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Stanford scholars examine systemic racism, how to advance racial justice in America

Black History Month is an opportunity to reflect on the Black experience in America and examine continuing systemic racism and discrimination in the U.S. – issues many Stanford scholars are tackling in their research and scholarship.

A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

For Black Americans, COVID-19 is quickly reversing crucial economic gains

Research co-authored by SIEPR’s Peter Klenow and Chad Jones measures the welfare gap between Black and white Americans and provides a way to analyze policies to narrow the divide.

How an ‘impact mindset’ unites activists of different races

A new study finds that people’s involvement with Black Lives Matter stems from an impulse that goes beyond identity.

For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

Stanford sociologist Matthew Snipp discusses ways to educate students about race and ethnic relations in America.

Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

In a new book, Assistant Professor Michael Hines chronicles the efforts of a Chicago schoolteacher in the 1930s who wanted to remedy the portrayal of Black history in textbooks of the time.

How disability intersects with race

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

Travis Bristol, MA '04, talks about what it takes for schools to hire and retain teachers of color.

Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

The American Heart Association has provided funding to two Stanford Medicine professors to develop ways to diversify enrollment in heart disease clinical trials.

Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

Traditional approaches to pain management don’t treat all patients the same. AI could level the playing field.

5 questions: Alice Popejoy on race, ethnicity and ancestry in science

Alice Popejoy, a postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, speaks to the role – and pitfalls – of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research.

Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

African-American heart transplant patients have had persistently higher mortality rates than white patients, but exactly why still remains a mystery.

Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

Widely used virus tracking data undercounts older people and people of color. Scholars propose a solution to this demographic bias.

Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

Disparities exist in how babies of different racial and ethnic origins are treated in California’s neonatal intensive care units, but this could be changed, say Stanford researchers.

Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

When states expand public health insurance to include low-income, legal immigrants, it does not lead to out-of-state immigrants moving in search of benefits.

Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been starkly uneven across race, ethnicity and geography, according to a new study led by SHP's Maria Polyakova.

Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias . 

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

A Stanford collaboration with the Department of the Treasury yields the first direct evidence of differences in audit rates by race.

Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

The disparity likely occurs because such technologies are based on machine learning systems that rely heavily on databases of English as spoken by white Americans.

New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

Robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent machines could become better-behaved thanks to a new way to help machine learning designers build AI applications with safeguards against specific, undesirable outcomes such as racial and gender bias.

Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice

In a recent study, assistant professor of communication Angèle Christin finds a gap between intended and actual uses of algorithmic tools in journalism and criminal justice fields.

Move responsibly and think about things

In the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy , Stanford students become computer programmers, policymakers and philosophers to examine the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation.

Homicide victims from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods devalued

Social scientists found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those killed in mostly white neighborhoods.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle

Stanford HAI’s 2021 AI Index reveals stalled progress in diversifying AI and a scarcity of the data needed to fix it.

Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

From who moves forward in the hiring process to who receives funding from venture capitalists, research has revealed how Blacks and other minority groups are discriminated against in the workplace and economy-at-large. 

“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

How To: Use a Scorecard to Evaluate People More Fairly

A written framework is an easy way to hold everyone to the same standard.

Archiving Black histories of Silicon Valley

A new collection at Stanford Libraries will highlight Black Americans who helped transform California’s Silicon Valley region into a hub for innovation, ideas.

Race influences professional investors’ judgments

In their evaluations of high-performing venture capital funds, professional investors rate white-led teams more favorably than they do black-led teams with identical credentials, a new Stanford study led by Jennifer L. Eberhardt finds.

Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

Stanford study suggests that the emotions American employers are looking for in job candidates may not match up with emotions valued by jobseekers from some cultural backgrounds – potentially leading to hiring bias.

Do VCs really favor white male founders?

A field experiment used fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors.

Can you spot diversity? (Probably not)

New research shows a “spillover effect” that might be clouding your judgment.

Can job referrals improve employee diversity?

New research looks at how referrals impact promotions of minorities and women.

Inequality and Racial Backlash: Evidence from the Reconstruction Era and the Freedmen’s Bureau

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We use new historical records and an event study approach to estimate impacts of the Bureau on political economy in the South. In the decade immediately after the war, counties with Bureau field offices had reduced vote shares for Democrats, the major political party that previously championed slavery and opposed Black civil rights during Reconstruction. In the longer-run, we find evidence of backlash in the form of higher Democratic vote shares and increases in several forms of racial violence, including lynchings and attacks against Black schools. This backlash extends through the twentieth century, when we find that counties that once had a Bureau field office have higher rates of second-wave and third-wave Ku Klux Klan activity and lower rates of intergenerational economic mobility. Overall, our results suggest that the initial impacts of the Freedmen’s Bureau stimulated countervailing responses by White majorities who sought to offset social progress of Black Americans.

For helpful comments and discussions, we thank Bhash Mazumder and Patrick Testa. We also thank Katherine Cohen, Bethany Falcon, Cristine McCollum, and Vanessa Ntungwanayo for valuable research assistance. This project benefited from software developed by Joung Yeob Ha and Henry Mo. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia or the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Striking racial inequities in health persist in South Africa

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• Peer review
• Anthony Mbewu , consultant physician and cardiologist 1 ,
• David R Williams , professor of public health and African and African American studies 2 ,
• Relebohile Moletsane , J L Dube chair in rural education 3 ,
• Priscilla Reddy , honorary professor 4
• 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University, Ga-Rankuwa, South Africa
• 2 Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• 3 School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
• 4 School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

In 1994, when 350 years of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa came to an end and more than 300 racist laws were repealed, many people expected to see a significant decline in racial inequalities in the country’s health.

Thirty years later, however, striking inequities in health persist between racial groups, 1 even after accounting for socioeconomic indicators. For example, in 1998 the infant mortality rate in the Black population was six times as high as in the White population and remained three to four times as high when adjusting for income, education, and living conditions. 2 This barely improved over the next 13 years: census data from 2011 show that, when compared with White people, infant mortality was 4.6 times as high in Black people, 2.4 times as high in people of mixed ethnicity, and 20% higher in people of Indian heritage. 3

Why do these health inequities persist in South Africa and around the world? A growing body of research shows that racial and ethnic discrimination are damaging to physical and mental health. 4 A national study in South Africa found that Black, mixed ethnicity, and Indian people were four times as likely as White people to report acute and chronic experiences of racial discrimination, 5 which was associated with heightened psychological distress. This association persisted even after adjustment for socioeconomic status, multiple stressors, and psychological resources—suggesting intrinsic harm to mental health from racism.

In South Africa, “Bantu education” (by which Black people were educated simply to provide cheap labour) was officially abolished after 1994, resulting in a reduction in the 13-fold inequality in government spending on education between Black and White children. By 2021, however, the racial inequality in education spending remained eightfold. This was partly because of many White pupils attending schools in wealthy areas that remained predominantly White because of the persistent effects of the Group Areas Act of 1950, 6 an act that had enforced racial segregation in urban areas and was repealed in 1990.

Nowadays this enduring legacy of apartheid in South African society is dubbed “geographical apartheid.” Similar patterns are evident in the US, where civil rights initiatives provide only a partial solution for the racial gap in academic outcomes. This is important because educational status remains a powerful predictor of health status in South Africa, as in most countries worldwide.

Apartheid and colonialism also produced enormous inequity in household incomes, 7 as Black people are largely consigned to low paying jobs in mining and agriculture. To tackle these inequities, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) laws were introduced in 2003 to “correct historical imbalances” in socioeconomic status. Although they were effective in changing racial socioeconomic demographics in public sector employment, they were less successful in the private sector. Partly because of these BBBEE laws, a substantial Black middle class emerged, 8 and racial inequalities in education and household income began to narrow. But while more Black children and adults had access to education and employment opportunities, many remained on the margins of the educational system and the economy, particularly in rural and township areas.

Thus, decades after the end of apartheid, glaring inequalities remain in household income, access to opportunities, and living and working conditions. In 1993, for example, the average per capita income among White people was 10 times that of Black people, and by 2017 this had dropped to six times. 9 However, as Shifa and colleagues wrote in 2023, “when all Black people in the top 10 per cent of the income distribution were excluded from the analysis, the White-Black income ratio had risen significantly, from 10.5 in the early 1990s to 11.5 in 2019.”

They added, “This indicates that racial inequalities in income in South Africa have decreased, but that this decrease is primarily due to the emergence of a new African elite” 9 —presumably from expanded tertiary education for Black people and BBBEE laws providing them with access to better paid jobs.

Enduring structural inequity

The idea of apartheid in South Africa originally derived from residential racial segregation in the US as a structural mechanism for reinforcing racism. 10 Research in the US has found that where a person lives determines their access to high quality education, income, housing, amenities, and employment opportunities, while exposing them to social, environmental, and physical stressors. 11 Differences in social mobility are thus linked to amenities and opportunity at the neighbourhood level, where racial differences in multiple indicators of income, education, and employment are a direct result of discriminatory social policies. 11

Segregation likely plays a similar role in South Africa. This was seen in a recent study showing the persistence of “green apartheid,” whereby majority White neighbourhoods were more likely to have parks, tree cover, and both public and private green space than areas where White people were in the minority. 12

In South Africa today poverty, race, employment status, educational status, and hunger remain significant determinants of health inequity. 9 13 14 However, the country’s persistent racial inequities in health, mental health, and socioeconomic status are likely also driven by enduring structural racism, evident in the higher levels of psychological stress and racial discrimination experienced by Black and ethnic minority South Africans. In addition to “geographical apartheid,” a legacy of the Group Areas Act also contributes to these racial inequities, as do the legacies of other apartheid era policies that created and sustain large racial differences in access to social and economic opportunities and resources. 5 14

Correcting geographical apartheid and reducing inequalities in household income, education, and employment are vital to eliminating racial inequities in health. 11 15 In addition, recognising and tackling the systemic racism that permeates South African society and shapes access to opportunities and resources is essential in reducing persistent racial inequities in health in South Africa.

Competing interests: None declared.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

• Harriman NW ,
• Williams DR ,
• Morgan JW ,
• Burgard SA ,
• ↵ Statistics South Africa. Census 2022: Statistical release. 10 Oct 2023. https://census.statssa.gov.za/assets/documents/2022/P03014_Census_2022_Statistical_Release.pdf (Compares 2011 data with 2022 data)
• Lawrence JA ,
• Gonzalez HM ,
• Williams S ,
• Mohammed SA ,
• ↵ Leibbrandt M, Woolard I, Finn A, Argent J. Trends in South African income distribution and poverty since the fall of apartheid. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers (no 101). OECD Publishing, 2010. doi: 10.1787/1815199X
• ↵ Goldman Sachs. Two decades of freedom—a 20 year review of South Africa. 2013. Available from: https://allafrica.com/view/resource/main/main/id/00071601.html
• ↵ Shifa M, Mabhena R, Ranchhod V, Leibbrandt M. An assessment of inequality estimates for the case of South Africa. WIDER Working Paper 2023/90. UNU-WIDER, 2023. doi: 10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2023/398-7
• ↵ Cell JW. The highest stage of white supremacy. Cambridge University Press, 1982, ISBN 13 doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511471049 .
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Mass Incarceration and Racial Inequality

Becky pettit.

* Barbara Pierce Bush Regents Professor of Liberal Arts in Sociology at the University of Texas–Austin.

CARMEN GUTIERREZ

† Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Despite two decades of declining crime rates, the United States continues to incarcerate a historically and comparatively large segment of the population. Moreover, incarceration and other forms of criminal justice contact ranging from police stops to community supervision are disproportionately concentrated among African American and Latino men. Mass incarceration, and other ways in which the criminal justice system infiltrates the lives of families, has critical implications for inequality. Differential rates of incarceration damage the social and emotional development of children whose parents are in custody or under community supervision. The removal through incarceration of a large segment of earners reinforces existing income and wealth disparities. Patterns of incarceration and felony convictions have devastating effects on the level of voting, political engagement, and overall trust in the legal system within communities. Incarceration also has damaging effects on the health of families and communities. In short, the costs of mass incarceration are not simply collateral consequences for individuals but are borne collectively , most notably by African Americans living in acutely disadvantaged communities that experience high levels of policing and surveillance. In this article, we review racial and ethnic differences in exposure to the criminal justice system and its collective consequences.

Introduction

Despite two decades of declining crime rates and significant and sustained policy attention to criminal justice reform, the United States continues to incarcerate a comparatively large segment of the population. (For a discussion of some recent policy initiatives, see Obama (2017) .) The United States experienced unprecedented increases in the volume and rate of incarceration between the mid-1970s and the first decade of the 2000s. The number of individuals incarcerated in America’s prisons and jails peaked in 2008, when just over 2.3 million people, or 1 in 100 adults, were behind bars. Recent estimates suggest that close to 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States on any given day ( Carson 2018 ). Figure 1 shows that although crime rates hover near their lowest level in decades, the incarceration rate is three times higher than the rate in 1980.

Incarceration and crime trends in the U.S., 1980–2016.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1980–2016) for incarceration rates. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (1980–2016) for crime rates. U.S. National Cancer Institute (1969–2017) for resident population of the United States.

Note: The incarceration rate includes prison and jail inmates.

1 The adult population includes all U.S. residents ages 18 and older.

2 The population includes all U.S. residents of all ages.

High rates of incarceration in the contemporary United States are also unique in comparison to incarceration rates in other countries. Even after recent declines in the total number of people held in prisons and jails, the United States continues to incarcerate a much higher fraction of its population than any other wealthy nation in the world. People living in the United States are more than 10 times as likely to be in prison or jail as people living in Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands and four times as likely compared to residents of the United Kingdom ( Aebi, Mélanie, and Burkhardt 2016 ; Coyle et al. 2016 ; Hartney 2006 ; Kaeble and Cowhig 2018 ).

Mass incarceration, or the widespread incapacitation of people in prisons and jails, does not randomly or equally affect all subgroups in the population. Rather, mass incarceration is characterized by its systematic targeting of particular segments of the population ( Garland 2001 ). Indeed, like other forms of criminal justice contact, incarceration is disproportionately concentrated among men, African Americans, and those with low levels of formal schooling. No other group suffers the overwhelming likelihood of imprisonment experienced by young black males in the United States who do not complete high school ( Pettit and Western 2004 ); Western and Wildeman 2009 ; Pettit 2012 ; Travis et al. 2014: ch. 2).

Despite the concentrated incarceration of young black men, the effects of mass incarceration extend well beyond the individuals living behind bars. Mass incarceration has generated not only direct implications for inequality through the systematic removal of young black men from free society but also indirect consequences for inequality as a result of its impacts on children, families, and communities that simultaneously suffer. Mass incarceration, and other forms of criminal justice contact, from police stops to community-based supervision, generate consequences related to employment, wages, political engagement, health, neighborhood stability, and a host of other considerations ( Clear 2007 ; Kling 2006 ; Lee, Porter, and Comfort 2014 ; Massoglia, Firebaugh, and Warner 2013 ; Massoglia and Pridemore 2015 ; Pager 2003 , Pager 2007; Sampson and Loeffler 2010 ; Schnittker and John 2007 ; Uggen and Manza 2002 ; Weaver and Lerman 2010 ; Western 2002 , 2006; Western and Pettit 2000 ). In this article, we discuss research on the consequences of incarceration and the other ways the criminal justice system disrupts people’s lives and how exposure to the system and its effects collectively impact social equality.

Trends in Exposure to Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice Contact

After steadily rising for nearly 40 years, the number of people incarcerated in the United States has hovered close to 2.2 million throughout the last decade ( Kaeble and Cowhig 2018 ). Other forms of criminal justice supervision such as probation and parole have also grown to the extent that an additional 4.7 million people are under the surveillance of probation or parole agencies ( Kaeble 2018 ). Far more commonly than either incarceration or community supervision, however, people encounter the criminal justice system for misdemeanor, or other relatively minor, infractions. Estimates suggest that nearly 20 million people have a felony conviction (Shannon et al. 2012). Around 70 million Americans, or slightly more than one-third of adults, have a criminal record ( Sentencing Project 2014a ). Nearly 25 million people are pulled over each year for routine traffic stops that can carry criminal sanctions, like fines and fees, which may widen the net of criminal justice involvement (Langton and Matthew 2013). A growing body of research considers how misdemeanor offenses, or other relatively minor infractions against the law, shape the way people interact with the police and the judicial system even in the absence of spending time in prison or jail (Comfort 2016; Kohler-Hausmann 2013 , 2018; Lageson 2016 ; Napatoff 2015 ; Uggen et al. 2014 ). Excessive and unnecessary traffic stops uniquely concentrated among African Americans can fuel racial inequality in experiences with a maze of criminal justice procedures and their consequences (Baumgartener et al. 2018).

Simple counts of the number of people incarcerated, under criminal justice supervision, arrested, or stopped by the police do not fully reveal the extent to which different forms of contact with the criminal justice system are stratified by gender, race, ethnicity, or education and thus represent a critical axis of inequality. Table 1 presents estimates of adult men’s exposure to the criminal justice system by race and ethnicity. Consistent with accounts that emphasize racial differences in surveillance, policing, prosecution, and sentencing, racial disproportionality in exposure to the criminal justice system varies in relation to types of contact.

Criminal activity among men (by race/ethnicity) and points of contact with the criminal justice system (arrest, conviction, incarceration, and probation)

Low-level forms of engagement with the police and judicial system are more evenly distributed by race and ethnicity than are more intensive forms of contact and supervision. Self-reports of criminal offending are relatively similar between young black and white men. According to recent estimates of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and the National Crime Victimization Survey, whites are slightly more likely to report having ever sold illicit drugs ( Mitchell and Caudy 2017 ). By contrast, blacks are slightly more likely to report having been involved in violence ( Morgan 2017 ). While there are no national estimates on the prevalence of police stops and surveillance across socio-demographic groups, local studies show that despite similarities in rates of offending, African Americans, and black men in particular, are disproportionately surveilled and stopped by the police ( Beckett et al. 2005 ; Fagan and Davis 2000; Fagan et al. 2010 ; Kohler-Hausmann 2013 ; Stuart 2016 ).

Table 1 also shows that engagement with the police and judicial system that does not involve spending time in jail or prison—from arrests to community-based supervision—are disproportionately concentrated among racial and ethnic minority groups, though the extent of that disproportionality varies widely. Brame et al. (2012 , 2014 ) estimate that fully one-quarter (25.3 percent) of young adults are arrested by age 23 and further show that nearly half (48.9 percent) of black men are arrested by the time they reach age 23, compared to 37.9 percent of white men. One in 55 adults is under criminal justice supervision through probation or parole ( Kaeble 2018 ). Although disproportionality in exposure to this type of supervision is less severe than inequalities in incarceration rates, black men are 3.4 times as likely as white men to be under supervision ( Phelps 2017 ). Fully 8 percent of all adults, 13 percent of male adults, and 33 percent of adult males who are African American have a felony conviction (Shannon et al. 2012). Among men between 20 and 40, the share of those with a felony conviction is over seven times greater for blacks and almost three times greater for Latinos, relative to the felony conviction rate among whites ( Wakefield and Uggen 2010 ).

In the United States, incarceration is even more acutely concentrated among African American and Latino men than most other forms of criminal justice contact. By the end of 2015, approximately 1.6, 9.1, and 3.9 percent of young white, black, and Hispanic men, ages 20 to 34, were incarcerated on any given day, respectively. These numbers are substantially higher among those without a high school diploma (Travis et al. 2014: ch. 2). Table 1 also shows that lifetime risks of spending at least a year in prison are significantly higher than point-in-time estimates of the incarceration rate: over one-quarter of black men born in the late-1970s experienced incarceration by the time they reached their 30s. For black men born in the late-1970s who did not complete high school, the odds of imprisonment for at least a year by the time they reached their 30s increased to over 60 percent ( Pettit 2012 ; Pettit and Western 2004 ; Travis et al. 2014: ch. 2; Western and Wildeman 2009 ).

Socio-demographic differences in punishment among adults translates into disproportionality in exposure to the criminal justice system and its consequences for partners, family members, children, and communities. Black women, in particular, face extraordinarily high chances of having a partner or family member incarcerated. They can expect to have almost two family members incarcerated, on average, whereas the average number of family members that white women can expect to have incarcerated is 0.14 (see Table 2 ). Even highly educated black women face a disproportionate risk of having one or more family members incarcerated, thus drawing attention to how the criminal justice system uniquely disadvantages African Americans, including those without criminal records ( Lee and Wildeman 2013 ; Lee et al. 2014 , 2015 ; Foster and Hagan 2007 ).

Exposure to the criminal justice system among children and women by race and ethnicity

An increase in children’s exposure to parental incarceration over time and socio-demographic differences in children’s exposure to parental incarceration, both over time and over the life course, have important implications for social inequality ( Wakefield and Wildeman 2013 ). Data from Surveys of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities show that nearly 1.5 million minor children in the United States had a parent in state or federal prison in 1999 ( Mumola 2000 ). Estimates that include children of parents housed in local jails find that close to 2.1 million children had a biological parent incarcerated at the turn of the century ( Sykes and Pettit 2014 ). Recent estimates show that at the end of 2015, 2.5 million children had a parent housed in a federal, state, or local correctional facility ( Pettit and Sykes 2017 ). Accordingly, 1 in 14 children can expect to have a parent incarcerated at some point before their 18 th birthday (Murphey and Cooper 2015). Nearly 1 in 4 black children can expect to have a parent imprisoned ( Wildeman 2009 ). Estimates of parental exposure to the criminal justice system more generally are even higher: one recent study suggests that nearly half of American children have a parent who has been arrested ( Vallas et al. 2015 ).

Exposure to the criminal justice system is not only deeply concentrated in certain socio-demographic groups but it is also disproportionately distributed within some of America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods ( Clear 2007 ; Sampson and Loeffler 2010 ). In communities with high levels of incarceration, as many as 15 percent of the adult male population cycles back and forth to prison ( Clear 2007 ). As a result, the criminal justice system is now estimated to affect nearly as many people as the education system or the labor market in poor, urban communities marked by high rates of incarceration (Morenoff and Harding 2014).

Contemporary patterns of inequality in both direct and indirect exposure to the criminal justice system are not simply a reflection of racial and ethnic disparities in crime or victimization. The concentration of incarceration and, more generally, of system involvement is due to shifts in policing, prosecution, and sentencing that disproportionately affect historically disadvantaged groups. (Travis et al. (2014: ch. 4) provide a recent overview of this issue.) Existing patterns of stratification—from racial homogamy in family formation, racial segregation in housing, and racially divided schooling—further concentrate the exposure of people of color to the criminal justice system.

Effects of Incarceration and Other Forms of Criminal Justice Contact

Incarceration and other forms of criminal justice contact have both short- and long-term consequences for a host of measureable outcomes for people who are justice-involved, their families, and their communities. Research has shown that spending time in prison has negative effects on 1) employment, earnings, and wage growth; 2) political engagement; and 3) health and well-being. Other measures of justice involvement also affect these and related outcomes, although the evidence is less definitive. Nonetheless, the criminal justice system has become an important and pervasive axis of stratification in the United States.

Economic Self-Sufficiency

Diminished employment opportunities, bouts of unemployment, and lost wages influence economic security and self-sufficiency for individuals who have been incarcerated as well as for their families and children. Having been incarcerated significantly decreases the likelihood that applicants receive call-backs for potential jobs ( Pager 2003 ), 2007). Similar effects are found for having a felony conviction even in the absence of spending time in prison or jail ( Uggen et al. 2014 ). Incarceration significantly depresses employment after release and is also associated with extended periods of unemployment, especially among low-skilled black men ( Apel and Sweeten 2010 ; Western 2002 , 2006). Evidence on the effects of other types of interaction with police and the courts are more mixed, yet recent research shows that even minor contacts with the criminal justice system can have important negative consequences because of inconsistencies between routines of work and demands of the court, including repeated court appearances (Kohler-Hausman 2018).

Incarceration has been shown to depress wages and wage growth even among former inmates who find work upon their release ( Apel and Sweeten 2010 ; Lageson and Uggen 2013 ; Loeffler 2013 ; Mueller-Smith 2014 ; Ramakers et al. 2014 ; Western 2002 , 2006). Even relatively short stints in jail can have long-term implications for wage growth and wealth ( Sykes and Maroto 2016 ; Western 2006). Incarceration is associated with time out of the labor force, lost work experience, and skill depreciation ( Kling 2006 ; Raphael 2011 ). However, there are also direct wage penalties associated with spending time in prison that result from the stigmatizing effects of any contact with the criminal justice system ( Mueller-Smith 2014 ; Pager 2003 , 2007; Western 2006). More than 90 percent of employers in the United States are estimated to obtain background checks on at least some of their potential hires ( Jacobs 2015 ). Employers express much less enthusiasm about hiring a person with a criminal record than hiring a person with a spotty work history or a history of unemployment ( Holzer et al. 2006 ).

The economic consequences of incarceration and other forms of engagement with the criminal justice system extend well beyond people who are justice-involved. Incarceration diminishes contributions to families ( Geller et al. 2011 ). It also increases household financial burdens associated with livelihood, such as childcare expenses ( Braman 2004 ; Grinstead et al. 2001 ). Family members, especially mothers and partners, bear excess financial burdens—from posting bail, to paying legal fines and fees, to visitation and related costs ( Comfort 2007 ; Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010 , 2011; Harris 2016 ; Maroto 2015 ). Financial obligations associated with criminal convictions, transferred to family members, can fuel a cycle of debt and obligation that spans across generations ( Harris 2016 ).

Economic insecurity associated with incarceration critically affects families and children through increased household instability. Having a criminal record affects the ability to secure and sustain housing ( Lee, Tyler, and Wright 2010 ). Children of recently incarcerated fathers are three times more likely to experience homelessness than children without incarcerated fathers. Even after adjusting for many of the preexisting family and household differences between children with and without incarcerated parents—such as welfare receipt, eviction history, public housing history, alcohol and drug abuse among parents, and family violence—paternal incarceration is found to increase the risk of childhood homelessness by 94 to 97 percent ( Wakefield and Wildeman 2013 ). Parental incarceration pushes even formerly non-poor children into poverty and entrenches their dependence on state and federal assistance programs (Sykes and Pettit 2015).

Incarceration has widespread consequences for civic engagement. Having a felony record, even in the absence of spending time in prison or jail, can prohibit people from political participation. Forty-eight states prohibit people who are currently imprisoned from voting. Thus, incapacitation alone excludes over a million people each year from the franchise; having a felony record precludes millions more from voting long after they complete their custodial sentence ( Manza and Uggen 2008 ; Uggen, Larson, and Shannon 2016 ). Whether, and for whom, formerly incarcerated individuals would vote is a matter of some debate ( Burch 2011 ,; Gerber et al. 2017 ; Miles 2004 ; Uggen and Manza 2002 ; Uggen, Manza, and Thompson 2006 ).

The Sentencing Project (2010) estimates that 13 percent of black men are disenfranchised from voting as a result of their criminal justice involvement. Although some formerly incarcerated individuals remain eligible to vote, voter turnout rates in this group are exceptionally low (Burch 2012, 2013, Gerber et al. 2017 ; Weaver and Lerman 2010 ). Despite claims of growing political participation among young blacks, evidence suggests that the exclusionary effects of mass incarceration depressed voter turnout rates among young black men during the historic 2008 election to the extent that they mirrored the low voter participation rates among this group in the 1980 presidential contest ( Pettit 2012 ). If current rates of incarceration and racial disproportionality persist in the future, 30 percent of black men in the next generation can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime, and as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote in states that disenfranchise ex-offenders (Sentencing Project 2012).

The negative effects of mass incarceration on civic engagement extend well beyond voting. Spending time in prison and other forms of criminal justice contact affect civic engagement, trust in institutions, and cynicism about the legal system itself ( Baumgartner et al. 2018 ; Mueller and Schrage 2014; Weaver and Lerman 2010 , 2014). Growth over time in incarceration and racial disproportionality in exposure to surveillance is linked to heightened levels of distrust in the law among African Americans (Mueller and Schrage 2014). Racial disproportionality in police stops and the outcomes of those stops fuel race differences in perceptions of the police and their legitimacy. African Americans are much more likely than whites to be stopped by police, yet a disproportionate number of cases where whites are stopped do not generate a citation, further reinforcing beliefs in an unjust system designed to subjugate people of color ( Baumgartner et al. 2018 ).

Trust and engagement in the political system is similarly precarious for family members and romantic partners of incarcerated people as it is for those in, or recently released from, punitive confinement ( Lee, Porter, and Comfort 2014 ; White 2018 ). The criminal justice system is an important institution in the political socialization of people connected to currently or formerly incarcerated individuals, especially as their relationship with the carceral state alienates them from other mainstream socializing institutions ( Flanagan 2003 ). Accordingly, the political and civil behaviors of individuals connected to the criminal justice system may diminish as a result of the general influence that parents and romantic partners have on shaping these outcomes.

Indeed, individuals with an incarcerated parent or romantic partner are less likely to vote, more likely to feel discriminated against in their daily lives, and less likely to participate in community service ( Lee, Porter, and Comfort 2014 ). While family members are not the primary targets for political disenfranchisement, their propensity for engaging in the political process declines as they experience negative interactions with correctional authorities that erode their beliefs in the fairness of the government as a whole. The spillover consequences of mass incarceration on trust in government and on political engagement more broadly are profound. Children who have experienced the incarceration of a parent exhibit significantly more legal cynicism than other children ( White 2018 ). Being stopped by police depresses trust in the law, especially among African Americans ( Baumgartener et al. 2018 ; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller 2014 ). In neighborhoods where police surveillance is high and interactions with the police are the result of unsolicited contact initiated by the police, policing is often viewed as racially biased or unfair on other grounds ( Sunshine and Tyler 2003 ; Tyler and Huo 2002 ; Tyler and Wakslak 2004 ). When positive views of the police are weakened among individuals within a community, the legitimacy of the police in that area is diminished.

Illegitimate and negative views of the criminal justice system have cascading consequences for inequality within a community, in part by making areas less safe. When individuals experience or perceive unfair treatment from legal authorities, their propensity to cooperate with and follow the law diminishes ( Tyler 2003 ). This process, however, is not unique to individuals. Through social interactions, distrust of the police and negative views of the law more generally become part of the neighborhood milieu ( Kirk and Papachristos 2011 ). Because the police rely on local residents to report crime, to participate in criminal investigations, and to assist in the informal control of crime, the reduction of police legitimacy often puts neighborhoods at risk for growing levels of crime and violence ( Carr, Napolitano, and Keating 2007 ; Kirk et al. 2012 ; Tyler and Huo).

Health and Well-Being

By and large, incarceration negatively affects health. Incarceration is considered a chronic stressor ( Pearlin 1989 ). It introduces acute shocks to inmates’ immune systems during their time spent behind bars and also throughout their lives. These acute shocks accumulate, causing dysfunction to the immune system that can last for long periods and result in early death ( Pridemore 2014 ). Spending time in jail and prison therefore affects health both during and after incarceration, and the health effects of incarceration manifest in both the short and long term. Because the stress related to incarceration persists beyond the confines of correctional facilities, having spent any amount of time behind bars is considered more consequential for health than the length of incarceration itself ( Massoglia 2008a ; Schnittker and John 2007 ).

The negative health effects of incarceration are often most dangerous in the short term, as the period immediately following release from prison and jail is associated with a severely heightened risk of death ( Binswanger et al. 2007 ; Krinsky et al. 2009 ; Lim et al. 2012 ; Merrall et al. 2010 ). In the first two weeks after being released from prison, the rate of death among formerly incarcerated individuals is 13 times higher than the rate for the general population ( Binswanger et al. 2007 ). The leading cause of death during this post-release period is overwhelmingly drug overdose, resulting from the combination of exacerbated stress and poor continuity of healthcare and other forms of support for former inmates on the outside ( Binswanger et al. 2011 ).

The heightened risk of death following release from prison and jail is also observed in the longer term, as incarceration harms the health of former inmates in multiple ways long after their formal sentences are served. In terms of physical health, spending time in prison or jail increases the occurrence of chronic health problems ( Schnittker and John 2007 ). Incarceration also adds to susceptibility to infectious diseases and stress-related illness, such as hypertension and heart disease (Massoglia 2008b). Having spent time in prison during young adulthood is also found to deteriorate physical health functioning for people at middle age (Massoglia 2008b). In terms of mental health, the stress associated with imprisonment also puts formerly incarcerated individuals at higher risk for psychological problems and depression ( Massoglia 2008a ; Schnittker and John 2007 ).

Measuring the impact of incarceration as a mechanism of health inequality is complicated by the fact that the negative effects of incarceration on health are uniquely absent among black men ( Patterson 2010 ). Black and white men display similarly poor health upon their entry into prisons and jails (Nowotny, Rogerts, and Boardman 2017). However, incarceration lowers the risk of mortality for black males both during and after their time spent behind bars. The lower mortality among black males could result from increased protection from acute stressors and risks like exposure to violence and drug overdoses. Prison conditions may provide a safer environment than what black males on the outside otherwise encounter. Removing firearm and motor vehicle deaths from the mortality rate of the general population, however, does not fully explain the improved life expectancies of incarcerated black men ( Patterson 2010 ). Lower than expected rates of death among black males in prison are also observed for chronic causes of death, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes ( Rosen et al. 2011 ). Improvements in these cause-specific mortality rates of black men in prison even extends to the period following the first five years after their release ( Rosen et al. 2008 ).

The health benefits of incarceration experienced by black men may therefore be attributed to the constitutionally mandated requirement to make healthcare available in jails and prisons that is otherwise largely inaccessible or unused for this segment of the population. As improvements in the mortality rate of incarcerated black men remain uniquely steady for deaths caused by chronic conditions but not for those caused by external injuries, the treatment and services provided to inmates may generate health benefits that extend well beyond the confines of correctional facilities. Nevertheless, racial disproportionality in exposure to incarceration means that aggregate effects of the criminal justice system fuel racial inequality in health. One way to see this is by measuring the years of life lost associated with incarceration.

Public health scholars and epidemiologists often employ demographic life-table techniques to measure the years of life lost to uncover the impact of large-scale events that adversely impact a population. Drucker (2002) applied this method to incarceration rates during the prison boom in New York, a state that implemented its own legislation to increase the length of prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses under the Rockefeller drug laws (RDL). Using data from the New York State Department of Corrections merged with population estimates and vital statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, Drucker found that RDL-related offenses accounted for over 325,000 person-years of life lost in New York from 1973 to 2002. With a median age of 35 and a life expectancy of 68 years, this figure is equivalent to the years of life lost associated with nearly 10,000 deaths in a population with the same age, racial, and ethnic composition. Drucker (2002) finds that the magnitude of these years of life lost to incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses is similar to the death toll associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York, especially for young black men. According to Drucker, approximately 242 black men ages 20–45 died in New York City during 2001, accounting for 7,986 years of life lost. In this same population group, the estimated years of life lost due to nonviolent drug incarceration is 8,805, a figure equivalent to 245 deaths.

The health and well-being of partners, children, and communities are also impacted by mass incarceration. For example, people who spend time in jails and prisons face greater risks of sexually transmitted infections and diseases, which may eventually translate to their partners on the outside when they return to society. The concentration of incarceration within communities gravely shapes the disproportionate risk of HIV among black men and women. Through the late 1980s and mid-1990s, the rate of infection was nearly 20 times greater among black women than among white women. After accounting for racial differences in incarceration, however, the infection rate of black women would have been lower than that of white women ( Johnson and Raphael 2009 ; Schnittker, Massoglia, and Uggen 2011). Along with potential detriments to their sexual health, individuals with incarcerated romantic partners experience elevated levels of stress as a result of their partner’s incarceration, exposing them to greater risks of health problems throughout the life course, such as depression in the short term and heart disease in the long term ( Lee and Wildeman 2013 ; Lee et al. 2014 ).

Children conceived by recently incarcerated men also suffer negative effects to their health in utero, threatening their chance of survival. Wakefield and Wildeman (2013) use data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) to investigate the association between infant mortality (death of a newborn before the first birthday) and paternal incarceration. Among children born to women who did not complete high school, infants with an incarcerated father are 75 percent more likely to die within the first year of their lives than those infants whose fathers are not imprisoned. Controlling for risk factors associated with infant mortality, however, the authors find that paternal incarceration increases the odds of infant death by 49 percent. Nevertheless, the risk of paternal incarceration on infant mortality remains similar to other factors that have long received attention in public health and medical research, such as the effect of maternal smoking, which increases the odds of infant mortality by 46 percent.

It is hard to identify the direct effects of incarceration on a variety of outcomes because families of incarcerated parents experience conditions such as lower educational attainment of parents, greater levels of public assistance utilization, more single-parent households, and greater risks of domestic violence between parents. Nonetheless, incarceration has been shown to negatively impact children’s mental and behavioral well-being, as well as their residential stability, which cumulatively relate to enduring physical health disadvantages ( Wakefield and Wildeman 2013 ).

Collective Consequences of Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration is a historically novel, uniquely American, mechanism of inequality. In the context of existing patterns of stratification in the labor market, family structure, and neighborhoods, high rates of incarceration and high levels of exposure to the criminal justice system more generally, exact damaging consequences that endure over lifetimes. Mass incarceration is thus a key determinant of racial inequality. At the same time, high concentrations of exposure to partners, parents, and community members who are justice-involved reinforces inequality across geographies, groups, and generations. Thus, while spending time in prison or jail can be a remarkably solitary experience, the costs of mass incarceration are not simply collateral consequences for individuals but are borne collectively, most notably by African Americans living in acutely disadvantaged communities.

Individuals returning home from prison move to a relatively small number of cities, counties, and even neighborhoods, which concentrates the costs of mass incarceration ( Clear 2007 ; Harding et al. 2013 ; La Vigne and Parthasarathy 2005 ; Pew Charitable Trusts 2010 ; Sampson and Loeffler 2010 ; Visher and Travis 2011 ). In a longitudinal study of Michigan prisoners paroled in 2003, Morenoff and Harding (2011) find that half of all returning parolees were concentrated in 12 percent of Michigan’s census tracts, and one-quarter of the parolees were concentrated in just 2 percent of the tracts.

Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) have developed a composite measure of concentrated disadvantage in which a high score represents a greater degree of disadvantage. The average score in the communities where parolees lived was almost one standard deviation higher than the state-wide average, suggesting that the communities where individuals return from prison have considerably higher levels of poverty, unemployment, and residential instability. The disadvantaged conditions of neighborhoods to which individuals return home from prison negatively impact labor market outcomes, including employment, wages, and income. In their study of Michigan parolees, Morenoff and Harding (2011) found that, at most, 20 percent of individuals who returned from prison in the previous year earned sufficient income in the formal labor market to meet the basic material needs of a single person.

Given that mass incarceration is characterized by extraordinarily high rates of criminal justice contact among impoverished black men, and that poor blacks largely reside in racially and economically segregated communities, the effects of mass incarceration are further concentrated by race and ethnicity. Fagan and colleagues (2002) found that incarceration disproportionately affects New York’s poorest neighborhoods, and that these areas received more intense and punitive policing and surveillance even during periods of general declines in crime. Despite a drastic reduction in the number of those at risk of criminal involvement in those neighborhoods, police persistently monitor these communities, perpetuating disadvantage and harm and leading to “the first genuine prison society of history” ( Wacquant 2001 ). By removing large numbers of young men from concentrated areas, incarceration reduces neighborhood stability ( Petersilia 2003 ). The cycling of men between correctional facilities and communities may even begin to trigger higher crime rates within a neighborhood, a process Clear (2007 : 73) describes as “coercive mobility.” Contemporary research suggests that high rates of incarceration increase policing and surveillance in local areas in ways that reinforce further punishment.

Other research confirms that prison admissions predominately come from select counties and urban neighborhoods, and that returns from prison are concentrated in many of those very same neighborhoods. Lynch and Sabol (2001) found that a mere 3 percent of the census block groups in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland) account for more than 20 percent of the state’s prison population, with an expected 350–700 formerly incarcerated individuals returning to those very same block groups each year following release. Lynch and Sabol further found that, in 1984, approximately 50 percent of prison releases returned to urban counties. By 1996, this figure had increased to 66 percent. For those rearrested after release, the trend was even more dramatic: 42 percent returned to urban counties in 1984 and 75 percent by 1996. For neighborhoods that witness such widespread police surveillance, criminal justice involvement has become an integral component of the collective experience ( Weaver and Lerman 2010 ). Yet, absent perceptible improvements in public safety, heightened surveillance in already disadvantaged neighborhoods leads to repudiation of legal authorities and a reduced willingness to comply with the law ( Tyler 2003 ; Weaver and Lerman 2010 ).

Mass incarceration produces widespread detrimental outcomes for people who are incarcerated or face other forms of legal punishment, their children and families, and neighborhoods and communities already characterized by crime and disadvantage. Moreover, the legal effects of mass incarceration produce consequences for the nation’s representativeness and participation in democracy and society across generations. The greater disadvantages suffered by single parents in raising children are detailed in the literature on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration on children and families. In addition, children with parents involved in the criminal justice system endure worse mental health and behavioral issues. However, studies of these collateral effects have two drawbacks. The first is a strong male bias. They largely focus on the ways mass incarceration perpetuates future inequality by examining how males in the next generation become caught up in the criminal justice system through the repeated cycle of incarceration within their families and communities. Measuring inequality through the perpetuation of crime and punishment, however, largely ignores the experience of daughters of incarcerated parents since most females never engage in crime to the extent that they face incarceration. The second problem with research on multi-generational impacts is that it does not adequately address how disproportionality in surveillance, policing, prosecution, and sentencing contribute to disproportionality in engagement with legal authorities, quite distinctly from engagement in criminal activities.

While evidence on mass incarceration and its effects are increasingly clear, questions about the implications of new forms of surveillance and other types of contact with the criminal justice system remain. In the age of big data and hyper-surveillance systems, how are the experiences and consequences of mass incarceration related to other ways in which at-risk groups are identified by criminal justice agencies? Does the linkage of data between criminal and noncriminal justice institutions, like banks and health-care systems, undermine the economic, political, and social engagement of historically disadvantaged and hyper-surveilled groups, especially blacks? Do new data technologies from facial recognition to DNA archiving make some groups uniquely vulnerable to increased scrutiny? How do new forms of noncustodial punishment—from fines and fees to repeated court appearances—influence economic, health, and political outcomes for individuals and communities?

Legal and social institutions in the United States increasingly rely on beliefs of colorblindness (avoidance of racial classification), which ignore the underlying social and political processes that differentiate racial groups above and beyond visual differences. Employing colorblind policies and laws in order to achieve equality between racial and ethnic groups denies the social, cultural, and political phenomena attached to race, maintaining injustices for vulnerable minorities. The American criminal justice system and its effects are not colorblind. A wide range of factors have aligned to shape the laws, policies, and practices currently in place that effectively sustain systematic patterns of incarceration. In turn, those patterns concentrate both the experience of criminal justice contact and its consequences among people of color from a relatively small number of communities. The resulting inequalities stray far from and undermine the stated purposes of most laws aimed at reducing and controlling crime. Future research must more directly consider how contemporary rhetoric surrounding colorblindness influences our collective aspirations for equality, representativeness, and democracy.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Biographies

Her most recent book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (Russell Sage Foundation 2012), investigates how decades of growth in America’s prisons and jails obscures basic accounts of racial inequality.

Her research explores issues at the intersection of stratification, the criminal justice system, and health, with an emphasis on how inequalities arise across race, ethnicity, and citizenship.

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Racial Disparities Persist in Human Subjects Research

By Beatrice Brown

Human subjects research has long been plagued by racial inequality . While flagrant abuses have been curtailed, disparities have, unfortunately, persisted.

One area ripe for scrutiny is clinical trial enrollment. A 2018 study by William Feldman, Spencer Hey, and Aaron Kesselheim in Health Affairs documents racial disparities in trials that are exempt from typical requirements for informed consent from study participants.

Informed consent is a cornerstone of the ethical conduct of medical research, as affirmed by the Belmont Report in 1976. However, emergency conditions, such as cardiac arrest, are not conducive to obtaining informed consent. Patients may be incapacitated, and often there is simply not enough time to discuss the trial in a meaningful way with surrogates. Nevertheless, research on emergency conditions is important for improving clinical practice.

To respond to this issue, the FDA created the “exception from informed consent” (EFIC) process in 1996 to allow for the study of drugs and medical devices used to treat emergency conditions. The rationale for this process lies in weighing the ethical principle of beneficence with the ethical principle of respect for persons—if the clinical benefit to be derived for the population is sufficient, then exceptions from informed consent may be warranted.

However, even if there is an ethical justification for EFIC trials, for the practice to be just, the burdens and benefits of these trials ought to be fairly distributed.

Feldman, Hey, and Kesselheim ’s findings raise questions about the fairness of EFIC trials. Although Black people represent only 13 percent of the US population , they made up 29 percent of participants at U.S. sites for EFIC trials.

This overrepresentation of Black people in EFIC trials stands in sharp contrast to their underrepresentation in clinical trials requiring informed consent.

Black people only make up 5 percent of clinical trial participants overall. Participation in clinical trials may afford patients better outcomes through access to cutting-edge treatments. Diversity and inclusivity in clinical trials are also important to understanding and analyzing research findings. Although efforts in various medical fields, such as in oncology , are underway to make clinical trials more inclusive, enrollment among Black people remains low.

This underrepresentation and overrepresentation both represent concerns for research ethics.

The underrepresentation of Black people in clinical trials that require informed consent may partially result from distrust fueled by past historical abuses in medical research. And overrepresentation of Black people in trials that bypass informed consent might exacerbate this distrust. The overrepresentation of Black people in EFIC trials, while not fully understood, may be due in part to the possibility that these trials are conducted in communities with higher proportions of Black people. The data raise questions about whether Black participants in EFIC trials (or their surrogates) would willingly consent if given the chance or if they would otherwise decline to enroll.

More must be done to ensure that EFIC trials do not perpetuate racial disparities. Though extensive work is needed, Feldman, Hey, and Kesselheim provide a few preliminary suggestions.

First, better community engagement may be helpful. The FDA requires that EFIC trial investigators engage in a community consultation process before initiation of trials, which includes providing information about the risks and benefits of the intervention and soliciting feedback on research plans. But a follow-up study demonstrated that Black people are underrepresented in this consultation process relative to their enrollment, and that groups with higher proportions of Black people support EFIC trials at lower rates. Deeper, targeted consultation in Black communities may help to improve the EFIC process and mitigate racial disparities by ensuring that these communities have a voice in shaping the conduct of these studies.

Second, Feldman, Hey, and Kesselheim propose that recruitment should be conducted in a wide variety of communities to ensure racial and ethnic parity. Many EFIC trials provide interventions in the field (i.e., before arrival to the emergency room) and enroll patients across wide catchment areas. It is important, the authors argue, that clinical investigators perform these trials in diverse communities and not only in areas with high proportions of Black people.

Finally, Feldman, Hey, and Kesselheim suggest that the FDA implement reporting requirements to ensure that better data are available on consent and race in these trials. Having better data would allow policy makers to improve the EFIC process, ensuring that it remains ethical and does not exacerbate already-existing racial disparities.

As COVID-19 continues to reveal deep racial disparities in our health care system, we must think carefully about how to resolve these disparities in all realms of medicine , including clinical trials and particularly those trials that bypass consent. Researchers conducting trials without informed consent must be cognizant of systemic racial injustices and ensure that they are not contributing to the persistence or worsening of disparities.

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Beatrice Brown

Beatrice (Bea) Brown is a Research Assistant for the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL) within the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She received her Master of Bioethics (MBE) from Harvard Medical School in 2020 and her BA in Ethics, Politics, & Economics from Yale University in 2019. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Bea was a Petrie-Flom Student Fellow and wrote a research paper proposing a new argument for a constitutional right to physician-assisted death by redefining what it means to heal.

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U.S. Department of the Treasury

Racial inequality in the united states.

By: Counselor for Racial Equity Janis Bowdler and Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Benjamin Harris  

Racial inequality is the unequal distribution of resources, power, and economic opportunity across race in a society. While the discussion of racial inequality in the United States is often focused on economic inequality, racial inequality also manifests itself in a multitude of ways that alone and together impact the well-being of all Americans. This includes racial disparities in wealth, education, employment, housing, mobility, health, rates of incarceration, and more. 1

In her January 2022 remarks at the 2022 ‘Virtual Davos Agenda’ hosted by the World Economic Forum, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen stated, “A country’s long-term growth potential depends on the size of its labor force, the productivity of its workers, the renewability of its resources, and the stability of its political systems.” This concept underpins the Biden Administration’s economic growth strategy, which Secretary Yellen has coined “modern supply side economics.” According to Secretary Yellen, modern supply side economics “prioritizes labor supply, human capital, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment. These focus areas are all aimed at increasing economic growth and addressing longer-term structural problems, particularly inequality.” 2  This reflects a recognition that despite an aim to advance economic growth, many policies in areas such as access to the labor market, housing, and infrastructure have not benefited all Americans. This has impacted the ability of communities of color, rural communities, and other historically marginalized people to fully participate in and benefit from the nation’s prosperity. Our economy as a whole cannot be as productive as possible unless all individuals are given the opportunity to be as productive as possible. As a result, the legacies of structural racism continue to hamper economic growth for everyone. Furthermore, some economic policies that would directly benefit Americans of all races and ethnicities have been undermined by zero-sum arguments that play to fears that one group will benefit at the expense of another. 

There are, of course, moral, legal, microeconomic, and other reasons to promote a more just and equitable society. In a series of blog posts over the coming months, we will focus on the economic argument for reducing racial inequality. The economic cost of racial inequality is borne not just by the individuals directly faced with limited opportunities, but also has spillovers to the entire U.S. economy. Especially as the country becomes more racially diverse (see Figure 1), inequality poses an ongoing threat to our individual and collective economic welfare.  

Figure 1: Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Population

Notes: Hispanic refers to anyone of Hispanic ethnicity, regardless of race. The remaining groups exclude anyone of Hispanic ethnicity. Prior to the 1980 decennial census, individuals were not directly asked about whether they were of Hispanic origins. For data before the 1980 decennial census, Hispanic is imputed by IPUMS.  Source: Treasury calculations using U.S. Census Bureau data from IPUMS. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Sophia Foster, Ronald Goeken, Jose Pacas, Megan Schouweiler and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 11.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V11.0  

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo emphasized this argument in his September 2021 blog post: “The exclusion of communities of color from the ladder of economic opportunity holds back economic growth for the entire country. Pursuing racial equity is a vital opportunity to drive innovation and boost growth across the U.S. economy.” 3  When people gain access to the resources they need to build their economic future and withstand financial shocks, it is not just good for individuals and their families, but it also benefits the communities where they live, work, and invest, with beneficial spillovers to the economy as a whole. Likewise, when investments are made that allow millions of people who have been held back economically to reach their full economic potential, it gives the United States an important advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy. We cannot afford to leave talent and opportunity on the table.

Below we briefly discuss the origins and persistence of inequality in the United States, highlight some of the key economic indicators of its impact, and give an overview of the issues we will explore in more depth in future posts.

Origins and Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States

Racial inequality in the United States today is rooted in longstanding behaviors, beliefs, and public and private policies that resulted in the appropriation of the physical, financial, labor, and other resources of non-white people. While a review of the origins of racial inequity is beyond the scope of this blog, it is important to note the prominent role of inequitable and harmful policies—dating back to before the country’s founding. These include attacks on Native Americans’ political status and expropriation of their land, the reliance on slavery to underpin a significant portion of the colonial and then U.S. economy, and the Jim Crow laws and other formal and informal policies that enforced segregation and severely limited opportunities for non-white Americans. The millions of African Americans who left the southern United States to escape Jim Crow laws faced formal and informal employment, housing, and educational discrimination in destination cities in the North and West. 4  Native Americans who survived the military conquests of the mid-19th century were subject to policies that disenfranchised them, forced their assimilation and relocation, and removed Native children from their households. Anti-Latino sentiment, which grew in the 19th century as emigration from Mexico to the United States increased in the years following the Mexican-American War, grew further following the Great Depression due to concerns that Mexican Americans were taking jobs from European-Americans. 5  Similarly, anti-Asian sentiment grew following the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush, which was manifested in the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers beginning in 1882, and was ignited again after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with the establishment of Japanese internment camps by executive order, which resulted in the forced relocation and internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans. 6

While the most targeted racist laws and policies have been repealed or otherwise abandoned, subsequent policies, uneven enforcement of equal protections, and a failure to invest in individuals harmed by de jure and de facto discrimination has resulted in vastly limited opportunities and stark inequities between white and non-white Americans that have continued to this day. For example, maps drawn by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a now defunct federal agency, to portray the relative riskiness of lending across neighborhoods in the 1930s were used by banks to deny access to credit to residents of the lowest-rated neighborhoods, who were often racial and ethnic minorities, though these policies also hurt poor white individuals. 7  Moreover, this conduct depressed home ownership rates, house values, and rents and increased racial segregation in low-rated neighborhoods in subsequent decades, highlighting the lasting, negative economic consequences of racism on the community and on future residents of these neighborhoods, regardless of race. 8   These and other policies and actions not only led to continued racial disparities in access to resources and opportunities, they also led to differences in the extent to which people of different races benefit from the resources and opportunities they already possess. 9

These disparities are evident in the persistent over-representation of Black and Hispanic Americans among the population in poverty in the United States and in the widening of the racial wealth gap in recent decades. 10   While the poverty rates for all racial and ethnic groups had been declining prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (see Figure 2), the gaps between the rates for Black and Hispanic Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans has remained relatively constant since the early 2000s. At the same time, the gap in average net wealth between Black and Hispanic households and non-Hispanic white households has widened significantly (see Figure 3).

Figure 2. Poverty Rate by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2019

Figure 3. Household Net Worth by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1989 to 2019

Source: Federal Reserve Board, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.htm  

Racial disparities in outcomes predictive of future success appear early in life. In 2010, math skills at kindergarten entry were over half a standard deviation higher for white students than for Black or Hispanic students, with similar disparities in reading skills. 11  These disparities in educational outcomes continue into higher education. In 2019, 40 percent of white adults had earned a bachelor’s degree compared to just 26, 19, and 17 percent of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native adults, respectively. 12

Large educational disparities, coupled with racial discrimination in the labor market and other factors, lead to pronounced differences in economic security across racial groups. In 2019, the unemployment rate was 6.1 percent for both Black and American Indian or Alaska Native adults, compared to just 3.3 and 2.7 percent for white and Asian adults, respectively. Similarly, the rate for Hispanic adults was 4.3 percent and only 3.5 percent for non-Hispanics. 13

In addition, Black and Hispanic adults continue to have considerably lower earnings than White or Asian adults. Median household income in 2020 was roughly $46,000 and $55,500 for Black and Hispanic workers, respectively, compared to $75,000 and $95,000 for white and Asian households, as shown in Figure 4. These earnings differences have changed little since 1970 and are one of the primary contributors to the persistence of the racial wealth gap. In 2019, the median white family had $184,000 in family wealth compared to just $23,000 and $38,000 for the median Black and Hispanic families, respectively. 14

Racial disparities in educational and economic outcomes not only impact the economic well-being of racial and ethnic minorities, they have also been shown to inhibit economic growth for the U.S. economy as a whole, which affects the economic security of every American, regardless of race. For example, recent research by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow shows that up to 40 percent of growth in U.S. GDP per capita between 1960 and 2010 can be attributed to increases in the shares of women and Black men working in highly skilled occupations, likely due to changes in social norms that previously hindered talented women and Black men from pursuing their comparative advantage. 15  This research suggests that sexist and racist social norms prevented the U.S. economy from reaching its full potential and that working to ensure that every American has an equal opportunity to pursue the career he or she chooses should improve economic outcomes for all.

Figure 4. Real Median Household Income by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1967 to 2020

Racial gaps in well-being extend beyond educational attainment and economic security. Health disparities, for example, also begin early in life and persist over the lifespan. Black and Hispanic Americans face higher rates of child abuse, 16  lead exposure, 17  obesity in childhood, 18  and chronic illness in adulthood than white Americans. 19  These groups often experience restricted access to quality health care, an issue further illuminated by the recent global pandemic. Compared to white non-Hispanic Americans, Hispanic, Black non-Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native non-Hispanic Americans are 1.8, 1.7, and 2.1 times more likely to die from COVID-19. 20   Moreover, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the inequitable distribution of healthcare in the United States can negatively impact the health of all Americans, including those with access to high-quality services.

In addition, people of color in the United States are over-represented in neighborhoods with high poverty rates. In 2019, nearly a quarter of American Indians or Alaska Natives, 21 percent of non-Hispanic Black people, and 17 percent of Hispanic people lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, defined as Census tracts with a poverty rate of 30 percent or higher. In contrast, only 4 percent and 6 percent of white and Asian or Pacific Islander people lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. 21  High-poverty neighborhoods often lack vital resources and amenities like good schools, large and affordable grocery stores, reliable public transportation, and safe and clean community spaces that enable residents to succeed in the classroom and on the job.

It is important to note that while we have reliable measures and data sources to define the differences in many outcomes between racial and ethnic groups over the past forty years, our ability to trace racial inequality back further and examine the country’s progress since the end of slavery is limited by the quality and quantity of data available. For example, greater disparities exist within the Asian American and Pacific Islander group than are often evident in aggregate data, and data on Native communities in the United States is usually inadequate for any in depth analyses. Moreover, for some outcomes such as wealth, our ability to measure contemporary differences is also limited by data availability.

Roadmap for this Blog Series

Upcoming posts will discuss in greater depth the extent of racial inequality in economic security and explain how differences in in educational opportunity and attainment, neighborhoods and environmental factors, health and access to healthcare, and employment and job quality, contribute to and are caused by the persistence of racial disparities in economic well-being. Each post will highlight important facts, discuss how key outcomes have evolved over time, and emphasize the connections with other components of economic inequality, with the goal of calling attention to areas where more work is needed to advance racial equity. In addition, we will discuss issues related to data quality and coverage that affect our ability to truly understand the trajectory of racial inequality in the United States.

[1] Shapiro, Thomas M. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

[2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0565

[3] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/American-Rescue-Plan-Centering-Equity-in-Policymaking.pdf

[4] Derenoncourt, Ellora. 2022. “Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration.” American Economic Review 11 (2): 369-408.

[5] https://www.history.com/news/the-brutal-history-of-anti-latino-discrimination-in-america

[6] https://www.britannica.com/event/Japanese-American-internment. For additional details on the economic impacts of inequitable government policy, see:

• Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. 2021. “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13 (4): 355-92.
• Carruthers, Celeste K., and Marianne H. Wanamaker. 2017. “Separate and Unequal in the Labor Market: Human Capital and the Jim Crow Wage Gap.” Journal of Labor Economics 35 (3): 655-696.
• Jones, Maggie E.C. 2021. “The Intergenerational Legacy of Indian Residential Schools.” Unpublished working paper. Available at: https://maggieecjones.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/intergenerationalrs.pdf
• Rothstein, Richard. The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America . Liveright Publishing, 2017.

[7] https://www.britannica.com/topic/redlining

[8] Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. 2021. “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13 (4): 355-92.

[9] Pfeffer, Fabian T., and Alexandra Killewald. 2018. “Generations of Advantage: Multigenerational Correlations in Family Wealth.” Social Forces 96 (4): 1411-42.

[10] Wealth is the total financial value of what an individual or household owns (assets) minus all debts (liabilities), representing the sum of financial resources available to an individual or household at a point in time. Assets include the value of a home, retirement savings, stocks, bonds, money in the bank, and other items of value, while liabilities include home mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, and student debt. The racial wealth gap is the difference in wealth held by different racial and ethnic groups.

[11] Reardon, Sean F., and Ximena A. Portilla. 2016. “Recent Trends in Income, Racial, and Ethnic School Readiness Gaps at Kindergarten Entry.” AERA Open 2(3): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858416657343.

[12] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.10.asp

[13] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2019/home.htm

[14] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/december/has-wealth-inequality-changed-over-time-key-statistics

[15] Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. 2019. “The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Growth.” Econometrica , 87 (5): 1439-1474.

[16] Dakil, Suzanne R., Matthew Cox, Hua Lin, and Glenn Flores. “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in    Physical Abuse Reporting and Child Protective Services Interventions in the United States.” Journal of the National Medical Association 103(9-10): 926-931.

[17] Teye, Simisola O., Jeff D. Yanosky, Yendelea Cuffee, Xingran Weng, Raffy Luquis, Elana Farace, and Li Wang. 2021. “Exploring Persistent Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Lead Exposure among American Children Aged 1-5 Years: Results from NHANES 1999-2016.” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health 94: 723-730.

[18] Anderson, Sarah E., and Robert C. Whitaker. 2009. “Prevalence of Obesity Among US Preschool Children in Different Racial and Ethnic Groups.” Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 163(4):344–348. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.18

[19] Quiñones, Ana R., Anda Botoseneanu, Sheila Markwardt, Corey L. Nagel, Jason T. Newsom, David A. Dorr, Heather G. Allore. 2019. “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Multimorbidity Development and Chronic Disease Accumulation for Middle-Aged Adults.” PLoS ONE 14(6): e0218462. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218462

[20] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

[21] https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Neighborhood_poverty#/?geo=01000000000000000

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What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

Some companies discriminated against Black applicants much more than others, and H.R. practices made a big difference.

By Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz

A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up résumés with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.

On Monday, they released the names of the companies . On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.

Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.

Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others. They were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33 percent more often.

In a statement, Heather Ross, a spokeswoman for Genuine Parts, said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” AutoNation did not respond to a request for comment.

Companies With the Largest and Smallest Racial Contact Gaps

Of the 97 companies in the experiment, two stood out as contacting presumed white job applicants significantly more often than presumed Black ones. At 14 companies, there was little or no difference in how often they called back the presumed white or Black applicants.

Source: Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose and Christopher R. Walters

Known as an audit study , the experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: The researchers sent 80,000 résumés to 10,000 jobs from 2019 to 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.

“I am not in the least bit surprised,” said Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination. “If you’re having trouble breaking in, the biggest issue is the ripple effect it has. It affects your wages and the economy of your community going forward.”

Some companies showed no difference in how they treated applications from people assumed to be white or Black. Their human resources practices — and one policy in particular (more on that later) — offer guidance for how companies can avoid biased decisions in the hiring process.

A lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: food stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transport, including FedEx and Ryder; and wholesale, including Sysco and McLane Company.

“We want to bring people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, some are discriminating, but also that it’s possible to do better, and there’s something to be learned from those that have been doing a good job,” said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.

The researchers first published details of their experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, which is set to run in the American Economic Review, names the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, while accounting for statistical noise.

Sample Résumés From the Experiment

Fictitious résumés sent to large U.S. companies revealed a preference, on average, for candidates whose names suggested that they were white.

To assign names, the researchers started with a prior list that had been assembled using Massachusetts birth certificates from 1974 to 1979. They then supplemented this list with names found in a database of speeding tickets issued in North Carolina between 2006 and 2018, classifying a name as “distinctive” if more than 90 percent of people with that name were of a particular race.

The study includes 97 firms. The jobs the researchers applied to were entry level, not requiring a college degree or substantial work experience. In addition to race and gender, the researchers tested other characteristics protected by law , like age and sexual orientation.

They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, applying for as many as 125 jobs per company in locations nationwide, to try to uncover patterns in companies’ operations versus isolated instances. Then they tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.

A bias against Black names

Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or H.R. practices, the researchers said.

Still, there were exceptions — some of the companies exhibiting the least bias were retailers, like Lowe’s and Target.

The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against Black applicants in the labor market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less, said Lincoln Quillian, a sociologist at Northwestern who analyzes audit studies. It did not include names intended to represent Latino or Asian American applicants, but other research suggests that they are also contacted less than white applicants, though they face less discrimination than Black applicants.

The experiment ended in 2021, and some of the companies involved might have changed their practices since. Still, a review of all available audit studies found that discrimination against Black applicants had not changed in three decades. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, such discrimination was found to have disappeared among certain employers, but the researchers behind that study said the effect was most likely short-lived.

Gender, age and L.G.B.T.Q. status

On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers.

However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race. Builders FirstSource contacted presumed male applicants more than twice as often as female ones. Ascena, which owns brands like Ann Taylor, contacted women 66 percent more than men.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

The consequences of being female differed by race. The differences were small, but being female was a slight benefit for white applicants, and a slight penalty for Black applicants.

The researchers also tested several other characteristics protected by law, with a smaller number of résumés. They found there was a small penalty for being over 40.

Overall, they found no penalty for using nonbinary pronouns. Being gay, as indicated by including membership in an L.G.B.T.Q. club on the résumé, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited Black applicants — although the effect was small, when this was on their résumés, the racial penalty disappeared.

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination is illegal even if it’s unintentional . Yet in the real world, it is difficult for job applicants to know why they did not hear back from a company.

“These practices are particularly challenging to address because applicants often do not know whether they are being discriminated against in the hiring process,” Brandalyn Bickner, a spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said in a statement. (It has seen the data and spoken with the researchers, though it could not use an academic study as the basis for an investigation, she said.)

What companies can do to reduce discrimination

Several common measures — like employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board — were not correlated with decreased discrimination in entry-level hiring, the researchers found.

But one thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized H.R. operation.

The researchers recorded the voice mail messages that the fake applicants received. When a company’s calls came from fewer individual phone numbers, suggesting that they were originating from a central office, there tended to be less bias . When they came from individual hiring managers at local stores or warehouses, there was more. These messages often sounded frantic and informal, asking if an applicant could start the next day, for example.

“That’s when implicit biases kick in,” Professor Kline said. A more formalized hiring process helps overcome this, he said: “Just thinking about things, which steps to take, having to run something by someone for approval, can be quite important in mitigating bias.”

At Sysco, a wholesale restaurant food distributor, which showed no racial bias in the study, a centralized recruitment team reviews résumés and decides whom to call. “Consistency in how we review candidates, with a focus on the requirements of the position, is key,” said Ron Phillips, Sysco’s chief human resources officer. “It lessens the opportunity for personal viewpoints to rise in the process.”

Another important factor is diversity among the people hiring, said Paula Hubbard, the chief human resources officer at McLane Company. It procures, stores and delivers products for large chains like Walmart, and showed no racial bias in the study. Around 40 percent of the company’s recruiters are people of color, and 60 percent are women.

Diversifying the pool of people who apply also helps, H.R. officials said. McLane goes to events for women in trucking and puts up billboards in Spanish.

So does hiring based on skills, versus degrees . While McLane used to require a college degree for many roles, it changed that practice after determining that specific skills mattered more for warehousing or driving jobs. “We now do that for all our jobs: Is there truly a degree required?” Ms. Hubbard said. “Why? Does it make sense? Is experience enough?”

Hilton, another company that showed no racial bias in the study, also stopped requiring degrees for many jobs, in 2018.

Another factor associated with less bias in hiring, the new study found, was more regulatory scrutiny — like at federal contractors, or companies with more Labor Department citations.

Finally, more profitable companies were less biased, in line with a long-held economics theory by the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker that discrimination is bad for business. Economists said that could be because the more profitable companies benefit from a more diverse set of employees. Or it could be an indication that they had more efficient business processes, in H.R. and elsewhere.

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Josh Katz is a graphics editor for The Upshot, where he covers a range of topics involving politics, policy and culture. He is the author of “Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk,” a visual exploration of American regional dialects. More about Josh Katz

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Echoes of Inequality: a Look at Jim Crow Laws and their Impact

This essay about Jim Crow laws examines their examples, structure, and the enduring impact on American society. Focusing on segregation in public facilities, voting rights, and economic limitations, it highlights how these laws institutionalized racial discrimination, particularly in the South, from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. It discusses the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine and the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans, noting the role of violence and intimidation in enforcing these laws. The essay concludes by reflecting on the legacy of Jim Crow laws, underscoring the ongoing challenges of racial disparities and the importance of lessons learned from this era in the continued fight for racial equality.

How it works

The regulations known as the Jim Crow laws, a collection of oppressive mandates prevalent primarily in the Southern United States from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, entrenched racial segregation and discrimination. Derived from a character in a black minstrel show, these statutes formalized the marginalization and dehumanization of African Americans, leaving a profound and enduring legacy. This discourse scrutinizes instances of Jim Crow laws to unravel their framework, execution, and the substantial ramifications they exerted on America’s societal fabric.

Among the most glaring manifestations of Jim Crow laws were those dictating segregation in public amenities. From public transportation to recreational areas and educational institutions, distinct yet disparately maintained facilities were designated for individuals of different races. The infamous “separate but equal” doctrine, validated by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, legitimized these statutes, exacerbating the racial chasm. Particularly in schools, segregation sparked intense conflicts, with African American students receiving inadequate education in overcrowded and underfunded schools.

Voting rights emerged as another principal target of Jim Crow laws. Through measures such as literacy evaluations, poll levies, and grandfather exemptions, African American voters encountered systematic disenfranchisement. These mechanisms ensured that political power remained concentrated in the hands of white citizens, effectively muzzling the black populace’s representation in governance. The cumulative consequence extended beyond political disenfranchisement to encompass a broader marginalization from civic engagement and representation.

Furthermore, Jim Crow laws seeped into the economic domain, curtailing employment prospects and economic progression for African Americans. Occupational segregation proliferated, with African Americans often barred from certain vocations and relegated to low-paying, menial positions. This economic suppression not only reinforced the racial caste system but also perpetuated a cycle of impoverishment within the African American community.

The enforcement of Jim Crow laws relied heavily on violence and intimidation, with groups like the Ku Klux Klan ensuring stringent adherence. The specter of lynching, physical assaults, and other forms of violence loomed over dissenters, further cementing the system of racial segregation and inequality.

The repercussions of Jim Crow laws have cast a long shadow over the United States, contributing to persistent racial disparities in education, housing, employment, and the criminal justice system. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s precipitated significant legal and societal transformations, including the dismantling of many Jim Crow laws. However, the legacy of these statutes, and the systemic racism they propagated, persists as a formidable challenge for the nation.

In conclusion, the Jim Crow laws stand as a stark testament to America’s legacy of racial discrimination and segregation. By scrutinizing specific instances and the mechanisms by which these laws operated, we attain a deeper comprehension of the injustices endured by African Americans and the enduring impact on American society. The quest for racial equality remains ongoing, with the lessons gleaned from the era of Jim Crow laws serving as vital touchstones in addressing the structural inequities that endure to this day.

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Regions & Countries

2. partisanship by race, ethnicity and education.

As has long been the case, White voters are much more likely than those in other racial and ethnic groups to associate with the Republican Party. Hispanic and Asian voters tilt more Democratic. Black voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic.

However, there have been some shifts toward the GOP in most groups in recent years.

The Republican Party now holds a 15 percentage point advantage among White voters: 56% of non-Hispanic White voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, while 41% align with the Democratic Party.

• This double-digit lead for the GOP among White voters has held for more than a decade. The last time White voters were about equally split between the two parties was in 2008.

About six-in-ten Hispanic voters (61%) are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, while 35% are Republicans or Republican leaners.

• The Democratic Party’s edge among Hispanic voters over the last two years is somewhat narrower than it was in years prior.

Black voters continue to overwhelmingly associate with the Democratic Party, although the extent of the Democratic advantage among this group has fallen off over the last few years.

• Currently, 83% of Black voters are Democrats or lean Democratic, while 12% align with the GOP.
• As recently as 2020, the share associating with the Democratic Party was 5 percentage points higher. That somewhat larger edge in party affiliation had been in place for much of the last two decades.

About six-in-ten Asian voters (63%) align with the Democratic Party, while 36% are oriented toward the GOP.

• The balance of partisan association among Asian voters has changed little over the last few years.

Education and partisanship

The relationship between education and partisanship has shifted significantly since the early years of the 21st century.

• The Republican Party now holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.
• By comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education.

This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree.

In the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency and the first year of Barack Obama’s, Democrats had a double-digit advantage in affiliation over Republicans among voters without a college degree. For example, in 2007, 56% of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42% were Republicans or GOP leaners. This group was narrowly divided between the two parties for most of the next 15 years, but in the last few years it has tilted more Republican.

College graduates moved in the opposite direction, becoming more Democratic over this same period.

• Since 2017, the gap in partisanship between college graduates and those without a degree has been wider than at any previous point in Pew Research Center surveys dating back to the 1990s.

Voters with postgraduate degrees are even more Democratic than those with bachelor’s degrees. About six-in-ten registered voters who have a postgraduate degree (61%) identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 37% associate with the Republican Party. Voters with a bachelor’s degree but no graduate degree are more closely divided: 51% Democratic, 46% Republican.

Voters with a high school degree or less education and those who have attended some college but do not have a bachelor’s degree both tilt Republican by similar margins.

Education, race and partisanship

White voters are far more polarized along educational lines than are Hispanic and Black voters.

White voters by education

By nearly two-to-one (63% vs. 33%), White voters without a bachelor’s degree associate with the Republican Party.

The GOP’s advantage among this group has remained relatively steady over the last several years but reflects a major shift since 2009. This group is now substantially more Republican-oriented than at any prior point in the last three decades.

Today, White voters with a bachelor’s degree are closely divided between associating with the Democratic Party (51%) and the Republican Party (47%). Prior to 2005, this group had a clear Republican orientation.

Hispanic voters by education

In contrast, there are no meaningful differences in the partisan leanings of Hispanic voters with and without bachelor’s degrees. Democrats hold a clear advantage in affiliation among both groups of Hispanic voters, although the share of Hispanics (both those with and without bachelor’s degrees) who align with the Democratic Party has edged lower in recent years.

Black voters by education

Black voters both with (79%) and without college degrees (85%) remain overwhelmingly Democratic in their partisan affinity.

Black college graduates are somewhat less closely aligned with the Democratic Party now than they were for most of the prior three decades (for most of this period, 85% or more of Black college graduate voters affiliated with the Democratic Party).

Asian voters by education

Two-thirds of Asian voters with a college degree align with the Democratic Party; 31% associate with the Republican Party. The partisan balance among Asian voters with a college degree has remained largely the same over our last two decades of surveys. (Asian American voters without a college degree are a smaller group, and sample sizes do not allow for reporting trends among this group.)

Partisanship by race and gender

Visit the chapter on partisanship by gender, sexual orientation and marital and parental status for discussion of overall trends among men and women.

Six-in-ten White men who are registered voters identify as Republicans or lean Republican, as do 53% of White women voters.

The balance of partisanship among White women voters has tilted toward the GOP in recent years, but it was more divided in 2017 and 2018.

Among Hispanic voters, about six-in-ten men (61%) and women (60%) associate with the Democrats. Hispanic women voters have become somewhat less Democratic in recent years (down from 74% in 2016).

About eight-in-ten Black voters – both women (84%) and men (81%) – are Democrats or Democratic leaners.

About six-in-ten men (61%) and women (64%) among Asian voters identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. (There is insufficient sample to show longer-term trends among Asian voters by gender.)

Partisanship across educational and gender groups by race and ethnicity

Among White voters, there are wide differences in partisanship by gender, by educational attainment – and by the combination of these.

• Among White voters without a college degree, 64% of men and 62% of women say they identify as or lean toward the Republican Party (about a third of each associate with the Democrats).
• White men with a college degree also tilt Republican among voters, though to a lesser extent (53% are Republicans or lean Republican, 45% are Democrats or lean Democratic).
• In contrast, White women with a college degree are more Democratic than Republican by 15 percentage points (42% Republican or Republican leaning, 57% Democrat or lean Democrat).

Among Black and Hispanic voters, there are only modest differences in partisanship across the combination of gender and education. In both groups, there are no significant differences between men with and without college degrees, or between their women counterparts. (Because Asian American voters without a college degree are a small group, sample sizes do not allow comparing college and non-college Asian men and women.)

This dynamic has changed over time, as college-educated White men and women have grown more Democratic and those with less formal education have grown more Republican.

As recently as 15 years ago, there were sizable gender gaps in partisanship among both college and non-college White voters. In both cases, men were substantially more likely than women to associate with the Republican Party.

But, at that time, there was not a substantial difference in the partisanship of college and non-college White voters – for either women or men.

Today, there is no gender gap in partisanship among non-college White voters, while there is a gender gap among college graduate White voters. The difference in partisanship between White women voters who have a college degree and those who do not, in particular, is quite large.

By contrast, there is little variation in the partisanship of Black and Hispanic voters by these characteristics, and the relationship has varied less over time.

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Table of contents, behind biden’s 2020 victory, a voter data resource: detailed demographic tables about verified voters in 2016, 2018, what the 2020 electorate looks like by party, race and ethnicity, age, education and religion, interactive map: the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the u.s. electorate, in changing u.s. electorate, race and education remain stark dividing lines, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .