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Racial disparities

Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Reverse Globalization

April 5, 2025 Jon Jeter, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
While it was not technically a tariff, the 1808 law prohibiting the importation of enslaved people to the U.S. from Africa and the Caribbean had the same effect, protecting domestic industries—in this case the breeding of the enslaved for commercial trade—from foreign competitors. For everyone but the enslaved of course, the ban worked like a charm, raising significantly the sale price that slaveholders could demand for a bondswoman or bondsman. In the half-century that followed the embargo on international slave trafficking, the number of enslaved in the U.S. quadrupled from one to four million by the time the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861.

Natural Disasters Are Driving A School Crisis

April 2, 2025 Adam Mahoney, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen. Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered. Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January.

Redesigning Care For New Jersey’s Black Moms

February 12, 2025 Kimberly Izar, Next City. , , , ,
Cherelle Lloyd had just given birth to her son two weeks prior when she sensed something was wrong. With her hands and breasts in pain, she decided she needed outside help. “It was hurting every time that [my son] latched,” says Lloyd. “It was just miserable.” Finding resources near where she lived in East Orange, N.J. wasn’t easy. When she searched for support, all the in-person lactation consultants covered by her insurance were more than fifty miles away. That’s when her doula connected her to Perinatal Health Equity Initiative (PHEI), a Black maternal health nonprofit offering community services in New Jersey.

The Military To Prison Pipeline

January 5, 2025 Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men--white, Black and Latino—lined up proudly between two flags. In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort.

Blacks And Hispanics Seeking Parole Face Widening Racial Disparity

November 20, 2024 Reuven Blau, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
Black and Hispanic people in New York state prisons have a much higher chance to be denied parole than whites over the past three years — a divide that’s gotten worse since being highlighted in 2016, a new study shows.  New York’s Parole Board released 34.79% of people of color while letting out 48.71% of white people from January through June 2024, based on a report by New York University School of Law’s Center for Race, Inequality & the Law posted online Monday.  Since Gov. Kathy Hochul took office in 2021, there would be 1,338 fewer Blacks and Hispanics behind bars if they were paroled at the same rate as whites, the report shows. 

It’s Time To Act Locally To Address Racial Wealth Inequality

March 1, 2024 Natasha Hicks, Next City. , , ,
As we close out Black History Month and the celebration of the many invaluable contributions Black people have made to the U.S., we must also reflect, acknowledge and confront one of the most pernicious issues that has faced generations of Black Americans: racial wealth inequality. Black people have never been able to fully realize the power and freedom that wealth affords since throughout history they have had their wealth systematically blocked or stolen. Despite having the deck stacked against them, generations of Black Americans have been able to save, buy land, start businesses and create their own economic engines.

Unions Added 139,000 Members In 2023, But Density Remains Stubbornly Low

February 16, 2024 Elizabeth Donald, Portside. , , , ,
Unions added 139,000 more workers in historic gains in 2023, but union density remains stubbornly low, with only 10 percent of American workers represented by a union as of the end of the year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. This is an all-time low and a big surprise to many, given the historic strikes by auto workers, Hollywood creatives and Kaiser healthcare workers, according to a Washington Post analysis. Union density vs. union membership is a frustrating comparison. Even with the historic membership growth, the country added 2.7 million jobs in 2023, many of them non-union, meaning the membership growth couldn’t keep up with the overall jobs numbers.

Pollution Displaces Black Residents; White Homeowners Profit

November 25, 2023 Adam Mahoney, In These Times. , , , , , , ,
Englewood Chicago — Deborah Payne’s neighborhood of 35 years on Chicago’s South Side no longer exists. Dirt piles tower where families once gathered for Sunday dinners in single- and multifamily homes. Concrete lots cover backyards where children watched fireworks and caught lightning bugs. Streets that maintained generations of Black Chicago razed and left empty for railway cars. Today, less than 10 blocks from Payne’s old neighborhood, sits the repercussions of diesel pollution caused by the expansion of a railyard. Over a decade ago, the city, along with railroad giant Norfolk Southern, announced a plan to buy out Payne’s 12-block community of more than 200 households to replace it with the freight yard.

60 Years After March On Washington, Black Economic Inequality Persists

August 28, 2023 Chuck Collins, Inequality.org. , , ,
Black Americans have endured the unendurable for too long. Sixty years after the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, African Americans are on a path where it will take 500 more years to reach economic equality. A new report, Still A Dream, coauthored by Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, examines the economic indicators since 1963.  Our country has taken significant steps towards racial equity since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Climate Crisis Is Most Detrimental To The Black Community

July 23, 2023 Forrest Palmer, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
There was no more defining moment in modernity than the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Within that revolution domestically to the United States, the most significant incident was the Titusville, Pennsylvania oil drilling find , which began our internal deluge of oil.  This was the beginning of the troika of oil, coal and gas being the foundation of our modern economy. As the saying goes “there are no free lunches”.  With this abundance of cheap energy, the release of carbon in our environment has caused a constant rise in our temperatures globally over the past approximately 180 years .

Who’s Unhoused In California?

June 22, 2023 Sam Levin, The Guardian. , , ,
Nearly half of all unhoused adults in California are over the age of 50, with Black residents dramatically overrepresented, according to the largest study of the state’s homeless population in decades. University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research released on Tuesday also revealed that 90% of the state’s homeless population lost their housing in California, with 75% of them now living in the same county where they were last housed. The study further found that nearly nine out of 10 people reported that the cost of housing was the main barrier to leaving homelessness.

A Racial Disparity Across New York That Is Truly Jarring

January 5, 2023 Jesse Barber and Simon McCormack, New York Civil Liberties Union. , , ,
It has long been established that people of color — and especially Black people — are disproportionately criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated by the criminal legal system. When it comes to arrests, charges, convictions, and sentences, at every step, Black people are treated much more harshly than white people. But even though this reality is not new, just how unequal the system is across New York is still surprising: In Manhattan — one of the wealthiest and least equal places in the country — courts convicted Black people of felonies and misdemeanors at a rate 21 times greater than that of white people over the past two decades. This disparity is the largest of any county in the state. This troubling statistic features prominently in a lawsuit filed recently by the New York Civil Liberties Union challenging the constitutionality of a ban on people with felony convictions serving on juries in Manhattan.

Lessons From The Nation’s Black Male Educators

June 29, 2021 Letrell Harris and Horace Ryans, Scalawag Magazine. , , ,
The place of Black men in higher education, both as students and as educators, has always been precarious—even before the pandemic. A U.S. Department of Education report found in 2016 that Black men made up just 2 percent of the nation's teaching workforce, representing the lowest population group in education. As the realities of the pandemic set in last year, many school districts in the South were chastised for taking a lackluster approach to ensuring safe reopenings for their students. For Everton Blair, an educator and the first Black member of the Gwinnett County, Georgia, Board of Education, openly addressing the risks and the realities was a priority in his district.

Workers’ Wages Rebound From Pandemics But Not For Blacks

May 8, 2021 Sarafina Wright, The Washington Informer. , , ,
While wages for many Americans have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, earnings for Black workers declined in the first quarter of 2021, growing the wage gap to its highest level since before the pandemic, according to a new analysis. In a report of earnings data by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) real median earnings have increased by 1 percent for the first quarter of 2021, driven in large part by a 1.6 percent increase in real earnings by Hispanic workers, while real earnings for white workers remained virtually unchanged. Wages for white earners have fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels and are currently 0.3 percent higher in real terms than in December 2019.

Why Black Women Are Often Missing From Conversations About Police Violence

May 7, 2021 By Alex Samuels, Dhrumil Mehta and Anna Wiederkehr, Five Thirty Eight. , , ,
When Lajuana Phillips was shot and killed by a police officer in late 2018, she was a mother of three children, a daughter and a cousin who was described by family as “a hard worker,” according to an online memorial. But Phillip’s death received little media attention. There were a few local stories when she was first identified by police, and others detailing the circumstances that led to her being shot at six times. But that was about it. Phillips isn’t alone. Crystal Danielle Ragland, who was killed in Huntsville, Alabama; Latasha Nicole Walton of Florida; and April Webster of South Carolina, to name a few, also received little news coverage after their fatal encounters with law enforcement. Most people fatally shot by police get little to no attention from national media outlets.
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