Did You Know? (Facts about Racism)

Many leaders and scholars have written books, which provide rich information on the historical aspects of racism and the ways in which it continues to plague our society today. Antiracist Riverside believes that these literary works are excellent resources for individuals who wish to learn more about racism in the United States. We have selected a series of statements that provide important definitions, statistics, and other facts about racism under the context by which they impact society. It is our hope that these statements will stimulate further study and allow you to spark real discussions about racism among your social circles.

Discrimination and Prejudice

FACT: The stereotypes and attitudes that support racial discrimination have their roots in the system of slavery upon which the nation was founded.

(Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. p. IX)

FACT: Planners for the Interstate Highway System designated Black and brown areas as undesirable and either destroyed them to make way for the highways or located highways in ways that separated the neighborhoods from job-rich areas.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. p. 171)

FACT: White Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to hold racially resentful and otherwise racist views than religiously unaffiliated white people.

(Jones, Robert. P, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster; 2020)

FACT: The more you interact with people who are different from you, the more commonalities you see and the less they seem like “the other.” Contact also reduces our anxiety in relation to other groups and enhances our ability to empathize with other groups.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. p. 175)

Education

FACT: In 1944, the G.I. Bill was adopted to support returning servicemen. The VA frequently restricted education and training to lower-level jobs for African Americans even though they were qualified to acquire greater skills.

(Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. p. 167)

FACT: During the 2015–2016 school year, Black students represented only 15% of total US student enrollment, but they made up 35% of students suspended once, 44% of students suspended more than once, and 36% of students expelled. The US Department of Education concluded that this disparity is “not explained by more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color.”

(US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights. “2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection: School Climate and Safety.” https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/school-climate-and-safety.pdf. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: States have dramatically reduced their investment in higher education thus increasing tuition costs. Lower income individuals are hurt the most. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails then they were on colleges and universities. Since Blacks and Latinx are disproportionately poor they are disproportionately impacted by this cost of higher education.

(McGhee, H., The Sum of Us, New York: One World, 2021, p. 45)

FACT: “Compared to students in predominately white schools, white students who attend diverse K-12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Several studies of college students showed that racially and ethnically diverse educational experiences resulted in improvements in critical thinking and learning outcomes and in the acquisition of intellectual, scientific and professional skills. The results were similar for Black, white, Asian -American and Latinx students.”

(McGhee, H., The Sum of Us, New York: One World, 2021, p. 181)

Employment

FACT: In 1942 the Federal U.S. Employment Service generally refused to enroll African Americans in training for skilled work. Its instructions to local offices advised that if a company failed to specify a racial exclusion in its request for workers, the state office should solicit one, assuming that the firm might have overlooked the opportunity to state it. These discriminatory practices were continued after the war.

(Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. p. 168)

FACT: In the US, Black individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed than white individuals. Once employed, Black individuals earn nearly 25% less than their white counterparts.

(Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. “Discrimination in the Job Market in the United States.” https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-job-market-united-states. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: One US study found that job resumes with traditionally white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks than those with traditionally Black names.

FACT: In the US, Black workers are less likely than white workers to be employed in a job that is consistent with their level of education.

(Economic Policy Institute. “Black Workers Endure Persistent Racial Disparities In Employment Outcomes.” https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-racial-disparities-in-employment/. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

Health Care

FACT: From 2013 to 2017, white patients in the US received better quality health care than about 34% of Hispanic patients, 40% of Black patients, and 40% of Native American patients.

(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. “National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report.” https://www.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/research/findings/nhqrdr/2018qdr-final.pdf. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women, even at similar levels of income and education.

(National Partnership for Women and Families. “Black Women’s Maternal Health.” https://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/health/reports/black-womens-maternal-health.html. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: A 2011 study estimates that the economic costs of health disparities due to race for African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos from 2003 thru 2006 was a little over $229 billion.

(Thomas A. LaVeist, Darrell Gaskin, and Patrick Richard. “Estimating the Economic Burden of Racial Health Inequalities in the United States” International Journal of Health Services. April 2011.41:2. P. 234.

FACT: In a report issued in September 2009, the Urban Institute calculated that the Medicare program would save $15.6 billion per year if health disparities were eliminated. The study examined a select set of preventable diseases among the Latino and African American communities, including diabetes, hypertension and stroke, and concluded that – if the prevalence of such diseases in the African American and Latino communities were reduced to the same prevalence as those diseases occur in the non-Latino white population – $23.9 billion in health care costs would have been saved in 2009 alone.

(Timothy A. Waidmann. “Estimating the of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. 22 September 2009. http://www.urban.org/research/publication/estimating-cost-racial-and-ethnic-health-disparities)

FACT: In 2013, infants born to African American mothers experienced the highest rates of infant mortality (11.11 infant deaths per 1,000 births), and infants born to Asian or Pacific Islander mothers experienced the lowest rates (3.90 infant deaths per 1,000 births)

(National Center for Health Statistics, 2016)

FACT: In 2017, 12.6 percent of African American children had asthma compared with 7.7 percent of non-Hispanic white children.

(“Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity” by Carratala and Maxwell- 5/7/2020 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2020/05/07/484742/health-disparities-race-ethnicity)

FACT: Forty-two percent of African American adults over age 20 suffer from hypertension compared with 28.7 percent of non-Hispanic white adults.

(“Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity” by Carratala and Maxwell- 5/7/2020 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2020/05/07/484742/health-disparities-race-ethnicity)

Housing

FACT: In 1944, President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law—which provided a range of benefits, such as guaranteed mortgages, to veterans of World War II. The GI Bill allowed local banks to discriminate against Black veterans and deny them home loans even though the federal government would guarantee their mortgages. While the GI Bill paved the way for millions of predominantly white veterans to enter the middle class, it also further entrenched the United States’ racial hierarchy.

(Edward Humes, “How the GI Bill Shunted Blacks into Vocational Training,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 53 (2006): 92–104, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25073543.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A2de77c24d9eb56483e4463a6334db552)

FACT: Of all the African Americans in the United States during the decades between 1930 and 1960, fewer than 2 percent were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. p. 81)

FACT: The fringe lending market flourished to offer credit and reap profits from people of color who were excluded from the mainstream financial system. These included rent-to-own contracts for household appliances and furniture and houses bought on contract. These contracts enabled Black people to buy on the installment plan- and lose everything if they missed a single payment. Unlike a conventional mortgage, land contracts did not allow buyers to build equity; indeed, they owned nothing until the final payment was made.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. p. 81-82)

FACT: Black applicants have been turned down for loans at significantly higher rates than whites in 48 cities, Latinos in 25, Asians in nine and Native Americans in three. All 4 groups were significantly more likely to be denied a home loan than whites in Washington, DC.

(https://revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks-are-shutting-the-door-to-homeownership/)

FACT: Despite the law, the Justice Department has sued only a handful of financial institutions for failing to lend to people of color in the decade since the housing bust. This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for the applicant’s income, loan amount and neighborhood.

(“The Red Line: Racial Disparities in Lending” Reveal program from the Center for Investigative Reporting updated 2018. https://revealnews.org/podcast/the-red-line-racial-disparities-in-lending-rebroadcast/)

FACT: The homeownership gap between whites and African Americans is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. It has exploded since the housing bust, though the gap had been shrinking since the 70’s.

FACT: People of color continue to endure rampant discrimination in the housing market: 17 percent of Native Americans, 25 percent of Asian Americans, 31 percent of Latinos, and 45 percent of African Americans report experiencing discrimination when trying to rent or buy housing. By contrast, just 5 percent of white Americans report experiencing housing discrimination.

(Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and NPR, “Discrimination in America: Final Summary” (2018), available at https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/2018/01/NPR-RWJF-HSPH-Discrimination-Final-Summary.pdf.)

FACT: Fifty years after the Federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.

(Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez, “For People of Color, Banks are Shutting the Door to Homeownership,” Revealnews.org, Feb. 15, 2018 https://revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks-are-shutting-the-door-to-homeownership/)

Incarceration

FACT: Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested. Once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted, they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences.

(The Sentencing Project. “Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System.” https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: White and Black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate Black people for a drug crime.

(McGhee, H., The Sum of Us, New York: One World, 2021, p. 46)

FACT: Young African American men comprise fourteen percent of young men in the United States yet comprise forty percent of young men in prison.

(Puzzanchera, C., Sladky, A. and Kang, W. (2020). Easy Access to Juvenile Populations: 1990-2019. National Center for Juvenile Justice. https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezapop)

FACT: On average, Black men in the US receive sentences that are 19.1% longer than those of white men convicted for the same crimes.

(US Sentencing Commission. “Demographic Differences in Sentencing.” https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

Policing

FACT: The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol." The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.

(“The Origins of Modern Day Policing” NAACP website. Accessed June 4, 2021 https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing)

FACT: A Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person.

(Criminal Justice System: Law Enforcement, NAACP website. Accessed June 4, 2021 https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet)

FACT: In New York City, 88% of police stops in 2018 involved Black and Latinx people, while 10% involved white people. (Of those stops, 70% were completely innocent.)

(New York Civil Liberties Union. “Stop-and-Frisk Data.” https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data. Accessed Feb. 5, 2020.)

FACT: Black Americans and white Americans use drugs at similar rates, but Black Americans are 6 times more likely to be arrested for it.

(NAACP. “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/. Accessed Feb. 4, 2020.)

FACT: In 2019 police officers nationwide shot and killed more than 1000 people. Black people constituted 28% of those killed, more than twice their presence in the population. Indigenous Americans are killed at rates as high or higher than African Americans.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. page 234)

FACT: Media coverage increases the myth that black men are dangerous. Among those in the US arrested for criminal activity 69% are white. However only about 28% of the people who appear in TV crime reports are white. Black people are dramatically overrepresented.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. page 237)

Poverty

FACT: President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy of the people, because it favored Black and brown people over them – but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. page 34)

FACT: The media’s inaccurate portrayal of poverty as a Black problem triggers a distancing in the minds of many white people.

(Gilens, Martin, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-poverty Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cited in McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. page 34)

FACT: In the United States, 39 percent of African American children and adolescents and 33 percent of Latino children and adolescents are living in poverty, which is more than double the 14 percent poverty rate for non-Latino, White, and Asian children and adolescents.

(Kids Count Data Center, Children in Poverty 2014)

FACT: We could eliminate all poverty in the United States by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.

(Rachel West, “For the Cost of the Tax Bill, the U.S. Could Eliminate Child Poverty. Twice” talk poverty, December 12, 2017, https://talkpoverty.org /2017/12/12/u-s-eliminate-child-poverty-cost-senate-tax-bill/. Cited in McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. page 237)

Segregation

FACT: Our system of official segregation was the result of scores of racially explicit laws, regulations and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs.

(Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. p. XII)

FACT: In 1921 Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover developed a campaign to encourage exclusionary zoning and he headed the new Better Homes in America organization that encouraged white people to move into single-family houses away from African Americans in urban areas, thereby promoting ethnic and racial homogeneity.

(Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. p. 61)

FACT: More than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act’s passage, most American communities remain segregated by race. Existing residential patterns are largely not the result of personal preference among people of color to live in ethnic enclaves, but rather centuries of policies enacted by lawmakers on every level. Racial segregation has contributed to persistent disparities in access to public goods—such as parks, hospitals, streetlights, and well-maintained roads—and has undermined wealth building in communities of color nationwide.

(Joseph P. Williams, “Segregation’s Legacy: Fifty years after the Fair Housing Act was signed, America is nearly as segregated as when President Lyndon Johnson signed the law,” U.S. News & World Report, April 20, 2018, available at https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-04-20/us-is-still-segregated-even-after-fair-housing-act.)

FACT: In 2016 three-quarters of white people reported that their social network was entirely white.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. p. 175)

Voting

FACT: 1 in 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than 4 times greater than that of non-African Americans.

(Racism Facts and Figures, https://socialjusticeresourcecenter.org/facts-and-figures/racism)

FACT: Originally voting was allowed for only individuals who owned property effectively excluding many diverse populations who had been slaves. During Reconstruction after the civil war when voting could not be denied to black individuals, barriers were created such as literacy tests, registration rules, standards for conduct, poll taxes and more. Some of these remain today and are being expanded. For example, registration requirements kept nearly 20% of eligible voters from voting in 2016.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. pp.143-144)

FACT: Still in effect today in the majority of states is the restriction on voting for those with felony convictions. This effects over 6 million Americans. Since blacks are disproportionately convicted of crimes they are disproportionately restricted from voting.

(McGee, Heather, The Sum of Us. New York: One World, 2021. pp 144-145)

FACT: The United States continues to employ voter suppression tactics that target people of color including felony disenfranchisement, strict voter ID, modern-day poll tax, and discriminatory voter purge policies.

(“Systemic Inequality and American Democracy,” by Danyelle Solomon, Connor Maxwell, and Abril Castro, Center for American Progress, August 7, 2019)