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Report: Black Americans Are 72% Equal to Whites
Tessa Berenson @tcberenson
March 19, 2015
"It's a tale of two nations"
Black Americans are about 72% equal to whites, according to a new report on racial equality.
The 2015 State of Black America, put out by the National Urban League, looked at five
categories to come up with that number: economics, education, health, social justice and civic
engagement. The index sets white as the benchmark, because, according to the report, “the
history of race in America has created advantages for whites that persist in many of the outcomes
being measured.”
A 100% equality index would mean full equality between the racial group being measured and
the white population. So with blacks at 72%, National Urban League CEO Marc Morial says the
country still has a long way to go. (Hispanics fared slightly better, with an index of around 78%.)
“Black status, when measured in the five areas that we look at, is still not on par with white
Americans,” Morial said. “[It’s an] equality gap that represents the distance we need to cross to
achieve full equality in this country.”
That gap widens even more when you break the index down by category. The black equality
index drops to 56% when you just look at economics.
“I was stunned at the high levels of black unemployment in many cities,” Morial said. “I can
celebrate the tremendous growth in jobs, [but] it appears as though those jobs are bypassing large
segments of the black community.”
The black education equality indexcame in at 76%, health at 80%, social justice at 61% and civic
engagement at 104% (Morial explained that African Americans tend to be overrepresented in
civic engagement because a higher proportion work in the military and public-sector jobs
compared with whites.)
But why did the social justice index increase from last year, up from 57%, when the past few
months have seen such high-profile cases of social injustice in Ferguson and elsewhere?
“Numbers don’t always tell a whole story,” Morial said. “Numbers help you tell a story.”
For Morial, the most hopeful part of the study was the health index, up from 78% a year ago. He
attributed this uptick largely to the Affordable Care Act, which has caused the number of
uninsured African Americans to drop.
“It proves that sometimes public-policy interventions make a difference,” Morial said.
There are other policy initiatives Morial hopes the publication of this report will inspire,
including a transportation-infrastructure bill, a youth-unemployment bill and raising the
minimum wage. He knows there’s a “tremendous” amount of work to get that 72% up to 100%.
“The word I’d like you to think about is crisis,” he said. “It’s a jobs crisis, it’s a justice crisis, it’s
an education crisis. You can walk over here and you can look at the numbers and you can cheer.
But then when you look more closely there’s another story, and that’s the story of those being
left behind. And to me that’s the point. It’s a tale of two nations.”
1.
Why does the index set whites as the benchmark to measure African American equality?
2.
What category seems to be the most unequal based off of the findings of the equality index?
3.
What does the category “social justice” mean to you? Can you think of any examples in recent
news that would represent this category?
4.
What factor is leading to the health categories increase from 78% to 80%?
5.
Think about what can be done to help lessen the gap between whites and African Americans
and propose one solution to the problem. Why would this solution help?