Some things to think about for the “white privilege doesn’t exist/black people have more privilege” crowd
In 2010, white males outnumbered black males in the U.S. about 6 to 1, but per 100,000 people in each racial group, 2207 African Americans to 380 whites (nearly an inverse proportion of 6 to 1) constitute the prison population.
The incarceration rate of black men is more than six times higher than that of white men, slightly larger than the gap in 1960.
If incarceration was a function of class and not race, the prison population would be about 2 whites to 1 black person.
Black children make up 44 percent of youth prison inmates in the US.
In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today.
The US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. The US has about 5% of the world’s population but about 25% of the world’s prisoners.
In Madison, WI, black adults are 8-11 times more likely to be arrested than white adults.
Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who commit similar crimes and have similar records.
In New York City, more black defendants are put in jail while awaiting trial than white defendants, even after controlling for seriousness of the charges and prior record.
Also in NYC, black defendants are 13 percent more likely to be offered plea deals including jail time than white defendants, after controlling for many factors.
Black people in North Carolina are 2.48 times more likely to be excluded from juries than white people, after controlling for factors like employment status, reservations about the death penalty, and knowing a trial participant.
One study found that an all-white jury was 16% more likely to convict a black defendant than a white one for similar crimes, but when a jury had one black member, it convicted both at the same rate.
All else equal, black arrestees are much more likely to initially face a charge carrying a mandatory minimum (7.5% white vs. 12.4% black) and to be convicted of such charges (4.5% white vs. 7.5% percent black).
Black defendants face significantly more severe federal charges than whites even after controlling for criminal behavior (arrest offense, multiple-defendant case structure, and criminal history), observed defendant characteristics (e.g., age, education), defense counsel type, district, county economic characteristics, and crime rates.
Unexplained racial disparities exist all across the charge-severity distribution, but especially at the high end. The most striking disparities are found in the use of charges that carry non-zero statutory minimum sentences.
White judges’ implicit racial bias influences their decisions in determining both whether to convict defendants and the sentence to impose in each case.
A recent study suggested that white people presented with the fact that far more black people are imprisoned than white people are more likely to support harsh criminal justice policies than if they were unaware.
Non-white juvenile offenders receive harsher sentences than their white peers for similar crimes.
In a 2001 analysis of 77,236 federal cases from 1991 to 1994, even when cases were controlled for the severity of the offense, the defendant’s prior criminal history, and the specific district court’s sentencing tendencies, black people received sentences 5.5 months longer than whites.
In New York prisons, Black inmates are 30 percent more likely to be disciplined than white inmates, even after accounting for imprisonment due to violent offenses and for age. They are also sent to solitary confinement 65 percent more frequently and for longer durations than whites.
The disparities in discipline are greatest for infractions that give discretion to officers, like disobeying an order, and smallest for infractions that require physical evidence.
An extensive 1998 study of Philadelphia death penalty cases found that black defendants were 38% more likely to be sentenced to death, even when the researches controlled for the severity of the homicide.
In 2012, more than 70% of public defender offices reported that obtaining adequate funding for their attorneys was extremely or very challenging. The poverty rate is roughly 25% for black Americans and 9% for white Americans. This means black defendants are often more likely than white defendants to rely on overworked, underpaid public defenders, increasing their chances of being convicted.
In 2004, the American Bar Association reviewed the public defender system, stating: “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”
Black people constitute half of murder victims, but only 13% of persons executed since 1976 were convicted of killing black victims.
Since 1976, the United States has executed thirteen times more black defendants with white victims than white defendants with black victims.
White-on-black homicides in states with Stand Your Ground laws are 354% more likely to be ruled justifiable than white-on-white ones.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
In New York, an average of 10-11% of stop-and-frisk searches are done on white people, while 53-56% are done on black people. Nearly nine in ten stopped-and-frisked people are innocent.
Blacks people were frisked 50% of the time, compared to 34% of the time for whites.
24% of black people had force used against them by the NYPD, compared to only 17% of whites.
Only 2.6% of all stops (1.6 million stops over 3.5 years) resulted in the discovery of contraband or a weapon. Whites were slightly more likely to be found with contraband or a weapon.
The stop rate for black people was 3,400 stops per 10,000 residents higher than the white stop rate in LA from 2003-2004.
Black people were 127% more likely to get frisked and 76% more likely to get searched than whites.
Frisked black people were 42% less likely to be found with a weapon than frisked whites.
Consensual searches of black people were 37 percent less likely to uncover weapons, 23.7 percent less likely to uncover drugs, and 25.4 percent less likely to uncover any other type of contraband, than consensual searches of whites.
State highway patrol in Arizona was 2.5x more likely to search a stopped black person than a white person. Whites who were searched were more likely than equally likely as all other racial groups to be transporting drugs, guns, or other contraband.
In West Virginia, black drivers were 1.64x more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Black drivers were also searched more frequently, but police obtained a significantly higher contraband hit rate for white drivers than minorities.
In Illinois, the number of consent searches of black people after stops was more than double that of whites. Officers were twice as likely to find contraband with white drivers as a result of these searches.
Studies in Minnesota and Texas have yielded the same results. Black people are stopped more often, white people are more likely to have contraband.
When researchers asked police officers directly, “Who looks criminal?”, they chose more black faces than white faces. The more stereotypically black a face appeared, the more likely officers were to report that the face looked criminal.
Black boys as young as 10 years old are viewed as older and less “innocent” than white boys the same age.
When participants in this study were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark.
Black drivers nationwide are twice as likely to experience the use or threat of violent force at the hands of police officers than white drivers.
In one New Jersey lawsuit, black drivers were demonstrated to be both stopped and searched at starkly higher rates than white drivers, even though they violated traffic laws at almost identical rates.
Efforts by the state of New Jersey to suppress evidence obtained through race-based stops led to revelations that New Jersey State Police falsified information to hide pervasive racial profiling and the admission by the State that police engaged in profiling. Two state police supervisors said it was common practice for troopers on the turnpike to jot down the license plate number of white motorists who were not stopped and use them on the reports of blacks who were pulled over.
A subsequent study found that even after the revelations and lawsuit, black drivers were still more than twice as likely to be searched by police in New Jersey than white drivers.
In Volusia County, Florida, only five percent of drivers on the roads are racial minorities, but minorities constitute more than eighty percent of the people searched by police. Officers also detained black drivers for twice as long as they did white drivers.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students.
The vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.
Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students.
A 10 percent increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending.
Schools with 90 percent or more students of color spend a full $733 less per student per year than schools with 90 percent or more white students.
38 percent of black students attend schools with 90 percent or more students of color.
Counties in America that had a higher proportion of slaves in 1860 still suffer from higher rates of educational inequality today.
Only 57% of black students attend schools offering advanced math and science courses, compared to 71% of white students.
The average black student attends a school at the 37th percentile for test score results, whereas the average white student attends a school in the 60th percentile.
A national study finds that black students are about half as likely as white students to be put on a “gifted” track—even when they have comparable test scores.
Black students represent 18% of preschool enrollment but 42% of students suspended once and 48% of the students suspended more than once.
Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students.
Black students represent 16% of student enrollment, but they represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school-related arrest.
Black students represent 19% of students with disabilities served by IDEA, but 36% of these students who are restrained at school through the use of a mechanical device or equipment designed to restrict their freedom of movement.
Boys with imprisoned fathers are much less likely to possess the behavioral skills needed to succeed in school by the age of five.
Only 5.5% of undergrad students receive private scholarships. Of the private scholarships available, less than 5% of scholarship programs and less than 10% of the total number of individual scholarships take race into consideration.
White students are 40% more likely to receive scholarships than minority students.
Only 3.5% of students of color receive scholarships even partially based on race.
Ivy League and other top schools typically admit legacy students, who are overwhelmingly white, at two to five times their overall admission rates.
Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.
Black college students are more likely to graduate with more than $25,000 of student debt than white students.
White people who get the same college degrees as black people still earn more than black people with those degrees, accounting for 5% of the wealth gap.
A recent study found the unemployment rate for black college graduates was 12.4%, while the overall unemployment rate for college grads was 5.6%.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
Between 1980 and 2000, the US black drug arrest rate rose from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same period, the white drug arrest rate increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per 1,000 persons. A survey of drug usage among secondary school students in the United States from 1975-2011 found that white students were slightly more likely to report having abused an illegal substance within the past month than black students.
Yet from 1980- 2010, black youth were arrested for drug crimes at rates more than double those of white youth.
Black people are still 3.6 times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug possession.
One study in Seattle found black people constituted 15.6% of observed drug dealers for the five most dangerous drugs but 64% of drug dealing arrests for those drugs. (More about the methodology: [x])
Black drug offenders have a 20% greater chance of being sentenced to prison than white drug offenders.
Between 1994 and 2003, the average time served by African Americans for a drug offense increased by 77%, compared to an increase of 28% for white drug offenders.
Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009.
Black people use crack more than white people, and white people use cocaine more than black people.
Crack and cocaine are pharmacologically identical drugs, only varying in the immediacy, duration, and magnitude of the cocaine’s effect.
However, you must possess 18 times more cocaine than crack to get a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
In 2003, black people served as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites did for a violent offense (61.7 months).
One study in 1990 found that black and white people had similar rates of drug use during pregnancy, but black people were 10 times more likely to be reported to child health authorities than white people for drug use during pregnancy.
Another study in 1996 found that black people were far more likely to be discharged to non-maternal care for cocaine use during pregnancy than white people.
From 1999-2005, black people were 36% of those arrested for drug offenses and 46% of those convicted for drug offenses.
As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests.
In 2013, 82% of drug crime arrests were for drug possession.
Almost half of those in prison are there for drug offenses.
Arrests of black people since 1980 have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes.
Arrests for marijuana possession have more than tripled since 1991.
SWAT raids are much more common in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods.
62 percent of SWAT raids are used for drug searches, and drug-related SWAT deployments primarily impact people of color.
An aide of President Nixon recently came out and said that the “war on drugs” was specifically designed to target black people.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
The average black household earning more than $100,000 per year lives in a neighborhood with higher levels of disadvantage than the average white household earning less than $30,000 per year.
Residential segregation artificially lowers demand, placing a forced ceiling on home equity for black people who own homes in non-white neighborhoods.
Black people at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes.
A 2007 study found that it is the presence of black people, not just neighborhood conditions often associated with black neighborhoods (e.g., bad schools, high crime), that accounts for white aversion to such areas.
In one survey, whites reported that they would be unlikely to purchase a home that met their requirements in terms of price, number of rooms, and other housing characteristics in a neighborhood with good schools and low crime rates if there was a substantial representation of black people.
In the 1920s–1948, restrictive covenants barred black people from purchasing homes all over the country. By 1940, 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried restrictive covenants barring black families.
In 1937, a leading magazine of nationwide circulation awarded 10 communities a “shield of honor” for an umbrella of restrictions against the “wrong kind of people.”
Black homebuyers in the 1950s-1960s were subject to a predatory practice known as “contract buying.” In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, black homeowners would acquire no equity in the meantime. If they missed a single payment, they would immediately forfeit their down payment, all their monthly payments, and the property itself, preventing black people from generating wealth through home ownership for much of the 20th century.
The Federal Housing Administration explicitly refused to back loans to black people or even other people who lived near black people in a practice called “redlining.” The FHA and other initiatives greatly expanded home ownership and the middle class but deliberately excluded black people.
Now, only 44 percent of black families own a home compared with 73 percent for white households.
Neighborhoods that black people were forced to buy homes in are still usually the poorest, with the highest levels of exposure to air pollution and environmental toxins.
Chronic asthma is twice as common among black children as the rest of the population.
So are childhood obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Lead poisoning is more than twice as common among black children than it is among white children.
Number of years of home ownership explains 27% of the wealth gap between black people and whites.
Inheritance of family money accounts for another 5% of the wealth gap.
Because whites are far more able to give inheritances or family assistance for down payments due to historical wealth accumulation, white families buy homes and start acquiring equity an average eight years earlier than black families.
Because whites are far more able to give family financial assistance, larger up-front payments by white homeowners lower interest rates and lending costs.
Whites are five times more likely to inherit money than black people (36 percent to 7 percent, respectively).
In Toronto, emails with black-sounding names sent seeking apartments are less likely to get responses from landlords than emails with white-sounding names. (Draft with no paywall)
One study found black people report more difficulties during a housing search and are much more likely to feel they were taken advantage of.
In US experiments, home sellers told black people about 17 percent fewer available homes than white people, and black people were shown 18 percent fewer homes than whites.
Black people were also asked more questions about their finances and given fewer offers of help financing a loan.
Black renters also learned about 11 percent fewer rental units than whites.
Even when homeowners had similar incomes, black-owned homes were valued at 18% less than white-owned homes.
In Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend well to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.
Current mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit.
In the years before the financial crisis, black people were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than white people, even after accounting for income and credit scores.
For many types of loans, black borrowers were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk.
HUD data from 1998 also showed that predominantly black neighborhoods at every income level had a much greater share of subprime refinance mortgages than predominantly white neighborhoods.
Big banks sold black people subprime loans even when they qualified as high-income borrowers. 32.1 percent of high-income borrowers of high-interest loans were black, compared to 10.5 percent for whites. [x]
Many banks have been accused of neglecting foreclosed homes in black neighborhoods while maintaining foreclosed homes in white neighborhoods, depressing the value of the homes in the black neighborhoods.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
26.2 percent of black people live in poverty versus 10 percent of white people.
38 percent of black children live in poverty.
The number of white children living in poverty has fallen since 2013, but the number of black children in poverty has remained steady.
Black Americans living in poverty are much more likely to live in an equally poor neighborhood than white Americans living in poverty.
Black Americans living in poverty are more likely to die than white Americans living in poverty.
During the recession from 2007 to 2010, black families’ wealth fell by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.
America’s racial wealth gap, pay gap and college education gap have all widened in the last few decades.
The difference in median household incomes between whites and blacks has grown from about $19,000 in 1967 to roughly $27,000 in 2011.
The median black household in America has only 6 percent of the wealth of the median white household.
The United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
In one study, 5,000 identical resumes sent to employers with openings. Some resumes had white-sounding names such as “Brendan,” and others with black-sounding names such as “Jamal.” Resumes with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than those with black-sounding names. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”
Furthermore, the researchers found that the high-quality black résumés drew no more calls than the average black résumés, which was not true for white resumes.
Another study found that for low-wage jobs, white applicants with a felony conviction were 5% more likely to get a callback than black applicants with similar qualifications and no criminal record.
Black men make less money per dollar than white women. Black men make an average of 75 cents on the dollar that white men make. Black women make an average of 64 cents on the dollar a white man makes.
The wages of black ex-convicts grow at a 21% slower rate than those of white ex-convicts. (More info here: [x])
Drug testing increases black employment by 7-30% and relative wages by 1.4-13%, indicating that many black job seekers are turned down by the assumption that they use drugs.
White male college professors do the least service and mentoring, yet get promoted fastest.
Employers frequently favor having a “shared culture” with an employee over absolute productivity.
There have been only 15 black CEOs in the history of the Fortune 500, of whom five are current in the role.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
News coverage of missing black women is more likely to focus on the victim’s baggage, such as abusive boyfriends or a troubled past, while coverage of missing white women tends to focus on their roles as mothers or daughters.
Black children comprise 33.2% of missing children cases, but only 19.5% of cases reported in the media.
One study found that people who regularly watch network news increased participants’ endorsement of stereotypes that black people are poor and intimidating. Only 9% of particpants said Fox News was their preferred network.
Other studies found black people are overrepresented as perpetrators and underrepresented as victims on TV news coverage compared to recorded crime stats.
Compared to the percentage of crimes they actually commit, black people are grossly overrepresented on local news broadcasts about criminal activity of every type.
In 2007, black, Latinx, Asian, and Native American people together made up only 13.52% of American newsrooms.
People of color only made up 5.5% of executive producers on TV shows during the 2013-2014 season.
A lot of people believe that the occupational roles and negative personality characteristics that black characters frequently display on TV are true to real life.
Only 12 of the top 100 grossing films of 2015 had a protagonist of color.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The gap between black and white voter turnout is 7.4 points higher in states with the strictest voter ID requirements, all else equal.
The rate of voter fraud is infinitesimal. Out of 2,068 alleged voter ID fraud cases, only 10 legitimate cases of voter impersonation, or 1 fraud per 15 million votes, have been discovered.
7.7% of all black people are disenfranchised from voting due to a felony conviction, versus 2.5% of all Americans.
In 2015, Alabama passed a new voter ID law, then closed DMVs in black counties, essentially reinstating the poll tax.
White legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with black-sounding names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.
There are only 43 black representatives currently serving in the House of Representatives.
There are 2 black Senators currently serving, and there have only been 9 black Senators in the history of the United States.
There have only ever been 4 black state governors (not including US Virgin Islands).
There has only ever been one black president.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Black people are less than 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims.
39 percent of people arrested by police and not attacking when killed were black.
Half of all people killed by police are not counted in FBI statistics. Since the data is entirely based upon police officers’ non-compulsory self-reporting, the bias in these data must be assumed to favor police.
There was a 45 percent increase in killings by police between 1999 - 2013. Black men between ages 15-44 were three to five times more likely to be killed than their white counterparts.
18% of black people killed by police were under the age of 21, as opposed to just 8.7% of white people.
Police officers are hardly ever indicted for killing black people (or for anything else, for that matter).
In the UK, more than 500 of the 1,500 people who have died in police custody since 1990 are people of color, despite only making up 14% of the population.
Review of 15,000 protests between 1960-1990 found protests involving black people are more likely to attract police attention and the use of police force to disperse them.
SWAT teams are much more likely to be deployed against black suspects than white ones.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
74 percent of black adults have health insurance versus 85 percent of white adults.
Multiple studies have shown that doctors are less likely to prescribe opioid painkillers to black people than whites, even young children, for the same ailments.
Even when they do get a prescription, black people in low-income neighborhoods can struggle to find a pharmacy that has the opioids on hand to fill it.
A study found that black children who are treated for acute appendicitis are less likely to receive painkillers than white children.
The average black American male lives five fewer years than the average white American male.
Black people in New York are eight times more likely to die in childbirth than white people.
Black people are more than three times more likely to die in childbirth nationwide than white people.
58 percent of white people from the general population believe black people have thicker skin than whites. 40 percent of first-year medical students also agreed, as well as 42 percent of second-year students, 22 percent of third-years, and 25 percent of residents.
When told that black people have less sensitive nerve endings than whites, 20 percent of white laypeople agreed, as did 8 percent of first-year med students, 14 percent of second-years, no third-years and 4 percent of residents.
When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients—even when their medical files were statistically identical to those of white patients.
One study found white people have a significantly muted physiological reaction to seeing black people in pain compared to seeing white people in pain.
In another study, people, including medical personnel, rated how much pain they would feel in 18 common scenarios. They then rated how another randomly displayed person, sometimes white, sometimes black, would feel in the same situations. The researchers found that white participants, black participants, and nurses and nursing students assumed that black people felt less pain than whites.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
About 40 percent of white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, compared to 25 percent of nonwhite Americans.
There are 35 Neo-Confederate groups and 190 KKK groups still active in the US today. There are 892 total active hate groups, most of which are white supremacist or white nationalist.
Racially-motivated hate crimes are by far the most common hate crime. 48.3 percent of hate crimes are racially motivated, 62.7 percent of which are motivated specifically by anti-blackness.
Black players make up 65 percent of players in the NFL but get hit with 92 percent of unsportsmanlike penalties for “celebrating” after a touchdown.
In baseball, umpires are 10 percent less likely to expand the strike zone for black pitchers than for white pitchers.
iPods for sale online that show the iPod held by a black hand receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers than an iPod held by a white hand.
Conditional on receiving at least one offer, black sellers also receive 2–4% lower offers, and buyers corresponding with black sellers exhibit lower trust: They are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment.
When white and black people were sent to bargain for a used car, black people were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
In one study, the first taxi stops for white travelers almost 60% of the time, but for black travelers less than 20% of the time. And while white travelers never had more than 4 taxis pass them, black travelers had 6 or 7 taxis pass them 20% of the time.
Black passengers using Uber have to wait an average of 30% longer for riders than white passengers. People with Black-sounding names are two times more likely to have their trip canceled than people with white-sounding names.
People with Black-sounding names are 16% less likely to be accepted by AirBnB hosts than people with white-sounding names.
Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
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