The Many Dimensions of Racial Inequity
Abstract
"Black-white inequality persists across the many institutions of American society, reflecting racial differences in education, health, economic security, and civic and cultural life.We estimate black-white differences in a variety of domains; to compare disparate measures, we adopt some very approximate statistical assumptions that permit us to describe the experiences of the average African-American and the average non-Hispanic white as their percentile rankings in a national distribution...
None of these percentile rankings should be taken as precisely estimated. But the patterns they reflect reveal an underlying inequality that persists across many domains of American society. Because causal relationships between these various domains are often multi-directional, it is likely that black-white inequality can be substantially reduced only by sustained policy attention to many, if not all of these domains simultaneously."