Persistent racial inequality in the United States

6 Political rights and civil liberties

The final mechanism we analyze is political inequality: the deprivation of political rights and unequal protection under the law for Black individuals and communities. Without political power, it is exceedingly difficult for marginalized groups to influence the institutions needed to secure access to public goods and protect any economic gains, especially if they are starting from an already weak economic position.

This section examines two major consequences of racial political inequality that contribute to intergenerational economic inequality: civil liberties and health. We end this section by exploring some of the key barriers to the political empowerment of Black people that still exist today.

Civil liberties, protection from violence, and criminal justice

One of the primary functions of any modern democratic government is to protect the lives of its citizens without violating other basic democratic rights. On this count, the U.S. government at all levels has failed its Black citizens.

Although large-scale vigilante violence is largely a thing of the past, patterns of racially motivated violence continue to this day in both the North (e.g. Buffalo, New York in 2022) and the South (Charleston, South Carolina in 2015). In 2012, the Black Lives Matter hashtag was first widely circulated in response to the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

Black people are the biggest victims of violence in America. On average, a Black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a White person. In 2019, Black people made up 13.4% of the overall population but accounted for approximately 54.7% of the 16,425 homicide victims. Young Black men are also the most likely group to be robbed or be the victim of a violent offense, and are unlikely to have the resources they need to deal with the physical, psychological, and financial aftermath of these crimes.

The segregation and concentrated poverty discussed in Section 5, combined with weak protection under the law, lack of political power, and limited employment opportunities, create vulnerable communities and an environment that promotes criminal activity.

To learn more about the racial discrimination of the criminal justice system, read this helpful list of relevant studies.

civil liberties

Those rights and freedoms a government’s constitution and legal system have promised to protect. In the United States, these include such things as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial, and equal protection under the law.

Civil liberties include equal treatment by the state’s security forces and justice system. As in other countries with stark racial inequalities, the criminal justice system treats citizens (as well as non-citizens) of different races extremely unequally. Today the U.S. has a criminal justice system which discriminates against Black people at every step.

Comparing a White and Black person who committed the same crime, the Black person is:

• More likely to be arrested. For example, one study found that the “Black arrest rate is at least twice as high as the White arrest rate for disorderly conduct, drug possession, simple assault, theft, vagrancy, and vandalism.”¹
• More likely to be charged with a crime which carries a heavier sentence. Federal prosecutors are about twice as likely to charge a Black defendant with an offense that carries a mandatory minimum sentence than a similar White defendant.²
• More likely to experience pretrial detention. A 2014 study looking at hundreds of thousands of cases in New York found that controlling for factors such as the nature of the charge and prior record, Black defendants were 10% more likely than White defendants to be detained pretrial.³
• More likely to be offered a plea with prison time. That same study also found that Black defendants were 19% more likely to be offered a plea deal with prison time than similar White defendants.
• Likely to be given a longer sentence for the same charge. A 2018 study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that Black men receive on average a 20 percent longer sentence than White men for the same crime, even after controlling for variables such as age and prior convictions.⁴
• More likely to be wrongly convicted. A report for the National Registry of Exonerations estimates that innocent Black people are about seven times as likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent White people.⁵
• More likely to endure periods of solitary confinement, which has long been recognized as a form of torture. In 2017, Black men made up 43% of the male prison population but were 46% of those who experienced solitary confinement. During the same year, Black women were 23% of the female prison population but were 40% of those who experienced solitary confinement. ⁶
• More likely to be given the death penalty. A 2014 study looking at 33 years of data from Washington found that, after adjusting for variables such as number of victims and brutality of the crime, Black defendants were 4.5 times more likely to be given the death penalty for murder than White defendants.⁷
• Less likely to be released on parole,⁸ and more likely to be arrested and resentenced for committing the same parole violation. One study found that Black New Yorkers were 12 times more likely to be detained for parole violations than White New Yorkers, and five times more likely to be detained for technical violations.⁹

Black jurors are more likely to be dropped from the jury pool than similar White candidates, helping to ensure the conviction of Black defendants. Within the Black population, Black people with darker skin tones are more heavily discriminated against than those with lighter skin.¹⁰

As shown in Figure 13, starting in the early 1970s, the United States saw an explosion of incarceration and now has the highest incarceration rate worldwide. At its peak in 2008, there were around 2.3 million people incarcerated, about 40% of whom were Black men. As of 2020, the incarceration rate for Black people was 938 per 100,000 residents and 1,890 for Black men, as compared to 183 per 100,000 for White people overall and 332 for White men.

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https://books.core-econ.org/insights/persistent-racial-inequality-in-the-united-states/06-political-rights-and-civil-liberties.html#figure-13

Figure 13 Total number of incarcerated Americans from 1910 to 2014. Incarceration is broken down by: prison, where those convicted go to serve out their terms; jail, where people are held awaiting trials or for minor crimes; and juvenile detention, which is prison for minors.

Wikimedia Commons. 2022. Updated 22 June 2022.

The future income and wealth of individuals who experience incarceration are likely to be severely reduced. Given the combination of segregation and high Black incarceration rates, these effects disproportionately affect Black families and neighborhoods. By disrupting social networks, breaking up families, and generally destabilizing communities, mass incarceration has made it much more difficult to reduce Black poverty levels.

Mass incarceration is thus another substantial barrier to Black economic mobility:¹¹

• Incarceration depresses the total earnings of White males by two percent, of Hispanic males by six percent, and of Black males by nine percent.
• A total of one in nine Black children, 1 in 28 Hispanic children, and 1 in 57 White children have an incarcerated parent, and children whose fathers have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than other children to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared with 4 percent).

Beyond incarceration, there are systematic differences in the treatment White and Black people receive from all levels of the criminal justice system, most visibly by the police, which has been the focus of the BLM movement. Black people, especially Black boys and young men, are far more likely to be stopped, surveilled, harassed, and killed by police officers than almost all other racial groups.

Policing in Black communities is part of the problem. While Black citizens are surveilled and mistreated by the police, homicides involving Black victims are also significantly less likely to be solved or lead to a conviction than if the victim is White.¹² Thus, paradoxically, Black communities are simultaneously over- and under-policed, experiencing mistreatment on the one hand and neglect on the other.¹³

The rule of law the racial wealth gap

While Black people did make gains in wealth acquisition after the Civil War (Figure 1), the pace was slow and started from a near-zero base. The observed gains took place in a politically rigged environment, where the threat of violence could destroy Black wealth.

What wealth Black people formally owned was tenuous without the rule of law to prevent unlawful seizures and destruction. Since wealth compounds over time, communities that were either violently prevented from accumulating wealth or had their wealth destroyed or seized still suffer those consequences today. In 1965, a century after emancipation, Black people were more than 10% of the population but held less than 2% of U.S. wealth and less than 0.1% of the wealth in stocks.

Black wealth remains fundamentally unchanged and structurally unreachable for most Black people. One study found that very little of the wealth gap can be explained by differences in savings rates: the initial inequality in wealth was so large that even if Black people saved at the same rate as White people (a challenge given that they are poorer) the racial wealth gap would take hundreds of years to converge.¹⁴

Health

Political exclusion has also resulted in the under-provision of many public goods to Black people. In addition to schools, Black hospitals, especially in the South, were legally segregated and systematically underfunded throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the North, neighborhood segregation by race increased considerably with the Great Migration, resulting in school and hospital segregation that lowered Black people’s access to education and health. Since the 1970s, Black mortality (especially that of Black men) has improved in both absolute terms and relative to White mortality, although large gaps remain (Figure 4). In 2019, life expectancy for White people was 78.8 years, compared to 74.7 years for Black people.

The racial gap in health, measured by life expectancy at birth, has shrunk but persisted. At the beginning of the twentieth century the gap in life expectancy was driven more by infant mortality;¹⁵ by the end of the twentieth century, the gap was driven by chronic disease at older ages, due in large part to worse environmental conditions in Black neighborhoods, lower income, and the stress caused by racist treatment.¹⁶

Political inequality today

There are a number of ways the U.S. political system reduces or denies Black citizens political power, some blatant and some subtle. For example:

• Racial gerrymandering, which means either concentrating Black voters in a small number of districts or drawing districts to divide the Black vote, diluting Black communities’ electoral influence.¹⁷
• No day off for voting and lack of early voting. Since most Black people work for hourly wages, taking time off may not be an option. In a 2018 poll, it was found that 16 percent of Black people reported that they couldn’t get time off from work in order to vote, as compared to 8 percent of White people who had the same complaint.¹⁸
• Felony disenfranchisement. As of November 2020, 1 in 16 Black people nationwide have lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction, compared to only 1 in 59 non-Black people.¹⁹
• The overall importance of money in American politics which disadvantages groups with less of it: Black and Hispanic populations with low incomes cannot contribute as much to campaigns as those with high incomes, and this means cash-strapped politicians will listen more to the policy priorities of the latter.

Even if barriers to voting were entirely eliminated, the structure of the national political system heavily favors rural White regions over more diverse urban areas. In the Senate, for example, Wyoming, which is 92% White and has a population of less than 600,000, has the same level of representation as California, with its far more racially diverse population of nearly 40 million people. This imbalance leads to policies and appointments (such as Supreme Court justices) that disproportionately represent the views and interests of rural White people.

The Electoral College can also work to the advantage of White voters in states which suppress Black voter turnout because the number of Electoral College delegates is dependent on the number of seats (both congressional and Senate seats), not the number of voters. This fact also helps to explain why efforts to abolish the Electoral College have always been vehemently resisted by White politicians from Southern states.

Exercise 7 Education and incarceration

In a recent paper, sociologists found racial differences in how education level affects one’s likelihood of incarceration: there is a proportionately steeper decline in incarceration rates for White people once they have had some college education compared to Black people. They also found that this ratio increased substantially for both racial groups starting in the early 1990s.

Offer an explanation for why obtaining some college education seems to have a bigger effect on White people’s chances of incarceration compared to Black people. Why do you think the effect of education has been increasing for both groups over time?