Abstract
Systemic and deep-rooted racism has considerably contributed to the durability of race-based gaps that can be explicitly demonstrated in various socioeconomic indicators, including employment, family income, poverty, criminal involvement and justice, and healthcare delivery. Moreover, recent incidents of police brutality against the Black, especially George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s tragic deaths, have repeatedly come under the national spotlight. This paper aims to research racial inequality and hostile police attitudes towards the black population in the United States.
Inequalities
In the US, the Black still experience the highest pressure caused by racial disparities in all fields of human activity. In particular, due to the colossal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social wellbeing, this issue has become the most noticeable and actual in the healthcare sector. According to APM Research Lab Staff (2020), while mortality among White Americans comprises around 61.7 deaths per 100,000, Black Americans’ mortality achieves 114.3 per 100,000, the highest factual COVID-19 mortality. Such an alarming situation primarily stems from restricted healthcare access, inferior quality medical service, and widespread physician biases towards the black population. Besides, Garcia et al. (2020) indicate that considering the Black’s unemployment and overrepresentation in low-income jobs, this minority is less likely than Whites to have employer-delivered health insurance. For example, as of April 2020, 1 in 2.5 Black adults were temporally furloughed or unemployed (Lee et al., 2020). As a result, many black Americans remain uninsured, sometimes, during their whole life, which creates significant barriers to accessing medical care.
Police Brutality
The situation related to police brutality and the justice system is also highly complicated. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it has been revealed that 1 in 1,000 Black men and children may be murdered by the police during their lives (Lee et al., 2020). Furthermore, the likelihood for Black males to be killed by police is 2.5 times more than white males (Lee et al., 2020). Regarding criminal justice, one research revealed that people with the most distinguishing Afrocentric traits obtained more severe sentences than their counterparts with less notable Afrocentric features (“Understanding implicit bias,” n.d.). Therefore, these statistics exhibit acute problems stipulated by racial disparity that still exists at the national level.
References
APM Research Lab Staff. (2020). The color of Coronavirus: Covid-19 deaths by race and ethnicity in the US. APM Research Lab. Web.
Garcia, M. A., Homan, P. A., García, C., & Brown, T. H. (2020). The color of COVID-19: Structural racism and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on older Black and Latinx adults. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 20(20), 1–6. Web.
Lee, H., Esposito, M., Edwards, F., Chun, Y., & Grinstein-Weiss, M. (2020). The demographics of racial inequality in the United States. The Brookings Institution. Web.
Understanding implicit bias. (n.d.). The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Web.