Return to Talking Points>>

African Americans and Opportunity

From The State of Opportunity in America Report

The Opportunity Agenda has released The State of Opportunity in America, the first national report to measure how opportunity is faring in the United States.  The report assesses the level of opportunity for all in our nation, with special attention to African Americans and other groups who have often been denied full opportunity in the United States.

American opportunity means that everyone should have a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential.  Ensuring that fair chance requires equal treatment, economic security and mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after misfortune or missteps, and a sense of shared responsibility for each other as neighbors and fellow Americans.  The report assesses opportunity along each of these core American values and offers solutions to eliminate barriers so that everyone in our country has the chance to live the American Dream.

The report finds that, despite some areas of progress, opportunity is at risk for all Americans.  The traditional steppingstones to opportunity—an affordable home, a college education, a decent job at a living wage, access to quality health care, and economic security—are moving farther out of reach for everyday Americans.  Findings and recommendations of particular relevance to African Americans include the following:

Opportunity for African Americans has expanded in certain areas.

• African-American women have experienced dramatic increases in college enrollment.  Rates of matriculation in this group have nearly quadrupled over the past 35 years.  Enrollment for African-American men has, however, been stagnant in recent years.¹
• Although racial disparities in high school dropout rates persist, African Americans have narrowed the gap with whites in high school degree attainment.²

But African Americans continue to face multiple barriers, at rates much higher than the national average.  Many of these barriers are increasing and cannot be overcome through hard work and perseverance alone.

• Over one-third of African-American children live in poverty today—an increase of more than 10% since 2000.³
• Although the proportion of African Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods has declined over the last three decades, the racial gap in economic segregation has widened.  In 1960, low-income African-American families were 3.8 times more likely than poor white families to live in high-poverty neighborhoods with limited resources; by 2000 they were 7.3 times more likely to live in those areas.⁴  
• African Americans now hold more than 9,000 elected offices.  But the number of African Americans in Congress has not increased substantially since 1993, and they remain vastly underrepresented among elected officials, relative to their proportion in the population.⁵
• After years of gradual gains, minority employment in the nation’s print newsrooms has declined since 2000.  An estimated 600 newspapers employ no minority reporters, even though more than 40 of those papers serve communities that are at least one-third minority, and five serve communities that are majority nonwhite.⁶

Discrimination based on race persists, stifling the opportunity of millions of Americans.

• A 2000 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study found that whites were favored over similarly qualified African Americans 22% of the time in rental housing and 17% of the time in housing sales.⁷
• In a 2003 study, temporary employment agencies in California selected less-qualified white applicants nearly three times as often as better-qualified African-American applicants.⁸
• A study that assessed whether a criminal record would damage job chances found that employers were more likely to call back white applicants with criminal records than African Americans without criminal records.⁹
• A Boston Federal Reserve Bank study in 1990 found that the conventional mortgage loan rejection rate for African-American applicants in the Boston area was 82 percent higher than for white applicants with the same qualifications.  More recent studies using a range of controls have yielded similar findings.¹⁰
• In 2000, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 71% of crack cocaine users were white, but 84% of those arrested for crack possession were African American.¹¹ 
• Unequal law enforcement remains a problem in many places.  Data from the Los Angeles Police Department reveal that from July to November 2002, African-American drivers were three times more likely than whites to be asked to step out of their cars.  They were also more likely to be patted down and body searched.¹²

Bold action by our government and national institutions is needed to expand opportunity for all.  The report urges our nation’s leaders to:

• Assess the impact of public policies on all dimensions of opportunity, by requiring Opportunity Impact Statements for all publicly funded projects. 
• Train Americans to adapt to a global economy, evolving technology, and an increasingly diverse population—with particular attention to groups of Americans who face the steepest barriers to opportunity.
• Modernize safety net programs that help people meet their basic needs and become economically secure.
• Renew a commitment to human rights in the United States, by vigorously enforcing existing civil rights laws and implementing a new generation of human rights laws.
• Prioritize crime prevention and rehabilitation over incarceration.

Return to Talking Points>>

End Notes

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, Table A-5, “The Population 14 to 24 Years Old by High School Graduate Status, College Enrollment, Attainment, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: October 1967 to 2002,” www.census.gov/population (3 August 2005).
2. D. Losen and J. Wald, “Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis in California,” March 2005, www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu (14 October 2005).
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census 2005.
4. Poverty and Race Research Action Council analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, with the assistance of Nancy A. Denton and Bridget J. Anderson, 2005.
5. D.A. Bositis, Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary, 2001, 2003, www.jointcenter.org/publications1/publication-PDFs/BEO-pdfs/2001-BEO.pdf (23 July 2005); Congressional Research Service, Membership of the 109th Congress: A Profile, May 2005, http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/49078.pdf (15 August 2005).
6. B. Dedman and S.K. Doig, “Newsroom Diversity has Passed its Peak at Most Newspapers, 1990-2005 Study Shows,” June 2005, http://powerreporting.com/knight (10 August 2005); American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Newsroom Employment Census,” April 2004, http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=1138 (19 July 2005).
7. M. Turner et al., Discrimination in Metropolitan Housing Markets: National Results from Phase 1 of HDS 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2002).
8. J. Bussey and J. Trasvina, “Racial Preferences: The Treatment of White and African American Job Applicants by Temporary Employment Agencies in California,” December 2003, www.impactfund.org (13 August 2005).
9. D. Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology Vol.108, no.5 (2003): 937-75.
10. A.H. Munnell, L.E. Browne, J. McEneaney, and G.M.B. Tootell, “Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data,” American Economic Review 86, no. 1 (1996): 25-53; A.L. Ross and J. Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
11. Amnesty International, U.S. Domestic Human Rights Program, Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2004).
12. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Wrong Then, Wrong Now: Racial Profiling Before and After September 11, 2001, www.lccr.org (30 September 2005); U.S. General Accounting Office, Better Targeting of Passengers for Personal Searches Could Produce Better Results (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 2000).