Voting Rights

Public Health & Community Resources

Income & Wealth Inequality

Violence & Policing

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the most famous achievements of 20th century civil rights activism. But in 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated a key part of the law. Now, states with long histories of racial inequality can make changes to their election laws without federal approval.Since then, many of those states have enacted changes, including strict voter ID laws while restricting access to IDs, which critics say disproportionately affect citizens of color. IDs are much harder to obtain for the elderly, the poor, and youth voters. A long-term study on Black youth found that voter ID laws were applied disproportionately across racial groups, with people of color being asked to produce ID far more often. According to the study, “The uneven application of these laws suggests that polling-place workers exercise a high level of discretion in requesting ID from potential voters. Unless all polling places — and all poll workers — apply voting laws in a consistent manner, the very existence of identification laws implies that young people of color are more likely than white youth to be asked to prove their identify before being allowed to vote."Black communities have limited access not just to wealth and political power, but also to natural resources that wealthy communities take for granted — resources like clean water, clean air , and safe public spaces . Minority communities are more frequently subject to environmental public health risks than more affluent or white communities. Black communities are also more likely to be overlooked when they complain about conditions.The ongoing Flint Water Crisis , where an entire city was exposed to poisonous lead-contaminated water, is only one example of this contrast. The city of Flint is majority Black and overwhelmingly poor — more than 40% of residents live below the poverty line. After the city made its switch to the lead-contaminated water source, residents who complained of tainted water supply were repeatedly brushed off by local officials. It took over a year and the involvement of national media for officials to acknowledge the unsafe conditions.In the presidential debate on January 17, Hillary Clinton pointed out the racist roots behind the crisis going unaddressed for so long. “I'll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would have been action,” she said. Which leads us to...The average Black household has fewer resources than the average white one — and the disparity is only getting worse. In 2015, the median wealth of white households was 16 times that of Black households, according to a study from Brandeis University and public policy organization Demos. The numbers are stark — while the typical white household has more than $100,000 in assets, the typical Black household has just over $7,000. Lack of homeownership and limited access to higher education play a large part: the study cites discriminatory lending practices, lack of enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in housing, and continued educational segregation as key factors behind those disparities.This lack of assets means that Black families can be hit harder and more lastingly by economic downturns. The Pew Research Center found that during recession recovery between 2010 to 2013, while white households increased their median wealth by 2%, Black households’ wealth continued to drop by more than 33%.Of all the issues, the subject of police violence has become the become most associated with modern civil rights activism. Black Americans are disproportionately subject to violence — in some cases lethal violence — by police officers. Over the past few years, the Black Lives Matter movement has protested the deaths of many young Black men and women at the hands of police officers.In 2012, the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager shot to death by a neighborhood watchman, began a discussion about race that evolved into a national movement. Protests around the highly publicized deaths of other Black men and women, such as Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and Eric Garner, helped propel the issue into the mainstream as the Black Lives Matter movement, a national push to address the role of racial profiling in the American justice system.The movement has since grown to the point that it has become a major issue in national politics. In last month’s presidential debates, both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican Rand Paul took strong stands on inequality in our policing.