Black and White Inequality in All 50 States

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1965 made great strides toward racial equality. However, this legislation — ending decades of government-sponsored racial oppression and intended to reverse the effects of hundreds of years of slavery — by no means resolved racial inequality in the United States.

Racial differences in the United States are prevalent regardless of geography. While social and economic gaps are wider in some states than in others, the gaps exist across all areas, and we were unable to identify any states where black Americans are better off than white residents. For this reason, we expanded last year’s list of the 10 worst states for black Americans to include all 50 states.

Across virtually all social and economic measures, there are wide racial disparities. Compared to white people in the United States, African Americans are considerably less likely to own their homes, twice as likely to be unemployed, nearly three times as likely to live in poverty, and five times more likely to go to prison.

Click here to see how racial disparities exist in every state.

Click here to see our methodology.

SEGREGATION

According to Economic Policy Institute Research Associate Richard Rothstein, these disparities are entirely attributable to residential segregation, which in turn is attributable to deliberate, racially conscious, government policies implemented over the course of the 20th century. During this time, the Federal Housing Administration financed thousands of suburban development projects with the explicit requirement that no homes be sold to African Americans.

For Rothstein, the existence of racial segregation today is “a constitutional violation, and it requires a remedy.”

Housing equity is the single largest source of middle class family wealth. The tens of thousands of homes bought by white families in the 50’s and 60’s in many cases have tripled in value. Because this wealth is frequently transmitted from one generation to another, Rothstein explained, economic mobility, especially for black Americans, is extremely limited. The removal of such policies was effectively an empty promise, he added, because very few African Americans could afford to live in the neighborhoods after the equity gains.

Today, 71.0% of white individuals and families own their homes, in stark contrast with the black homeownership rate of 41.2%. In some states, the gap is considerably larger. In North Dakota, fewer than one in 10 black householders own their homes, while more than two in every three white individuals and families own the homes in which they live. The gap between the white and black homeownership rates in Maine, at 72.6% and 13.3%, is even wider.

This troubling ownership disparity speaks to the similarly wide racial wealth gap. Black families in the United States have only 5% as much wealth as white families.