Understanding racism and inequality in America

By Washington Post Staff

June 8, 2020

The video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis triggered protests across the United States and brought renewed attention to ongoing concerns about systemic racism in the criminal justice system. The slaying, in the midst of a pandemic that has disproportionately infected and killed black people, has exposed long-standing racial inequities in every aspect of American life.

To help provide context to the issues driving the debate among people attending marches and rallies or those having more quiet conversations with their families and friends, we’ve compiled deeply reported stories, videos, photo essays, audio and graphics on black history, progress, inequality and injustice.

What books, videos, films, or other resources have helped you understand systemic racism in the U.S.? Let us know in the comments and sign up for the About US newsletter for candid conversations about identity in 21st-century America.

(Joan Wong for The Washington Post/Images from New York Public Library)

How is slavery taught in America? Schools struggle to teach it well.

For the 50 million students attending public school in America, how they are taught about America’s history of slavery and its deprivations is as fundamental as how they are taught about the Declaration of Independence and its core assertion that “all men are created equal.” A deep understanding of one without a deep understanding of the other is to not know America at all. Read more.

2019 | By Joe Heim

Descendants

Even after abolition, the black experience has fallen victim to campaigns that obscure the darkest parts of the American story, diminishing African Americans’ connections to their pasts and warping the collective memory of the nation’s history.

But in recent years, black Americans have pursued new efforts to uncover their stories. From exploring sunken vessels of the Middle Passage to reconstructing museum exhibits that chronicle slavery, African Americans are breaking down the barriers that separate them from their ancestors and are reconnecting with a lineage once lost. Watch the video series.

2020 | By Nicole Ellis

‘Historically Black’

An eight-episode audio miniseries that brings black history to life through personal heirlooms and their stories. Listen to the series.

2016 | Hosted by Keegan-Michael Key, Roxane Gay, Issa Rae and “Another Round” hosts Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton

(Charles Gorry/AP)

The four days in 1968 that reshaped D.C.

The area around 14th and U streets NW was known as the Black Broadway, a world of black theaters and jazz clubs, black lawyers and pharmacists, black newspapers and the local offices for two major civil rights groups. During the riots, the stores north of U Street, where blacks felt exploited, became targets. They were stripped clean, up the 14th Street hill to Columbia Heights.

More than 275 businesses along 14th Street were damaged by fires and looting, and half of those were total losses. “There was a confluence of anger and hurt” about King’s death, said Charlene Drew Jarvis, a former D.C. councilwoman. Read more.

2018 | By Ann Gerhart, Armand Emamdjomeh, Lauren Tierney, Danielle Rindler and Michael E. Ruane

(Jahi Chikwendiu)

Visualizing racism

Racism hurts. A growing body of research shows it negatively affects the mental and physical health of its victims. Like any burden, it wears the bearer down. Sometimes it makes you feel like lashing out. Sometimes it makes you feel as if you are drowning.

In what surely is not a coincidence, racism is rising along with diversity. Read more.

2019 | Introduction by Eugene Robinson

(Zack Wittman for The Washington Post)

Rosewood massacre reparations: How a scholarship impacted descendants of an act of racial terror

What can a scholarship do to address a historic injustice? For Morgan Carter and her family, reparations changed the frame of a tortured past. The Rosewood story no longer ends with a scared boy running through the woods; it continues with graduation robes and diplomas, potentially the family’s first doctorate. Read more.

2020 | By Robert Samuels

How the nation’s growing racial diversity is changing our schools

More students attend schools with children of different races than ever before, a Washington Post analysis has found. Over the past couple of decades, integration took hold across the country in smaller school districts whose student bodies had been predominantly white.

But in many big cities and across the South, students remain in districts that are deeply segregated. Read more.

2019 | By Kate Rabinowitz, Armand Emamdjomeh and Laura Meckler

(Allison V. Smith for The Washington Post)

Black Americans are deeply pessimistic about the country under Trump

President Trump made a stark appeal to black Americans during the 2016 election when he asked, “What have you got to lose?” Three years later, black Americans have rendered their verdict on his presidency with a deeply pessimistic assessment of their place in the United States under a leader seen by an overwhelming majority as racist.

The findings come from a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans nationwide, which reveals fears about whether their children will have a fair shot to succeed and a belief that white Americans don’t fully appreciate the discrimination that black people experience.

While personally optimistic about their own lives, black Americans today offer a bleaker view about their community as a whole. Read more.

2020 | By Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Vanessa Williams, Dan Balz and Scott Clement

Segregation in U.S. cities

Some 50 years ago, policies like the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act were enacted to increase integration, promote equity, combat discrimination and dismantle the lingering legacy of Jim Crow laws. But a Washington Post analysis shows that some cities remain deeply segregated — even as the country itself becomes more diverse. Read more.

2018 | By Aaron Williams and Armand Emamdjomeh

What we’ve learned about police shootings 5 years after Ferguson

Compared to their numbers in the overall population, an unarmed black man is about four times more likely to be killed by police than an unarmed white man. Read more. Search The Post’s police shooting database.

2019 | By Joe Fox, Adrian Blanco, Jennifer Jenkins, Julie Tate and Wesley Lowery

(Yoon S. Byun for the Washington Post)

Murder with impunity: An unequal justice

In the past decade, police in 52 of the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in nearly 26,000 killings, according to a Washington Post analysis of homicide arrest data. In more than 18,600 of those cases, the victim was black. Those victims, who accounted for the majority of homicides, were the least likely of any racial group to have their killings result in an arrest. Read more.

2018 | By Wesley Lowery, Kimbriell Kelly and Steven Rich

In urban areas, police are consistently much whiter than the people they serve

As police engage with protesters in cities across the United States, many major police forces are still much whiter than the communities where they work. Decades of reform have made police less white, but it has not been enough to keep pace with the changing demographics of the country.

This widening racial gap has left very few police forces that resemble the people they serve, which experts say can hinder community relations and affect crime rates. Read more.

2020 | By Dan Keating and Kevin Uhrmacher

(Erin K. Robinson for The Washington Post)

Obama’s legacy

Barack Obama’s watershed 2008 election and the presidency that followed profoundly altered the aesthetics of American democracy, transforming the Founding Fathers’ narrow vision of politics and citizenship into something more expansive and more elegant. The American presidency suddenly looked very different, and for a moment America felt different, too.

The Obama victory helped fulfill one of the great ambitions of the civil rights struggle by showcasing the ability of extraordinarily talented black Americans to lead and excel in all facets of American life. Read more and explore a virtual museum of Obama’s presidency.

2016 | By Peniel Joseph

(Michael A. McCoy)

The anti-racist revelations of Ibram X. Kendi

In Kendi’s analysis, everyone, every day, through action or inaction, speech or silence, is choosing in the moment to be racist or anti-racist. It follows, then, that those identities are fluid, and racism is not a fixed character flaw. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” he writes. Read more.

2019 | By David Montgomery

Tour through the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Underground, a stark path winds chronologically and unflinchingly from slavery through civil rights and beyond. Aboveground, bold, busy galleries celebrate some of the cultural contributions African Americans have made to the country and the world.

“It’s as sobering as it is triumphant,” said Michelle Wilkinson, one of the museum’s 18 curators. “You don’t get to leave with only one feeling.” Tour the museum in an interactive graphic.

2016 | By Aaron Steckelberg, Bonnie Berkowitz and Denise Lu

Redefining the word

Following several incidents involving players using the n-word in 2014, the National Football League instructed game officials to penalize players who used the word on the field of play. The policy, though, was widely criticized as being heavy-handed and out of touch. As the league wrestled with the issue, a team of Washington Post journalists examined the history of this singular American word, its spread through popular culture and its place in the vernacular today. Read more from The N-Word Project.

2014 | By Dave Sheinin and Krissah Thompson