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No, the police kill more whites than minorities every year. There are also no laws institutionalized that target minorities

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Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 639 civilians having been shot, 85 of whom were Black, as of August 28, 2023. In 2022, there were 1,097 fatal police shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 5.8 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and May 2023.

Police brutality in the U.S.

In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police brutality has become a hot button issue in the United States. The number of homicides committed by police in the United States is often compared to those in countries such as England, where the number is significantly lower.

Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against police brutality in the U.S. by organizing "die-ins", marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police.

While Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.

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People shot to death by U.S. police, by race 2023 | Statista

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The trend of fatal police shootings seems to only be increasing in the U.S., with a total 639 civilians shot to death by police as of August 28, 2023.

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Biden wants to ease racial discrimination.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/920385802/biden-vows-to-ease-racial-divisions-heres-his-record

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Yes, in America there is still occuring racism towards minorities. I personally think that this doesn't just applies to America but to everywhere else on the world.

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Yes, Biden plans to ease racial tension

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Joe Biden says he's running for president to ease the racial divisions of our time.

He says he resolved to run after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Pledging to recover "the soul of America" from the polarizing Trump era, the 77-year-old white man won the Democratic nomination with the endorsements of many Black lawmakers and strong backing from Black voters. He has a unique place in American politics, both for serving as the running mate of the first Black president, and for choosing as his own running mate the first woman of color on a national ticket.

In September's presidential debate, he called President Trump a "racist" who uses "dog-whistle" language.

Trump, who insisted in the same debate that racial sensitivity training is itself "racist," launched his campaign in 2015 with an attack on Mexicans as "rapists," his way of promoting the immigration policies he has pursued ever since. He called for banning Muslims from entering the United States, told American lawmakers who are not white to "go back" where they came from, and defended Confederate statues.

Yet in the debate, Trump managed to question his opponent's views on race by digging into Biden's past.

"You did a crime bill, 1994, where you call them super predators - African-Americans are super predators - and they've never forgotten it," Trump said. The legislation said no such thing; it was Hillary Clinton who used the phrase "super predators" in the 1990s, and later apologized. But Biden was an architect of crime legislation in 1994, widely criticized today for disproportionate harm to people of color.

It's part of a record on race that is as long as Biden's half-century political career.

Elected to the Senate at the youngest possible age and now seeking to become the oldest president, he has witnessed - and at times influenced - decades of American social change. He has endured long enough that he is still on the stage to see the long-term results of his actions, and sometimes to receive the judgment of history.
'Somebody give me a sign'
Biden came of age in the protest-filled 1960s in Wilmington, Del. Its neighborhoods, schools and businesses were effectively segregated. As a young man he had a formative experience, traveling from his family's white neighborhood to a Black area to work as a lifeguard at a swimming pool. It's now named after him.

As a young lawyer with political ambitions, he sometimes joined civil rights protests. He would later be criticized for exaggerating his involvement, and in an NBC event this month he was careful to downplay it. "No great shakes," he said. "But that's how I got involved with politics."

The kind of role he played comes through in the stories of Bebe Coker, an activist affiliated with the NAACP, who befriended him in the early 1970s. She recalls him driving up to a protest, though "he never had his own protest sign," and had to borrow one.

He deepened his connection to the Black community with visits to Delaware State College (now a university), a historically Black institution. Tony Allen, a former Biden speechwriter who is now the university president, says Biden "spent a lot of time here in the early years of his political career just engaging with faculty, staff and students. ... He wanted to get to know us and make sure that we knew him."

Biden's visits appear to be what he was referring to when, in a 2019 campaign speech, he declared that "I got started" at Delaware State. A conservative news outlet later used the remark to suggest Biden had claimed that he attended the school. Trump turned that into a taunt in the September debate: "You forgot the name of your college," the president said.
'Can he be against the Constitution?'
Biden's early interest in diversity did not prevent him from parting ways with the mainstream civil rights movement on a major issue. After his election to the Senate in 1972, he became a critic of desegregating schools through busing.

The Supreme Court had outlawed segregated schools with its Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. The struggle to enforce it started in the Deep South, and later moved north - where schools weren't legally segregated but neighborhoods, and thus neighborhood schools, were effectively so.

Starting in the 1970s, judges ordered busing as a remedy, sending Black students to white-dominated schools, and sometimes the reverse. Historian Matthew Delmont, author of Why Busing Failed, says white residents resisted even in cities known for liberal politics. "It was a classic liberal position to say, 'I'm in favor of school integration in Little Rock or Montgomery and Selma, but not so much in Boston, Chicago, New York or Wilmington.' "

Delmont says some white parents objected out of overt racism. Others knew historically Black and Latino schools were starved for resources.

Biden became a leader among liberal lawmakers who tried for years to craft legislation limiting judicial authority to order busing. He even talked of amending the Constitution. He said busing wasn't working, and liberals should admit this even if it aligned them uncomfortably with "the racists" who resisted integration in the South. "There is academic ferment against it," he said in a 1975 NPR interview. "There are young Blacks and young white leaders against it. There is social unrest which highlights it."

His stance drew criticism from the only Black senator at the time, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. "He can be against busing," Brooke said, "but can he be against the Constitution?"

Studies eventually showed busing helped Black students without harming white students. But it never grew popular among white voters, and the Biden campaign referred NPR to Black supporters in Wilmington who also opposed it.

Delaware State President Allen, born in 1970, said he was bussed for years and is skeptical of the concept. "The notion that you can simply put a Black kid with a white kid, and somehow that will make the Black kid perform better, says something about what you think of the Black kid." Activist Coker says she was part of "a very small group that opposed busing." She urged Biden instead to support fair housing laws, since integrated neighborhoods would produce integrated schools. He did.

Historian Delmont says Biden was "right" to focus on housing, but "you can't say you're in favor of housing integration and not also be fighting for school integration at the same time."

In a presidential debate in 2019, Biden encountered a starkly critical perspective. Sen. Kamala Harris, his future running mate, said that as a child she had been part of the second class to integrate a school in California. She pressed Biden: "Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?"

Biden did not agree, insisting that he had only opposed federally mandated busing.

Today, integration by busing has largely faded. The Obama administration tried a more subtle approach: offering school districts grants to support their voluntary efforts at diversity. But many schools are still effectively segregated. Should Biden become president, he would confront some version of the problem that many cities faced in the 1970s.
'He did call it the Biden crime bill'
Before Trump attacked the 1994 crime bill, Biden's fellow Democrats did. In a primary debate, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey blamed it for increasing the number of Black people behind bars.

The legislation - formally known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act - came in an era of soaring crime nationwide; in 1990, for example, New York City set a record with more than 2,000 murders in a single year. By 1994, the crime rate was dropping but still high. And Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, declared that "my wife, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, me and everyone else in America are literally changing their lifestyle."

His legislative response was a collection of proposals by different authors, assembled in an election year and reflecting clashing approaches to crime. It included an assault weapons ban and money for social programs and crime prevention. Biden supported protections for women - known as the Violence Against Women Act - tucked into the crime bill.

President Bill Clinton favored federal funds to help cities hire more police. But Clinton also supported a populist provision called "three strikes you're out," directing that any person convicted of three crimes of certain kinds would be imprisoned for life. It was one of several punitive provisions. The bill created new federal crimes and expanded the number of crimes to which the death penalty applied.

Researcher Inimai Chettiar of the Justice Action Network says the bill did something more harmful: it offered billions to states to build more prisons.

Biden's defenders say he was skeptical of prison spending, but he took ownership of the legislation. "He did call it the Biden crime bill," Chettiar says.

Though one provision made it easier to release nonviolent drug offenders, the overall bill reinforced a longstanding trend toward incarceration. The U.S. prison population, already high in 1994, continued growing until it peaked at 1.6 million people in 2009.

Then as now, people imprisoned in America are disproportionately Black.

Crime fell dramatically in the generation after the bill's passage. But Chettiar, whose group pushes to reduce the prison population, credits factors other than prisons: economic growth, demographic change and better policing. Imprisonment, she says, may "increase that person's likelihood of committing another crime upon release. We don't do a very good job at all of helping people get back on their feet."

Biden's defenders note that many Black lawmakers supported the measure at the time. "I voted for that crime bill," says Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement boosted Biden days before his state's vital 2020 Democratic primary. But he acknowledges the bill had "unintended consequences."

In recent years a bipartisan consensus has concluded that imprisonment went too far. The Obama administration offered clemency to some offenders. In 2018, even Trump, better known for demanding the death penalty for five innocent Black suspects in New York, signed sentencing reduction legislation.

And while the 1994 crime bill offered states money to build prisons, Biden's 2020 crime plan proposes offering states money for alternatives to prison.
'Second place to a Black man'
On the surface, it can seem unusual that Biden would find a place in history as the running mate of the first Black president. In his early career, he built pragmatic relationships with Southern segregationists who were among the most powerful figures in the Senate. In 1991, he presided over a famously uncomfortable spectacle. He chaired the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, a Black man accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, a Black woman. Biden's all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee sat in judgment during the televised confrontation.

He later recruited Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman in the Senate, to join the committee. But as the years passed, he was criticized for jarring remarks on race, as in 2006 when he was recorded saying, "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking." He was even accused of patronizing Obama in 2007 by describing him as a "clean and bright and articulate" Black man.

When he accepted Obama's offer in 2008, perceptions of Biden changed.

His friend Bebe Coker, the NAACP activist in Wilmington, says she was moved by his decision because "I've never known any white male that would take second place to a Black man."

Black voters have voiced similar appreciation ever since. "Biden's loyalty to the country's first Black president," reported NPR's Asma Khalid from the 2020 South Carolina primary, was why older Black voters showed "such a willingness to forgive and defend him."

But his role on Obama's ticket was less to appeal to people of color than it was to reassure white people. As the New York Times put it earlier this year, "Obama was deeply worried about a backlash against a Black man at the top of the ticket, and believed that an older white running mate would ease fears in battleground states."

Biden was soon campaigning on his white working-class roots in Scranton, in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Obama and Biden twice won Pennsylvania, along with other Rust Belt states.

In 2020, Biden stands at the head of a diverse coalition, in an ever more diverse nation, and has chosen the first woman of color to be a vice presidential running mate. But part of his task is still reassuring the white majority.

Trump has appealed to "suburban housewives" using old racist code, claiming that under Biden, "low-income housing" would "destroy our suburbs." Biden tells white voters they have nothing to fear.

At a campaign stop in Johnstown, Pa., early this month, Biden made it explicit. "A lot of white, working-class Democrats thought we forgot them and didn't pay attention," he said. "I want them to know - I mean sincerely - that I'm going to be your president."
Jeevika Verma and Reena Advani produced and edited the broadcast versions of this story.

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Biden Vows To Ease Racial Divisions. Here's His Record

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Joe Biden says he's running for president to ease the racial divisions of our time. He says he resolved to run after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Pledging to recover "the soul of America" from the polarizing Trump era, the 77-year-old white man won the Democratic nomination with the endorsements of many Black lawmakers and strong backing from Black voters.

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Biden has a plan to "advance racial equity" in America. It is mostly focused on racial wealth and the lessening amount of jobless black Americans. (30 billions dollars devoted to small businesses and Low income families (which include blacks, latinos, and native americans) will be able to go to college tuition free.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Tuesday detailed a proposal to advance racial equity in the United States.

The plan is the fourth and final pillar of his "Build Back Better" agenda for economic recovery, crafted in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"[Biden] believes in an economy where every American enjoys a fair return for their work and an equal chance to get ahead. An economy more vibrant and more powerful precisely because everybody will be included in the deal. An economy where Black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Native American workers and families are finally welcomed as full participants," the campaign proposal says.

Biden outlined the plan Tuesday afternoon during remarks in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. Biden has significantly curtailed his campaign travel amid the pandemic, mostly staying in Delaware and next-door Pennsylvania.

The former vice president took questions from reporters following his remarks. He said he plans to name his vice presidential pick next week, and he expressed confidence in Democrats retaking the Senate.

Biden's new proposal seeks to address the country's racial wealth, opportunity and jobs gaps through what the campaign says would be a "historic effort to empower small business creation and expansion in economically disadvantaged areas - and particularly for Black, Latino, [Asian American and Pacific Islander] and Native American-owned businesses."

The 26-page plan centers around the bolstering of small business opportunities for minority communities, reforming " opportunity zones," investing in affordable housing and homeownership, and expanding access to resources for entrepreneurs of color.

Many of the policy proposals detailed Tuesday have been released earlier by the campaign and reflect the priorities of the other three pillars of his plan to revitalize the economy, including a major expansion of access to child care, a $2 trillion climate agenda and a boost to manufacturing through a "Buy American" proposal.

The racial equity plan would devote $30 billion - 10% of the $300 billion Biden aims to invest in research and development to stimulate the economy - to a new small business opportunity fund. The campaign suggests the investment would yield $150 billion in venture capital and low-interest business loans.

The housing plan includes an up-to-$15,000 refundable tax credit for first-time homebuyers to combat racial inequality in housing markets, along with an investment to construct 1.5 million homes and public housing units, and the elimination of housing regulations thought to perpetuate discrimination.

The plan also focuses on providing relief from student debt and would make public colleges and universities - and private historically Black schools - tuition-free for families with incomes under $125,000, something the campaign estimates would apply to about 90% of Black, Latino and Native American households.

Additionally, the plan reads: "As President, Biden will enact legislation to ensure that every person can go to community college for up to two years without having to pay tuition."

Biden also called on the Federal Reserve to add targeting persistent racial gaps in jobs, wages and wealth to its core mandate.

In response to the plan, President Trump's reelection campaign said in a statement that "no one should listen to a lecture on racial justice from Joe Biden," citing his past relationships with segregationist senators and various comments he's made.

Last week, during a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union, Biden controversially described Trump as the country's "first" racist president, which was first reported by the The Washington Post.

"No sitting president has ever done this," he said, mentioning that Trump often refers to the coronavirus as the " China virus." Biden said: "We've had racists, and they've existed. They've tried to get elected president. He's the first one that has."

Various American Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, enslaved Black people. Still more presidents held racist beliefs, including President Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal government. The Biden campaign later clarified to the Post that while there have been other racist presidents, Trump "stands out - especially in modern history - because he made running on racism and division his calling card and won."

Trump dismissed Biden's comments during a White House press briefing, citing his administration's efforts at passing criminal justice reform and the low unemployment rate for Black people before the pandemic.

"I've done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln," he said.

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Biden Details Proposal To Advance Racial Equity In America

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Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Tuesday detailed a proposal to advance racial equity in the United States. The plan is the fourth and final pillar of his "Build Back Better" agenda for economic recovery, crafted in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Trump questioned whether or not systemic racism is actually a problem in the United States, but proposed a four step policy that would help ease stress for nonwhite populations;
1. Increase federal support towards monitory owned small businesses
2. Increase funding that goes towards medical facilities that serve largely nonwhite populations
3. Expand the Opportunity Zones, a tax deferral for distressed communities
4. Encourage police departments to meet professional standard use of force and to pilot a program for social workers to work with police departments.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/916741084/trumps-and-biden-s-plans-for-racial-equality
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/11/874413290/trump-to-address-disparities-at-dallas-event

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Most republicans think that there isn't that much discrimination in America. It's "moderate" or "little" or "none at all." On the other hand, left leaning people think there is a lot.

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Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George's Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.

We wrote about these differing perceptions near the start of President Trump's term in 2017. Those perceptions have not changed that much, but we felt like these questions of discrimination are more relevant than ever, with Trump running for a second term and the country rethinking its racial policies in the wake of Floyd's death.

Here are some recent findings about perceptions of discrimination and perceptions of various groups in American society, based on recent polling from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project. The survey we relied on was administered after Floyd's death, from May 28 to June 3, but previous sets of polls from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape had similar results - except for shifts in responses to questions about black people and policing, as we explain below.

Perceptions of discrimination differ across party

An overwhelming majority of Democrats thought black and Muslim Americans face "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination in America today, as opposed to "a moderate amount," "little" or "none at all." Perceptions of discrimination against black people have surged among all groups, including Republicans, in the wake of Floyd's death. But the vast majority of Democrats thought that black people in America faced high levels of discrimination even before Floyd's death. About half of Democrats also thought women face a lot of discrimination.

Very few Democrats thought that Christians, men or white people face high levels of discrimination in America.

In contrast, only about half of Republicans thought that black people and Muslims face high levels of discrimination, and only about a quarter thought that women do. The majority of Republicans thought those groups face "a moderate amount," "little" or "no" discrimination at all.

Who faces discrimination?

Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination, by party identification

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. "Democrats" and "Republicans" refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

Generally, Republicans were less inclined to say that any group in America faces high levels of discrimination, at least according to this polling. But significantly more Republicans than Democrats thought there is discrimination against Christians and white people.

These views of discrimination line up closely with partisanship, among both voters and elected officials. Among voters, black Americans, Muslims and women are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates; Christians, men and white Americans are more likely to vote for Republicans.
[Related: Republicans And Democrats Increasingly Agree On The Protests ... But Not Why People Are Protesting]
At the political elite level, former President Obama's administration took a number of steps to reverse discrimination against black Americans and women. The Trump administration reversed some of the Obama policies aimed at blacks in particular, while adopting policies that the administration said created a more level playing field for Christians, men and native-born Americans, who are more likely than immigrants to be white.

There are similar numbers of people in both parties who thought that Jewish Americans face high levels of discrimination. What explains that? Well, Jewish Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. But Trump has cast himself as a defender of Jewish people in America and particularly in Israel, which may explain why a lot of Republicans also viewed Jewish Americans as facing high levels of discrimination.

In other words, it's likely that voters would see discrimination through partisan lenses anyway, but decisions by leading politicians are probably reinforcing those dynamics. In fact, partisans shift their support on policies to align with their party's leaders, and not the other way around.

There are partisan gaps in favorability

To get another assessment of feelings about different groups and how partisanship might shape those feelings, we looked at measures of favorability, where people are asked, "Do you have a very or somewhat favorable or very or somewhat unfavorable view of group X?" Although questions about group favorability are fraught because of " social desirability bias" - basically, even if someone feels intensely negative feelings towards, say, black or white people, they might not admit it to a pollster - we can still learn something by analyzing responses. We focused here on "very" and "somewhat" unfavorable views because we are assuming you must really dislike a group to admit this on a survey.

Nearly half of Democrats expressed unfavorable views about police and evangelicals. Unfavorable views of the police have substantially increased from polling before Floyd's death, but Democrats' unfavorable views of evangelicals were already very high and remain so. About a quarter of Democrats said they had unfavorable views of white Americans; a quarter said the same of undocumented immigrants, even though the Democratic Party is increasingly supportive of immigration and immigrants.

(Un)favorability is partisan

Percentage of respondents who have a unfavorable impression of each group, by party identification

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. "Democrats" and "Republicans" refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

In contrast, large shares of Republicans expressed unfavorable views of undocumented immigrants, LGBT Americans and Muslims. More than 20 percent of Republicans said that they had unfavorable views of black Americans and police, with the latter group having increased in unfavorability substantially since Floyd's death.

Younger and older Republicans diverge

On both perceptions of discrimination and favorability measures, Americans' views seem to be shaped more by partisanship than age, race or gender. So, Republicans - men and women - generally see discrimination in similar ways and view the same groups favorably or unfavorably. So do black and white Democrats. A helpful illustration of the partisan dynamics is that a greater share of Democratic men (44 percent) than Republican women (28 percent) thought that women in the U.S. face high levels of discrimination.

But there is a big GOP split on age. Republicans under the age of 45 were more likely to say that they saw high levels of discrimination than those over 45. And that cuts across the traditional divisions - younger Republicans saw more discrimination than older Republicans against blacks (a more Democratic group) and against whites (a more Republican group). In the wake of Floyd's death, a clear majority of Republicans under 45 thought there was a lot of discrimination in America against black people. The over-45 GOP cohort did not share that view.

Older Republicans were much more likely than younger Republicans to say that they had negative views of undocumented immigrants and Muslims.

More of the younger Republicans see discrimination

Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination, by age category

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3.

Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape

There were also some notable differences among Democrats. For example, Democrats under 45 were significantly more likely than those over 45 to say they had an unfavorable view of the police (54 percent compared to 38 percent). Black Democrats were more likely than white Democrats to have unfavorable views of the police (58 percent to 41 percent). Black and Hispanic Democrats were about twice as likely as white Democrats to view LGBT Americans unfavorably, and about 30 percent of both groups expressed unfavorable views of white Americans. And white Democrats, in particular, viewed evangelicals unfavorably (50 percent).

We should be careful not to overstate these identity-based divides. There are plenty of women in the Republican Party. There are plenty of non-religious Republicans. There are plenty of Christian Democrats. Also, it's not that the two parties are on different planets in terms of perceptions of discrimination - Republicans and Democrats agree that Muslims face more discrimination than Christians, and that black people face more discrimination than white people. Most Republicans and Democrats view Asian, black, Latino and white people favorably. (Or at least feel compelled to say so in a survey.)

But this also isn't a "both sides" situation - Democratic perceptions of discrimination line up more with the evidence than Republican perceptions. No candidate has recently run for president with a plan for banning Christians from entering the U.S. And by most measures, whatever discrimination they might face, Christians, men and white people remain fairly powerful in American society today, certainly more so than black people, Muslims and women.
[Related: Do You Know How Divided White And Black Americans Are On Racism?]
This data is important because it illustrates a serious identity-based disconnect at the heart of American politics. When social identities are threatened (real or imagined threats, often made salient by group leaders), individuals retreat to the safety of their in-groups, and react defensively with more negative feelings toward outside groups. And given the effectiveness of in-group retreating for political outcomes, there is little chance of this changing anytime soon, at least from political leaders who stand to gain the most from these identity-based fights.

The activation of social identities can have positive democratic outcomes, too. For instance, Trump's anti-Latino rhetoric led to increased political activity from Latinos with a stronger racial identity. And as we wrote about last week, strong racial identity among black Americans leads to collective voting to defend group interests. Moreover, if a sense of shared identity can be triggered, partisans can come together to prioritize national interests.

But so long as the parties remain largely distinct in terms of the group identities of their members - and how those members feel about other groups - ingroup and outgroup conflict is easily activated.

CORRECTION (June 17, 2020, 3:52 p.m.): An earlier version of a footnote in this article incorrectly said that the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey did not ask respondents whether Asians faced discrimination. Respondents were, in fact, asked whether Asians faced discrimination.

FiveThirtyEight Podcast: Views of Black Lives Matter have shifted. What happens next?

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There's A Huge Gap In How Republicans And Democrats See Discrimination

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Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George's Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.

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Biden called Trump a "racist" and that he will do his part by easing the racial divisions

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The killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and prompted many to take stock of the country's long history of racism toward Black people.

President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden reacted to the killing and the demonstrations in dramatically different ways, shining a light on how each has approached the complicated issue of race throughout their political careers.

Trump has consistently downplayed the role of racism in American life while simultaneously attacking protesters, making racist and xenophobic comments and claiming he's done more for Black people than any other president "with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln."

Biden has positioned himself as a crusader for racial justice who'll use the presidency to correct long-standing social inequities and restore the climate of relative tolerance that marked his two terms as vice president under President Obama. He's chosen as his vice presidential running mate California Sen. Kamala Harris, setting her up to become the first person of color and the first woman to hold that position if elected. At the Cleveland debate, he again vowed to stand up to racists - including Trump, as he put it.

Despite their differences, both candidates face an electorate that's somewhat doubtful that either can improve racial tensions. Only about a third of voters - 35% - had confidence that Trump could effectively handle race relations, according to a Pew Research poll conducted in June. Not quite half of respondents - 48% - felt confident that Biden would be effective on the issue.

President Trump

(Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images)

Trump claims he's done more to help African Americans than his predecessor, Obama, the nation's first Black president. He says he also comes out ahead of Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Acts of 1965.

"With African Americans, I'm doing very well," Trump told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan during an interview broadcast on HBO in early August.

"They had the best employment numbers they've ever had; they had the best job numbers they've ever had; they were making more money than they've ever made," he said. "We were all set until we got hit by China with the virus. ... We were becoming a very unified country."

Yet Trump often undercuts his self-praise.

At his first debate with Biden, the president dodged moderator Chris Wallace's repeated requests for him to unambiguously condemn armed white vigilantes who've shown up at anti-racism protests as well as white supremacists and other groups. Trump said, "Sure," then deflected. And when the name of a violent far-right group was mentioned, instead of distancing himself, Trump looked into the camera and said, "Proud Boys - stand back and stand by," adding that "somebody's got to do something" about antifascists "and the left."

Trump later claimed he didn't know the far-right group, but the Proud Boys took his words as a call to arms. Within hours, members of the group were celebrating Trump and have reportedly started selling "Proud Boys standing by" T-shirts.

Two days after the debate, the president sought to recast his remarks, telling Fox News' Sean Hannity that he condemns "all white supremacists," whom the FBI says represent the nation's greatest domestic terrorism threat.

The president also seems unaware of basic facts about Black Americans, such as their greater risk than whites of being killed by police, or the reality that despite historically low jobless figures for Black Americans pre-pandemic, the wealth gap between Black households and white ones is as wide under his administration as it was 30 years ago.

During his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which came after days of testimonials by Black speakers praising him, Trump sounded poetic when speaking about the pioneers and immigrants he said built the country. Yet he never mentioned that millions of enslaved Africans also toiled on American soil and were beaten, raped and separated from their families on auction blocks - or that their descendants have faced lynchings, segregation and voter suppression.

In an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward, Trump scoffed at the idea that his whiteness affords him privileges that people of color don't enjoy, according to a recording for Woodward's book "Rage."

Trump has been defensive, obtuse and vulgar when discussing racial inequities, white supremacist violence and his own stereotyping of Black people, Latinos, Muslims, Asians and immigrants from Central America as threats to public safety and health.

He falsely claimed at a vitriol-filled Duluth, Minn., rally that Biden would turn the state into a "refugee camp," and that Minnesota would be "overrun and destroyed."

The president also launched a xenophobic attack on U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim who came to the U.S. as a child and became an American citizen after fleeing civil war in Somalia and spending years in a refugee camp. Trump told the mostly white audience that Omar was trying to dictate how to run "our country," implying, as he's done before, that she doesn't belong in the U.S.

Trump has described some majority Black nations as "shithole" countries while suggesting, "We should have people from places like Norway." And within days of Harris being named Biden's vice presidential running mate, he perpetuated the false claim that Harris, who was born in Oakland to an Indian immigrant mother and Jamaican immigrant father, might not be eligible to serve as vice president.

He launched his political career by spreading similar racist innuendos falsely suggesting that Obama wasn't a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Trump acknowledged in the Axios interview that "the knee on the neck was a disgrace," referring to George Floyd's death as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for about eight minutes. The 46-year-old Black man's death set off months of peaceful protests and sometimes violent clashes with authorities.

But when asked what "systemic racism" means to him, he acted glib. "Does anybody really answer that question accurately?" he replied. "Does anybody really know?"

Trump insists that police violence is a major problem for white people. Black Americans are more than three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.

As for the Black Lives Matter movement, he calls the mostly peaceful activists "anarchists" and "Marxists" who never should've gained "respectability."

Even so, Trump has shown an openness to criminal justice reforms that would reduce the number of Black people in the nation's prisons, and his administration has taken steps to aid business development, job creation and educational programs in communities of color.

In 2018, Trump signed the First Step Act, the first major criminal justice reform law in more than a decade. The law reduced sentences for some prisoners who were given mandatory minimum sentences, and it funded programs to reduce recidivism by helping released prisoners transition back into society.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump signed into law in 2017 set up "opportunity zones" in more than 8,700 census tracts across the U.S. where the poverty rate is on average twice the nationwide rate of about 12%, and that includes many neighborhoods with high populations of people of color. Entrepreneurs and real estate developers who invest in these zones receive a capital gains tax break lasting seven years on the money they put into those projects, and if they hold onto those investments for at least a decade they pay no capital gains taxes at all.

Trump also signed a bipartisan bill in 2019 to renew $255 million in annual funding to historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that primarily serve students of color that was at risk of lapsing. Some schools would've faced deep budget cuts and layoffs if the funding hadn't been approved.

At the same time, Trump has frequently fueled hatred against migrants from Latin American countries by describing this population as infiltrated by dangerous criminals. He launched his 2016 campaign with a vow to build a wall along the U.S.- Mexico border.

His administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policies have led to migrant parents being separated from their children along the U.S.-Mexico border and asylum seekers being required to endure often dangerous conditions in Mexico while they wait for their asylum hearings in the U.S. The Trump administration has also slashed the number of refugees allowed to enter the country.

Joe Biden

Biden has staked his third presidential bid around the idea that Americans deserve straight talk from their leaders about the country's divisions, especially when it comes to the subject of race.

"The battle for the soul of this nation has been a constant push and pull for more than 240 years, a tug of war between the American ideal that we're all created equal and the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart," he said during a speech in Philadelphia in early June.

Biden speaks like a man who harbors no doubt that's he's pulling for the right side in that enduring tug of war. The reality has been, at times, more muddled.

As a candidate, he's promised to bring an end to the "selfishness and fear" ushered in by the Trump presidency, and he's said he won't exploit the country's racial wounds for political gain like his Republican opponent.

Black voters, especially those over 50, back the former vice president by wide margins over Trump. Many cite Biden's long-standing relationship with the Black community, his support for civil rights legislation and his service under Obama.

But throughout his five decades in politics, the 77-year-old has at times embodied the conflict between the nation's idealism and its treatment of people of color.

As a young lawmaker, he joined with segregationists in the 1970s to fight against court-ordered busing, at a time when Black students in cities like Boston risked being spat on and jeered with racial epithets on their way to newly integrated schools. And he's faced scrutiny among progressives and activists over his support for a 1994 crime bill that's been blamed for the mass incarceration of Black men.

Biden once described the Harvard-educated Obama as "clean" and "articulate" in one of many tone-deaf attempts to demonstrate his racial openness. His campaign recently had to clarify remarks he made to a group of Black and Latino journalists that suggesting that Latinos are a diverse community representing a broad range of political views, "unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions."

Despite his stumbles, Biden often appears emotional when describing how Black people's struggle for acceptance and equality has personally inspired him.

Although he hasn't been an outspoken champion of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans, he recently laid out plans to close the wealth gap between Black and white Americans and combat inequities in the criminal justice system, the economy, housing and other areas.

He has also promised to appoint the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Biden has also tried to shore up his somewhat softer support among Latinos by announcing a set of economic policies targeting that community, along with immigration reforms.

Biden plans to invest in programs that increase home ownership among families of color, including creating a new tax credit of up to $15,000 to help lower- and middle-income families buy their first home.

He also wants to create a $30-billion Small Business Opportunity Fund to help kick-start public-private developments in communities of color and fine-tune Trump's "Opportunity Zone" program to make it more effective at spurring economic development in qualifying low-income census tracts.

The former vice president says he'll eliminate state and local regulations, including racially discriminatory zoning ordinances, that make it harder for Black people and other people of color to buy or rent a home. And he'll direct more than $50 billion in venture capital funds to small businesses owned by Black entrepreneurs and other people of color. He plans to require the Federal Reserve to track and report data on racial disparities in the economy.

Biden has never been able to live down his support for the Clinton-era crime bill, but his criminal justice policies target racial inequities in policing, the courts and incarceration.

He's called for greater accountability for police officers who use deadly force and better training for officers. And he's vowed to eliminate mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes and the cash bail system, as well as end the practice of incarcerating people for drug use alone.

Biden's pitch to Latino voters includes promises to create a path to citizenship for the nation's 11 million immigrants in the country illegally as well as longtime refugees from countries devastated by natural disasters and civil unrest who are shielded under Temporary Protected Status.

He'd offer free tuition for Latino, Black and Native American students whose families make less than $125,000 a year at public colleges and universities, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and at other private educational institutions that serve populations of color. And his platform calls for forgiving all federal student loan debt related to undergraduate tuition at HBCUs and minority-serving institutions for debt holders earning $125,000 or less.

Biden also would direct the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of hate crimes, which have sharply surged during the Trump presidency.

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Trump and Biden couldn't be more different on the complicated issue of race

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The killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and prompted many to take stock of the country's long history of racism toward Black people. President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden reacted to the killing and the demonstrations in dramatically different ways, shining a light on how each has approached the complicated issue of race throughout their political careers.

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Biden wanted to strengthen minority owned  small businesses.
He allocated about $30 billion to support the small businesses.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/916741084/trumps-and-biden-s-plans-for-racial-equality

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I personally believe that there is still racism in place such as how white employers tend to callback those with more American names rather than those with Minority names, but I do not believe that it is that big of a deal when it comes to hot topics like police brutality or discrimination.

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Trump "repeatedly questioned" as to "whether systematic racism" exists in the US. He says that he's done more for Black americans than any other president (other than Abraham Lincoln).
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/916741084/trumps-and-biden-s-plans-for-racial-equality#trumpplan

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President Donald Trump on Friday said that while President Abraham Lincoln - who freed Black people from slavery during the Civil War while also saving the Union - did some good, the "end result" of the 16th president's actions are "always questionable."

Trump's bizarre comment about his fellow Republican came during an interview with Fox News' Harris Faulkner, in which the president said he has done more for the Black community than any other president, with the possible exception of Lincoln.

"So, I think I've done more for the Black community than any other president, and let's take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, cause he did good, although it's always questionable," Trump told Faulkner, who is Black.

"You know, in other words, the end result," Trump continued.

Faulker then interrupted Trump: "Well, we are free, Mr. President. He did pretty well."

Trump replied: "But we are free. You understand what I mean. So I'm gonna take a pass on Abe, Honest Abe, as we call him."

Trump then listed what he said were his actions to benefit Black Americans, including, "Criminal justice reform."

"Nobody else could have done it. I did it," he added.

"I didn't get a lot of notoriety, and the fact the people I did it for then go on television and thank everybody but me, and they needed me to get it done, and I got it done, and I got five or six Republican senators who had no interest in getting it done, and they were great, and we got it done. We did that."

Trump also mentioned his winning approval of long-term federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities.

Trump's interview came nearly three weeks after the death of a Black man, George Floyd, after a white Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes ignited protests nationwide, calls for reform of police departments and demands for the removal of symbols of the Confederacy from public places.

Trump earlier in the week rebuffed suggestions from military officials that 10 Army bases might have their names changed because they currently are named after generals in the Confederacy. All of the bases are in former Confederate states.

"Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!" Trump wrote in a tweet condemning the suggestion.

"My Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations," he wrote.

Lincoln was president when the Confederate states seceded from the United States in a doomed effort to save the institution of enslaving Black people.

Trump's first campaign rally since the coronavirus pandemic began spreading widely is scheduled for June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was the site of a 1921 massacre of hundreds of Blacks by a white mob. June 19 also is known as "Juneteenth," a holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S.

The president told Faulkner on Friday that the day of the rally was not chosen intentionally to coincide with Juneteenth but called it an "interesting" date and one of "celebration."

But Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has said that the selection of Tulsa on that day for the rally "isn't just a wink to white supremacists - he's throwing them a welcome home party."

Harris, who is Black, is considered a leading contender to become the running mate of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

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Trump suggests Lincoln's legacy is 'questionable,' brags about his own work for Black Americans

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President Donald Trump on Friday said that while President Abraham Lincoln - who freed Black people from slavery during the Civil War while also saving the Union - did some good, the "end result" of the 16th president's actions are "always questionable."

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Biden wants support minorities' business.

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Key priorities

Support minority-owned small businesses.

Increase homeownership among minority communities and combat housing discrimination.

Improve accessibility to affordable higher education and reduce student loan debt for minority students.

Read details of Biden's plans below.

Maintain low unemployment rates for Black Americans, as seen before the pandemic.

Strengthen minority-owned businesses.

Read details of Trump's plans below.
Biden's plans for racial equality

Biden has laid out a comprehensive plan to address racial disparities within the United States on issues ranging from health to policing, zeroing in on measures to advance economic equality, access to affordable housing, education and a fair criminal justice system.

Biden pledges to support minority-owned small businesses by allocating $30 billion - 10% of the $300 billion going toward research and development outlined in his jobs plan - specifically toward a Small Business Opportunity Fund, which would also leverage private investments. He also plans to invest $50 billion in venture capital specifically for Black and brown entrepreneurs, put $100 billion toward low-interest loans and provide educational and development opportunities for new entrepreneurs and students. Overall, he says, these investments through the fund will bring forward a gain of $150 billion.

Biden also advocates for reforming the current Opportunity Zone tax deferral passed under the Trump administration to help distressed communities, assigning the U.S. Department of Treasury to increase supervision over organizations receiving the benefit.

To boost homeownership within minority communities, Biden wants to create 1.5 million new homes and public housing units and provide up to $15,000 in tax credits for people buying their first homes. He also calls for an end to discriminatory housing policies, stressing the need to penalize financial institutions perpetuating such policies and outlining policies to strengthen renters' rights and provide more housing vouchers.

On education reform, Biden wants to expand student loan forgiveness and make public universities as well as private historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions tuition-free for students with household incomes under $125,000.

Trump's plans for racial equality

Trump has not outlined a broad policy plan to address racial inequity. Trump has repeatedly questioned whether systemic racism is a problem in the United States. He argues that his policies have helped Black Americans, in particular, often citing record low Black unemployment before the pandemic hit. Trump says his economic policies will help bring unemployment back to those record lows.

On June 11, Trump spoke about a four-step policy geared toward building "safety and opportunity and dignity." He highlighted a need for increased federal support toward minority-owned small businesses and addressed "health care disparities," saying more funding should go toward medical facilities that serve largely nonwhite populations.

Trump has also called for expanding Opportunity Zones, a tax deferral for distressed communities passed as part of the 2017 tax bill.
See more of the major presidential candidates' key policy agendas here. NPR White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe and political correspondent Asma Khalid contributed to this report.

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Trump's And Biden's Plans For Racial Equality

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Support minority-owned small businesses. Increase homeownership among minority communities and combat housing discrimination. Improve accessibility to affordable higher education and reduce student loan debt for minority students. Read details of Biden's plans below. Maintain low unemployment rates for Black Americans, as seen before the pandemic. Strengthen minority-owned businesses.

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I found an article that states both the pros and cons of affirmative action that I mostly agree with.

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Of course America still have issues with racism. Frankly, there is no way for any country to stop racism. Racism exists everywhere around the world. The only difference is the degree of racism.

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Affirmative actions should not exist because it is purely segregation. Segregating people by their race and making them fight against each other is just immoral. Since I am asian, I have to work WAY harder to get into the same college that a black person is applying to just because of my race. Why do i have to get a 1500 SAT to get a spot in a college while somebody black only needs to get a much lower score to be considered.

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Credit Credit Photo illustration by Joan Wong. Photographs by Ronghui Chen for The New York Times.

A high-profile lawsuit against Harvard is forcing students and their families to choose sides.

Credit Credit Photo illustration by Joan Wong. Photographs by Ronghui Chen for The New York Times.

By

Photographs by

For the purposes of this article, Alex Chen, an 18-year-old senior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, is the "typical Asian student." Alex has a 98 percent average at one of the city's elite public high schools, scored a 1,580 on the SAT and, as far as he knows, has earned the respect of his teachers. Alex is also the vice president of technology for the Bronx Science chapter of the National Honor Society, the director of graphics and marketing for TeenHacks L.I. ("the first hackathon for teens in Long Island"), a member of the cross-country team, the vice president of the school's painting club, the president of the Get Your Life Together club (visitors from various businesses come talk to students) and the senator for his homeroom. In his free time, he plays Pokémon and goes on long jogs through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. His parents, Qiao and Su, emigrated from China in the '90s and worked their way through commuter colleges in Queens. They live along with Alex's little brother in a modest apartment in outer Queens. In the specific yet ultimately abstracted and perhaps inhuman calculations particular to selective college admissions, Alex is a first-generation (considered a plus), middle-class (minus) Chinese-American (minus, arguably) with two college-educated parents (minus) from a major American city (minus) with aspirations to study either computer science (minus, given all the Asians who want to go into STEM disciplines) or political science (plus).

When I first met him in early August 2018, we struggled to find a time to meet up to talk about his thoughts on affirmative action and its effect on Asian-American students. Deep into the summer vacation before his last year of high school, Alex had been interning in the office of Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou while also completing a study on congressional legislators with a professor at New York University. There just was no time.

After Alex canceled our first agreed-upon date, I told him that in addition to writing for The New York Times Magazine, I was also writing a book, ran a small production company and had an 18-month-old daughter. And yet, despite these various jobs (as well as the fact that I wasn't on summer vacation), I could meet him on any day and at any time for however long he pleased. My flexible schedule wasn't a favor to him but simply a reflection of the life of a relatively productive adult.

"Well, that's you," Alex said, a bit scornfully.

We finally settled on a meeting in the financial district. Alex suggested a Dunkin' Donuts exactly one door down from his internship office. When I arrived, I saw that it had no tables or booths, just three stools pushed up against the front window. I was hungry and slightly irritated, so I texted him and said I'd meet him at a Cuban lunch counter nearby. He walked through the front door a moment later - thin, with short-cropped hair, a neatly tucked button-up shirt and creaseless pants. He had a look of mild agitation about him, one that never really subsided. We shook hands.

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Name: Alex Chen, 18.
Education: Yale University, class of 2023.
Photographed at Yale in New Haven, Conn.

He pulled up a spreadsheet on his phone with the names of 11 colleges listed in color-coded columns. "So, Binghamton and Rochester are the safeties, which is great, because I'd be totally thrilled to go to both. Carnegie Mellon and Rice are matches where I'm pretty sure I can get in. And these schools in red are my reaches." Yale, M.I.T., Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt and Brown.

"Would you really be happy going to Binghamton or Rochester?" I asked.

"Yes, because the value would be there for the price I'll end up paying. They're great schools and cheap."

"I see Harvard isn't on your list," I said. "Are you worried it'll be impossible because of ... you know."

"I'm applying to Yale."

"Sure," I said. "But Harvard is Harvard."

"Yes, and Yale is Yale," he said.

"Do you want to go to Yale?" I asked.

"Define 'want,' " he said.

It went on like this for a while. After a brief discussion about his internship and what it taught him about the importance of local political representation, I finally asked him how he felt about affirmative action.

"It's complicated," Alex said. "I understand why it exists and why it might be necessary to create the society we all want," he went on. "But I also understand there are ideas that make it seem like Asians aren't discriminated against at all."

"What ideas?" I asked.

He gave me a look that communicated his deep, and perhaps justified, frustration with me. These ideas, I gathered, had been implicit in every conversation Alex had ever had about college admissions, but they rarely found clear expression. "So how do you feel about affirmative action?" I asked again.

"I understand the thinking behind affirmative action, but I just wish the message wasn't that Asians are all so privileged and rich and buying their way into colleges," he said, referring to the perception that Asian parents in effect buy their kids' test scores through expensive preparation programs and private tutoring. "And I wish that it didn't mean that my work didn't count in the same way as other people's work."

This was an unsatisfying answer but not an uncommon one. In 2014, an organization with the cryptic name Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard College on behalf of Asian-American applicants who claimed they had been victims of discrimination and bias. In August 2018, the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the case, arguing against Harvard's motion to dismiss it and claiming that "Harvard has failed to prove that its use of race survives strict scrutiny." Following all the attention that action received, I began asking Asian kids across the country about affirmative action, which was widely seen to be the real issue.

The case, which after a lengthy trial last autumn is expected to be decided by Judge Allison D. Burroughs sometime in the coming months, has pushed many Asian-Americans into a spotlight they had eagerly been avoiding for the past 20 years. The students felt uneasy, and perhaps unworthy, discussing race, especially within a context where they were personally implicated. As such, many refused to go on the record for fear of saying something controversial. The opinions ranged from "We shouldn't be punished for doing well" to "We all need to sacrifice to make a better, more just society." Most of them said they had always known it would be harder for them to get into college, but only a few called this an injustice. There was nothing approaching a consensus, but they were, for the most part, extremely conflicted and embarrassed by the whole business.

Their internal conflict, however inchoate and strangled by euphemism, paled next to the angst of what I'll call the upwardly mobile Asian-American population - the sort of people who had attended Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford and who, in other circumstances, would have publicly and loudly supported any goal pursued in the name of diversity. Over the past year, I found myself constantly talking about the Harvard case with this cohort, many of them friends and colleagues, not only for journalistic reasons but also because it was always on our minds. These conversations usually started with perfunctory statements like "Listen, I know I'm not supposed to say this" or "This is a complicated issue," but they almost always ended with a surprisingly declarative conclusion.

"Look, I support Harvard's right to pursue the diversity they want," said one Asian-American who described herself as a "staunch supporter of affirmative action." "But of course they discriminate against Asian kids."

On the first day of the trial for Students for Fair Admissions (S.F.F.A.) v. the President and Fellows of Harvard College, which took place over three weeks in late 2018, a problem presented itself: It was almost impossible to figure out who or what, exactly, was on trial. In his opening statement, Adam K. Mortara, the lead attorney for S.F.F.A. and a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, declared, "The future of affirmative action is not on trial." Then he added, "Diversity and its benefits are not on trial." This came as news to the dozens of Asian-American activists who had traveled to Boston to support the lawsuit, as well as the gallery of reporters who piled into the stiff, unyielding press benches in Courtroom 17 of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston with assignments to cover "the affirmative-action trial."

A thin man sat in the back of the courtroom in a suit two sizes bigger than what's fashionable these days. Every now and then he would jot down something in a notebook and then return to watching dispassionately with his hands folded in his lap. This was Edward Blum, the 67-year-old president of S.F.F.A., and paradoxically enough, given that he is a white man with no direct connection to the school, the only person named on the side of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Harvard. Blum is not a lawyer or a politician, but he may be the most influential and effective opponent in the country of any progressive policy that tries to distinguish people by race and ethnicity. He exerts influence, in large part, because of his connections to wealthy conservative donors, but also from an indefatigable resolve to flood the legal system with lawsuits, some of which eventually make it to the Supreme Court.

In addition to S.F.F.A., Blum also heads the Project on Fair Representation, the litigation fund behind Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, the last major challenge to affirmative action to reach the Supreme Court, in which Abigail Fisher, a white woman, was one of two women claiming to have been rejected from a spot she deserved because of preferences given to people of color. On two separate occasions within the last decade, Blum and his attorneys argued that the University of Texas was placing too much weight on race in nonautomatic admissions. Blum lost this challenge in 2016, but he has also done quite a bit of winning: In 2013, he won a landmark decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by effectively ending federal oversight of elections. Blum would not be taking the stand in the Harvard case.

A sweeping elimination of affirmative action still requires the cooperation of the Supreme Court, which was responsible for another odd dynamic in the trial. A vast majority of the testimony and argumentation was about Asian-Americans, but the actual lawsuit unfolded in a way that didn't have much to do with Asians at all. The inevitability of an appeal, which would then raise the stakes, made the entire trial feel somewhat like an opening act. At the #DefendDiversity rally at the start of the trial, Jessica Tang, president of the Boston Teachers Union and a Harvard alumna, said that "Edward Blum is not a friend to Asian-Americans" and accused him of using Asian-Americans as pawns in a vile legal game. S.F.F.A. was making three broad claims:

One: Harvard's use of racial preferences far exceeded the Supreme Court's allowance of race as "one, nonpredominant factor in a system designed to consider each applicant as an individual," as Justice Anthony Kennedy described it in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. A landmark affirmative-action ruling, it involved the University of Michigan Law School and upheld the principle that race is only supposed to be a "plus" that is considered when two applicants are otherwise indistinguishable. In those instances, race can be a "tip" that allows a university to seek the diversity it desires.

Two: Harvard, by keeping black, Latino and Asian admissions rates at a relatively steady equilibrium, despite demographic changes in its applicant pool, had created a de facto quota system. Quotas have been illegal since the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the first major challenge to affirmative action in higher education.

Three: Harvard had not adequately explored race-neutral alternatives required by the legal parameters of affirmative action. This requirement was reaffirmed in Fisher v. University of Texas, allowing a school to consider an applicant's race only when "no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity."

Despite what Mortara said about affirmative action not being on trial, S.F.F.A. has been extremely forthright about its expectation that regardless of Burroughs's decision, it will eventually be arguing in front of the Supreme Court. Over the course of the past year, I asked Blum on a few occasions what he hoped to get out of all this. His stance never changed. His "mission," he told me again in August, is to remove race from college admissions: "We believe that a student's skin color or ethnic heritage should not be used to help or harm that student's prospects of being admitted to a college or university." When I asked if the ultimate goal, then, was to end racial preferences not only in college admissions but also in all parts of the law, Blum said: "Yes! Absolutely. I won't deny it."

To get to the Supreme Court, S.F.F.A. needed to justify the lawsuit both in the courtroom and to the public. According to Blum, Abigail Fisher, the daughter of a family friend, had suffered greatly from her years of national attention as a result of her case against the University of Texas. To avoid putting another young person through the same thing and to bring a fresh angle to the fight, Blum and his attorneys decided to represent an anonymous and amorphous group of plaintiffs. (Every request I made to talk to any of these unnamed persons was denied by S.F.F.A.'s attorneys.) They chose, instead, to build a case out of spreadsheets and statistical data obtained through pretrial discovery, which in turn set up something of a phantom showdown: Students were discussed almost entirely through the abstraction of test scores, grades and extracurricular accomplishments. In their opening and closing statements, the attorneys for S.F.F.A. went through charts and spreadsheets, many of which were centered on something called the "personal rating," a portion of Harvard's application review that judges traits like "courage," "openness to new ideas and people" and "effervescence."

Their charts showed that Asian-American applicants outperformed white applicants in academics and extracurriculars and lagged behind in athletics and legacy considerations. When it came to the personal rating, Asian applicants rated significantly worse. Harvard never convincingly explained or contested the disparity.

Harvard's defense, argued by Bill Lee, a 69-year-old Chinese-American attorney and a graduate of the class of 1972, was mostly predictable, if not entirely coherent. On one front, Harvard resorted to bureaucratic denial: It claimed that every piece of information, however damning, had to be placed within the context of the entire admissions process. And while Lee took great pains to detail how an application went through an initial reader and then an alumni interviewer and then a subcommittee and then the final 40-person committee, he never addressed the specifics of how decisions were made, except to say that the committee considered "the whole person." In the end, the only definitive, knowable thing about the admissions process was that race was said to be only one small part of an opaque process.

On the other front, Harvard and its allies went on an ideological offensive. The multicultural and empathetic vision of the country - represented on Harvard's side by lawyers of all races and a steady stream of Asian, black and Latino students who gave testimony about why they, despite less than perfect test scores and G.P.A.s, deserved to be on campus - would not be possible without the tireless efforts of places like the Harvard admissions office to change the face of elite society in America. Lee ended his opening statement with a personal anecdote: Forty-two years earlier, when he argued his first case in front of a federal judge, every person in the courtroom, save the deputy, was a white man. "Look around the courtroom today," Lee said. "Many institutions, many people have contributed and worked tirelessly to make this happen. Among them are colleges and universities."

This could easily have been seen as a shot at S.F.F.A.'s cross-examining lawyers, who were all white. But Harvard's story made even less sense than S.F.F.A.'s. The array of amicus speakers gave breathless testimony about the dangers of gaslighting and the crippling self-doubt that comes with being told that your feelings of alienation and racial othering are all imagined or not worthy of concern. Then Lee stood up and told the judge that S.F.F.A.'s own claims of implicit racial bias were outrageous, because Harvard admissions were an unknowably complicated, nuanced and sensitive process that involved 40 thoroughly trained people.

Lee and the Harvard admissions officers who were called to the stand also talked about the school's endlessly adjustable process, which could take factors like standardized test scores and G.P.A.s and place them within the proper context. The goal in all this, of course, was to root out systemic racism and relative privilege. But when it came to explaining away the disparities in the personal rating, Harvard presented years of data showing that Asian-American applicants, despite superior academic and extracurricular ratings, uniformly received worse recommendations from their teachers and guidance counselors. Lee did not extrapolate on what this might mean, but there was really only one possible conclusion to draw: If there was bias in the personal ratings, it came from the teachers and guidance counselors, not from Harvard's admissions officers. And Harvard, despite its complex and sensitive system calibrated to ferret out and correct bias, apparently took these teachers and guidance counselors at their word - Asian students, year after year, were just a bit less personally appealing than white students and significantly less personally appealing than those who were black or Latino.

When Mortara and S.F.F.A.'s other attorneys asked Harvard admissions officers on the stand if they believed Asian applicants had less desirable traits than their white counterparts, they, of course, said no, they did not.

From a letter to The Harvard Crimson by a student named David A. Karnes, arguing against affirmative action for Asian-American applicants:

"Current U.S. Census figures show that Asian-Americans today penetrate all income levels and, in general, have attained an above-average standard of living. The barriers to equality which did indeed exist in the past for this group have largely vanished."

And a rebuttal, a few weeks later, from a student named Charles D. Toy:

"Mr. Karnes adheres to the same misconception about Asian-Americans which has plagued them since intelligent people began to recognize and repudiate the savagery of official discrimination. Because he now perceives some ostensible penetration by Asian-Americans into various social and economic levels, Mr. Karnes concludes that most Asian-Americans no longer suffer the oppression of their status as a minority in this country."

These two letters were published in the fall of 1976. Earlier that semester, Josephine M. Lok and Bet Har Wong, Asian-American freshmen roommates at Radcliffe, tried to attend an orientation banquet for minority students and found that they were not among the invitees. In a lengthy article about the beginning of the Asian-American student movement at Harvard published in March of this year in The Crimson, Lok said she didn't really make a big deal of the omission because "we didn't have that whole awareness." But other Asian-American students on campus saw the incident as representative of their unseen, and largely unwelcome, presence there. This stood in direct contrast with federal law at the time; in 1977, for example, the Department of Labor designated minority groups as consisting of "negroes, Spanish-speaking, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts."

According to the article describing Wong and Lok's strange rejection, after a group of Asian students confronted Fred Jewett, the dean of admissions, he told The Crimson in 1976 that Harvard did not count Asians as minorities because their enrollment numbers exceeded their share of the general American population. The demographics of the Harvard applicant pool, in other words, overruled everything else, whether common sense or the lived realities of many of the Asian students who attended Harvard.

These deliberations over race and privilege did not take place in a vacuum. In 1975, just a year before Wong and Lok were turned away from the minority-students banquet, Allan Bakke, a 35-year-old white man, was rejected for the second time by the medical school at the University of California, Davis. At the time, under a transparent affirmative-action policy, the school had reserved 16 of each class's 100 spots for a "special admissions" program that considered the applications of "economically and/or educationally disadvantaged" students. Those applicants deemed disadvantaged were evaluated by a separate committee with different standards. After Bakke sued U.C. Davis, a California court ruled that the school's program violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits racial discrimination. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed that Bakke had been discriminated against.

In the court's decision in Bakke, Justice Lewis F. Powell cited Harvard's admissions plan as the paragon of how diversity could be pursued in college admissions - because the school acknowledged, he wrote, that "a farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer." The Bakke ruling meant that explicit quotas were unconstitutional, but when confronted with two equally qualified students, a school could give a "tip" to the one who could bring his or her unique regional or racial flavor to the college's melting pot.

The spiritual language of affirmative action - to remedy the nation's sins and to help underprivileged minorities who had been the victims of generational oppression - fell out of the legal conversation around affirmative action, mostly because any talk of "giving a leg up" to a certain number of students sounded too much like a quota system. "Diversity" became the new justification for considering a student's race. It was no longer about righting history's wrongs or ending poverty. It was now about the "something" a student from a different background could "bring" to campus.

In 1988, William Bradford Reynolds, who was an assistant attorney general and chief of the civil rights division in the Reagan administration's Justice Department, spoke at a symposium on Asian-American university admissions sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a Democrat. By this point, official complaints of discrimination had been filed by Asian-American students at several top universities. In 1984, after a lengthy internal review, Brown University concluded that Asian-American applicants had been "treated unfairly." By the time Reynolds took the stage to give his remarks, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education had begun investigating admissions at several schools, including Harvard and U.C.L.A.

Until Reynolds's speech, the question of discrimination against Asian applicants had not been explicitly placed within the context of affirmative action, at least not by someone in such a prominent position. But he noted "substantial statistical evidence" that Asian-Americans faced "higher hurdles than academically less qualified candidates of other races," and he added that "rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven by the universities' 'affirmative-action' policies aimed at favoring other, preferred racial minorities." In this formulation, Asian students were being pitted against other minority groups for scarce, precious opportunities.

Over the next two years, the rules of the racial zero-sum game of college admissions took shape. The solidarity movements that started at Harvard in the late '70s were supplanted by an uneasy coalition of conservative white politicians, writers and attorneys and Asian-American legal activists. In 1990, according to a lengthy study by Dana Y. Takagi, a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz, the Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether white applicants had been discriminated against at U.C. Berkeley. One of the original complainants was Arthur Hu, a Chinese-American software programmer who, using data made public by the school, had painstakingly charted the test scores and academic credentials of black, white and Asian applicants.

Thirty years after Reynolds's speech, Students for Fair Admissions revisited the 1988 playbook and filed its lawsuit against Harvard, claiming that its admissions process had discriminated against Asian applicants. During that time, the Asian population in the United States has grown to more than 21 million in 2016 from roughly 3.5 million in 1980, and a relatively narrowly defined group that used to apply mostly to Chinese and Japanese immigrants has been expanded to include everyone from the Hmong people to Koreans to South Asians. Attempts to corral all these peoples into one monolithic identity have become increasingly harder to reconcile. Asians are found throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. If it's a silly endeavor to quantify racial oppression, it's also absurd to equate the experience of a Sikh kid in Wisconsin with that of a Korean-American kid in Los Angeles.

And yet, when it comes to college admissions at elite schools, the conversation seems stuck in the past. None of the underlying questions have changed since Wong and Lok were turned away from that freshman banquet. Are Asians actually minorities? And if diversity - whatever that means - is the goal of affirmative action, how many Asians does a school really want on campus?

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I found Alex somewhat annoying at first. If I had been an alumni interviewer tasked with rating Alex's personality on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 being a student who showed unusual intellectual curiosity, grit and effervescence and 6 being a mumbling 4chan troll who would be a nightmare for his roommates, I would have given Alex a solid 3.

During that first meeting, I asked Alex if he had ever considered applying for a scholarship at any of New York City's elite private schools, like Horace Mann, Collegiate or Dalton.

"What are those?" he asked. "Are those schools in the city?"

Which is all to say, if we're going to see how Alex Chen, who would receive roughly the same credits and debits from affirmative action as I would, measures up, we should at least give an honest accounting of his past.

So here are some more relevant facts: Alex's father, Qiao, immigrated to the United States in 1994, when he was 21. He grew up in poverty in the countryside of Fujian Province. He describes his hometown as a thoroughly corrupt place where people like him could not get anything done without bribing a local official. When Qiao was 18, his father moved to Flushing, Queens, where he found construction work and began saving up money. Qiao came three years later, after his father secured a green card, and worked in restaurants around Queens and Long Island. He spoke no English, but he enrolled in Queens College, which had an E.S.L. program for international students.

In 2000, Qiao brought his wife, Su, to the United States, and she moved into the basement apartment Qiao shared with his father in Flushing. Qiao saw life in America pragmatically - he acknowledges that he faced discrimination - and it was hard to go anywhere outside Chinese-speaking enclaves. He felt that his classmates at Queens College treated him like a low-rent immigrant. "The bad part," he said, "was that I didn't know the language, so I didn't feel like I could fight back." But those humiliations paled in comparison to life under corruption in China. "Everything was open in America," Qiao said. "If I had the right paperwork for something or if I finished the work I was supposed to do, the right thing would get done. At least I could trust that."

Qiao eventually found weekend work selling computer parts until he settled into a stable job as a technician. Su, who gave birth to Alex a few years after arriving in Flushing, struggled with life in the United States. She had been a middle-school teacher in China, but now she bounced between car dealerships, restaurants and, finally, an ice-cream parlor.

Alex was a bright and self-motivated student, someone whom Su "never had to worry about." In the eighth grade, he came home and asked his parents if he could take the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the multiple-choice examination that determines entry into the city's top public high schools. Su and Qiao were not planning on pressing Alex to take the SHSAT. And he did not enroll in an intensive prep course. "We are not tiger parents," Su said. "Alex cares so much about his schoolwork, and we just supported him. But really, we did not know too much about any of this, and so he figured it out himself."

Alex got into Bronx Science, widely considered the second-best of New York City's three original specialized high schools. Qiao and Su, eager to help their son, but like so many immigrants hampered by the barriers of language and an unfamiliarity with the American school system, joined a group on the Chinese social-media service WeChat in which Chinese parents at Bronx Science talked about their children's homework and their concerns about the school.

In the summer of 2018, the parents in the WeChat group began talking about proposed changes to the admissions criteria at the city's specialized schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Richard Carranza, his schools chancellor, had proposed a new system that would phase out the SHSAT over two years and replace it with a University of Texas-style admissions program that would award seats to top students at all of the city's middle schools. These changes would result in a radical shift in the racial demographics of the specialized high schools. At Stuyvesant, regarded as the most prestigious of the three specialized high schools, black and Hispanic students made up roughly 14 percent of the student population in 1976; Asians accounted for 16 percent. By 2017, black and Hispanic students had dropped to just 4 percent; Asians, by contrast, were now 74 percent of the student body. By spreading out admissions to the entirety of the city's middle schools, many of which are overwhelmingly black and Latino, enrollment of underrepresented minorities was projected to go from its current 10 percent to nearly 50 percent. After presenting the plan, Carranza said, "I just don't buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to these schools," a clear reference to Asian-American students and their parents.

Qiao and Su's WeChat group quickly turned into a political organizing platform. Participants began reaching out to other groups, including ones that supported the affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. The Chinese-language news broadcasts they watched every night provided blanket coverage of the SHSAT issue. "Many of our friends work in restaurants and are very poor," Su said. "They don't know anything about how to make their kids successful except SHSAT and then study hard to go to an Ivy League school. They feel like if you take that away, you are taking away their hope, because they don't speak English well and have a hard time understanding how else to succeed in this country." In mid-June, Qiao attended his first protest, which reconnected him with other parents who hadn't found the same route to the middle class.

This past February, a workshop on the subject of race was offered to middle-school parents; it was run by the Center for Racial Justice in Education, a training organization. When Ingrid Flinn, a white mother of an adopted Asian child, questioned a white, male presenter from the center about the dearth of attention given to Asian-Americans in his presentation, he said that Asians benefited from white supremacy because of their proximity to white privilege. (The center denies that its workshop said Asians benefited from white supremacy.) The implication, Flinn felt, was that there was little need to talk about Asians. Yet they make up about 16 percent of students in the New York City public-school system, and by every measure, they suffer the highest poverty rates of any ethnic or racial group in the five boroughs.

I thought back to a morning when I met Alex in Van Cortlandt Park, a stretch of groomed pasture just about a 20-minute walk from Bronx Science. He and his cross-country teammates were meeting for their first practice of the year: South Asians, two girls wearing head coverings and full-length athletic wear as well as a handful of half-Asian kids. As they stretched, they joked about being out of shape and complained about the 1 train service up to the Bronx. According to the racial-privilege hierarchy of the New York City public schools, all those kids, with all their different backgrounds, skin tones and countries of origin, are the same as Alex. None of them warrant a mention in discussions of racial hierarchies.

The Rally for the American Dream kicked off in Boston's Copley Square on the eve of the trial. The organizers had promised "thousands" of demonstrators who would be rallying in favor of S.F.F.A.'s lawsuit. This optimistic projection (only a few hundred showed up) had been made by Yukong Zhao, a 56-year-old Chinese immigrant from Orlando who is the president of the Asian-American Coalition for Education and the author of the 2013 book "The Chinese Secrets for Success: Five Inspiring Confucian Values." (The values: "Determination for an Outstanding Life," "Pursuing an Excellent Education," "Saving for a Better Life," "Caring for Your Family" and "Developing Desirable Friendships.") Zhao walks with a bit of a stoop, but he exudes an optimistic, cheerful energy when talking about America and its promise.

Zhao had always been involved in politics, but ever since he immigrated to the United States in 1992 to go to graduate school in urban studies and get an M.B.A., he has mostly expressed his opinions through writing. In one piece he wrote for The Orlando Sentinel, titled "Immigrants Can Add Valuable Ingredients to Melting Pot," Zhao posed this question: "Why do so many immigrants prosper in America? Because we have suffered many life challenges from where we started to become Americans, we have valuable experiences we can share with struggling families, our spirit to overcome challenges, and our great cultural heritage on education and money management."

Zhao, who became an American citizen in 2009, began his transition from writer to activist in October 2013, when Jimmy Kimmel put together a round table of young children for his late-night show and asked them what the United States should do about its $1.3 trillion debt to China. One suggestion, from a floppy-haired blond kid in a blazer and tie, was "kill everyone in China." The joke sparked the expected online outrage among Chinese-American advocacy groups. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of several American cities to call for Kimmel's firing. Kimmel quickly apologized, and ABC pulled the segment from its archives and YouTube.

Fresh off what these activists saw as a victory against the Kimmel show, the nascent movement turned its attention to Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 (SCA-5), a proposal in the California State Legislature that would have significantly scaled back Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot initiative that effectively ended affirmative action in California state universities. They followed up with civil rights complaints, including one that involved Zhao's son. An informal partnership with Edward Blum soon followed.

For many of these parents, the Harvard case, with its revelations about personal ratings, as well as what many of the parents in New York see as the erasure from the city's Department of Education, has created a binary choice. They can choose the side that is trying to get more of their children into Harvard and other elite schools, or they can choose the side that will not even bother mentioning them. Qiao Chen, despite the protestations of his son, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Although he now regrets the choice, he told me that he did it because liberals do not care about Asian-Americans.

"Sparse country" is the term Harvard uses to describe the geographic areas of the United States that are underrepresented in the student body. This includes the usual suspects - Wyoming, Alaska, Montana - but also states with large metropolitan areas like Nevada, Arizona and Oklahoma. To geographically diversify its incoming freshman class, Harvard gives a bump to promising students from sparse country. It also recruits heavily to ensure that the top students in Arizona and Alabama and Maine consider coming to Harvard over their local state colleges and universities. Recruitment certainly does not equal admission, but Harvard starts to shape its incoming class through these early encounters and follows up diligently and often through email, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

This process begins with sophomores and juniors who take the PSAT, and later the SAT. Harvard purchases scores from the College Board and mails invitations to apply to students with strong scores relative to their demographic group, whatever that might be. In sparse country, the admissions office extends an invitation to any white student who scores above 1,310 on the tests and any black student who scores above a 1,100. Male Asian students from the same places need to score a 1,380 on the tests to receive an invitation to apply. For female Asian students, the cutoff is 1,350.

For the past four decades, these types of decisions have been the purview of William R. Fitzsimmons, a graduate of the class of 1967 and Harvard College's dean of admissions. Fitzsimmons, who goes by Fitz, grew up in his family's gas station in Weymouth, a working-class suburb on Boston's South Shore. In the parlance of his office, he was a "first-generation college student" from an "economically disadvantaged" background, as well as a star hockey goalie. Although he wasn't an "economically disadvantaged" minority, he understands what it's like to be different at the most elite educational institution in America.

Fitz, with his strong, square jaw, carefully measured Boston accent and tweed jackets, perfectly fills the role of the Harvard man. Over four days of testimony, he laid out his legacy - he came to the Harvard admissions office in 1972, took over a few years later and has been the dean since 1986. This presented something of a problem for the defense because every bit of mail, every spreadsheet, every memo or communiqué issued by the Harvard College admissions office since the Nixon administration reflected on Fitzsimmons's office.

During a bizarre section of Fitzsimmons's testimony in which he claimed a 1,100 on the PSAT was only "slightly lower" than a 1,380, an S.F.F.A. lawyer named John M. Hughes posed the following hypothetical: Let's take two students at the same high school in Las Vegas. One white, the other Asian. The white student scores a 1,310. The Asian student receives a 1,370. According to Fitzsimmons's testimony, the white student would be invited to apply to Harvard while the Asian student would not. How, the attorney asked, could Fitzsimmons begin to explain this?

On the third day of the trial, I had dinner with Sally Chen and her friend Thang Diep, both in Harvard's graduating class of 2019, at a Japanese-barbecue restaurant in Harvard Square. Thang, a senior neurobiology major and one of the main voices testifying in support of Harvard at the trial, had been repeatedly misidentified in media reports about the trial as a "refugee." This, he said, was "really annoying," and he requested I not make the same mistake. Thang's grandparents were the actual refugees - they were the ones who fled Vietnam and settled in Reseda, a middle-class suburb in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. When Thang was 8, he and his parents immigrated to join them in California. Thang spoke almost no English, but through a self-imposed regimen of assimilation, he worked his way into one of Southern California's most prestigious magnet high schools.

People on Harvard's side testified about Thang's essay, emphasizing his divulgence that he placed a pencil between his teeth while practicing his pronunciation because he heard that was the quickest way to overcome the steep learning curve that separates a tonal language like Vietnamese from English. In comments, one of Harvard's admissions readers wrote, "Essay- immigrant Vietnamese identity & pencils as tools." And then, "Add'l- grappling with sexual identity."

Thang was valedictorian of his high-school class, but he scored only a combined 1,360 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT, and his other standardized test scores weren't much better. These results most likely would have put him outside the lower threshold for Harvard, which, as it said throughout the trial, turns away dozens of applicants with perfect scores every year.

Sally and Thang were the de facto counterexamples in the trial. Their smiling photos were shown on the courtroom television screens; their G.P.A.s and test scores were discussed, at length, by Fitzsimmons and the stream of pro-diversity speakers backing Harvard. Sally, who grew up in a low-income immigrant household in San Francisco, proved that highly motivated, poor Asian students would be admitted to Harvard. Thang, whose low SAT scores were put on parade throughout the trial, proved that Harvard actually did care about Asian struggle narratives. But Thang's and Sally's stories, which were pushed out to the media, existed almost as ornamentation to the actual trial. In fact, it wasn't clear if Harvard or its experts knew much about Asians at all. On the second-to-last day of the trial, Mortara went through a litany of stereotypes about Asian applicants - one-dimensional, future doctors, children of mathematicians and engineers. He asked David Card, an economist testifying for Harvard as an expert witness, if he was aware that they were, indeed, stereotypes. Each time, Card said he wasn't sure.

Both Sally and Thang seemed aware of their role in the trial. But they also don't see the trial as a fight between concerned Asian parents and Harvard's admissions office, but rather as the last defense of affirmative action against a man who had successfully undercut the Voting Rights Act and who seems hellbent on ending racial preferences everywhere. "I don't really feel like I'm on the side of Harvard," Sally said. "As someone who advocates against Harvard on many issues, it's really hard to give Harvard this kind of power. So I think of it more as having a broad impact on the baseline for not just here but a lot of other places, like workplaces and other universities."

Sally's dilemma was shared by many of the alumni, students and faculty who showed up to the courthouse. It's difficult to defend a vision of diversity that has had many of its clearest and most evocative claims of racial and economic justice stripped away by decades of court challenges, demographic change in the applicant pool and escalating hypercompetitiveness for a fixed number of seats. During the trial, the racial and social-justice reasoning - the spirit of affirmative action - was never really stated. What stood in its place, mostly because of the legal realities of "diversity," which constrained what Harvard could defend in court, was the sense that students of color on campus needed to have others who looked like them. This justification exposed one of the puzzling contradictions at the heart of this case: By law, Harvard cannot have a quota system. But it also looks as if Harvard believes there is a set range of how many black, Latino and Asian students ought to be on campus. Roughly 30 percent of the seats in every Harvard class go to athletes, legacies, the children of faculty and applicants on the dean's interest list, composed in large part of the children of donors. This group, called A.L.D.C.s, get into Harvard at a rate of about 45 percent, far greater than the 5 percent rate for the rest of the pool. Two percent of Asian applicants are A.L.D.C.s. The zero-sum view of this arrangement never asks why the spots for more Asian kids couldn't come from the pool of A.L.D.C.s.

S.F.F.A.'s attorneys did not contest the defense of the benefits of diversity, as displayed in court. There was no need, really. They chose, instead, to pick out a few contradictions in Harvard's practices that implicitly questioned whether the school's actual practices measured up to its expressed, righteous defense.

In the months after the trial's conclusion, I asked Harvard on numerous occasions to explain its admissions process. (I made several requests to interview Fitzsimmons as well. All of these were denied.) The stock answer, always delivered from the P.R. office, never deviated from what Harvard has consistently said: We have a complicated and in-depth process that involves dozens of people and hundreds of hours, and there's no way to quantify it. You just have to trust it.

Some clarity, however dim, can be found in Plaintiff's Exhibit 555 from the trial: "Ethnicity was only considered a 'plus' when the applicant wrote about or indicated the significance of his or her heritage, or when there was some other indicia in the file of the applicant's involvement with ethnic community organizations or groups."

This passage comes from the 1990 report on Harvard's admissions practices filed by the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education. In the 28 years since then, the personal essay has become an even larger part of how Harvard makes its race-conscious decisions, so much so that in a draft of instructions sent out last year, the admissions office specified that "the consideration of race or ethnicity should be in connection with the application's discussion of the effect an applicant's race or ethnicity has had on the applicant, not simply the fact alone."

When Sally was applying to colleges, she says, her guidance counselor advised her to not write her essay about her identity, because "nobody wants to read another Asian immigrant story." Sally ignored him and wrote about acting as a translator for her parents as they encountered the humiliations and hassles of working-class life.

Sally scored a 1,550 on the SAT. She was student-body president at Lowell and played violin in the school orchestra. But during the trial, Harvard's attorneys intimated that she would not have gotten into Harvard without her personal qualities, calling her admission "a wonderful example of the consideration of an application by a group of people who ultimately came to the correct decision and admitted Ms. Chen. But it was only the result of an iterative and open process." As proof, they pointed to her application, which included an interviewer's report mentioning her ethnicity on two occasions:

"Categorized as low-income and with Taiwanese-speaking parents, she relates to the plight of the outsiders in Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. ..."

And:

"Her claims about making friends across multiple social groups seem credible. As the youngest of 4 in a culturally Chinese home, she feels a responsibility to take care of her parents. Recommending a 1 specifically for Contribution because of her demonstrated energy and specific desire to connect socially with everybody. As the youngest of 4 in a small apartment, she has lots of experience with being a roommate in close quarters."

It's worth asking if a white student, who did not bear the stereotype of the shy Asian who only hangs out with other Asians, would need to "credibly" claim to want to make friends across "multiple social groups." And while it's difficult to read too much into such brief notes, Sally's top personality score seemed to come from the fact that she broke the stereotype and wouldn't just be quiet and self-segregated. If this is Harvard's idea of "diversity," it's a white-down vision that rewards students for acting, in essence, more like wealthy white kids.

But the emphasis on the essay revealed a much more troubling standard. Harvard, in essence, is saying that if you want your race to count, you need to prove to us why it matters. Or perhaps, to be more precise, when you write an essay to present who you are to the most prestigious college in the country, you should reduce your life to a moment of trauma.

At dinner at the Japanese steakhouse, Thang seemed to understand all this. While quietly searing his steak on the tabletop grill, he said: "I don't want to defend Harvard. But it's the better of two evils."

In September 2017, Delmar Fears, a 19-year-old junior at Cornell, walked up to the office of President Martha E. Pollack. As co-chair of the group Black Students United, she was accompanied by hundreds of chanting students who had all come to deliver a set of demands. The list mostly included administrative and curricular changes, from the creation of a "minority-liaison-at-large" position to the hiring of psychologists and physicians of color. But the ninth demand, sandwiched between the creation of a "student honor board" and a "permanent presidential task force," set off an unexpected maelstrom.

" We demand that Cornell Admissions to come up with a plan to actively increase the presence of underrepresented Black students on this campus. We define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country. The Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism."

Fears and her group received weeks of blowback from conservative websites, and Black Students United later said it regretted the wording of its statement. But that year Fears wrote a final paper on the issue titled "Who Makes Up the 7 Percent of Black Cornellians?" which detailed some of the demographic change that had taken place on exclusive college campuses. In a 2004 New York Times article, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, and Lani Guinier, a professor in the law school, pointed out that while Harvard had increased its black undergraduate population to 8 percent, a majority of those students - up to two-thirds - were international students, first- or second-generation immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean or the children of biracial couples. What was rare, Gates said, was the black student whose four grandparents lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Mary C. Waters, the head of Harvard's sociology department, told The Times, "You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action. If it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not doing well."

In 2007, Camille Z. Charles, a professor of sociology and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and three co-authors, Margarita Mooney, Douglas S. Massey and Kimberly C. Torres, published a study in The Journal of Education titled "Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States." Charles, Mooney, Massey and Mary J. Fischer followed up that research with a 2009 article, "Affirmative Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice." Both papers reported an "overrepresentation" of black immigrant students at highly selective colleges and universities compared with black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved.

Charles's study drew on data from 28 schools, going back to 1999. Nearly 20 years later, she is confident that the proportion of black immigrants has increased, but she can't say exactly how much, because schools do not make that information accessible to the public. "It's a way to have some plausible deniability," Charles told me. "The schools are purposefully not paying attention to the backgrounds of the black students they admit. In the '80s and '90s, low-income black students could talk about overcoming obstacles in their essays, but over time, that narrative has worn thin. But the immigrant narrative, which is also an American narrative, in some ways might have become a more appealing story for admissions officers. A student can write, say, 'My parents were doctors in Nigeria, but they had to start all over in the United States,' and that story doesn't invoke white guilt. It doesn't even tie to affirmative action in the same way, because there isn't this assumption of lesser qualifications that still follows black American students, no matter their backgrounds or their parents' backgrounds." Charles continued: "I think there are American blacks whose families have suffered generationally who are being squeezed out."

Charles, it should be said, did not undertake her study in order to pit one group of black people against another. And she emphasizes that she does not think affirmative-action spots should be taken away from black immigrants.

Edward Blum, Delmar Fears and Yukong Zhao may not agree on much of anything, but they all have made versions of an argument that the spirit of affirmative action has been replaced by a largely cosmetic, overly simplified diversity that allows elite institutions to report gains in black and Latino student populations without having to engage in the harder work of undoing systemic inequality. Waters's question from 2004 has largely gone unaddressed: If you stop random supporters of affirmative action on the street and ask why they believe in it, they will most likely discuss the need to address the harms of historic, institutional racism. They may talk abstractly about a poor, "inner city" or "urban" kid in, say, Detroit and how his test scores, grades and accomplishments should be evaluated in the context of the extraordinary inequality within this country.

The truth at Harvard and other elite private colleges is that the supposed zero-sum game of admissions slots isn't really between Asian immigrants and the descendants of enslaved people, but rather between Asian immigrants, Latino immigrants and black immigrants. Some inevitable, deeply uncomfortable questions arise: If you compare an Asian-American student raised in poverty by parents who fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with the son of Chilean doctors who come from generational wealth and sent their child to 12 years of private school, who is more privileged? If you accept that the child of, say, solidly middle-class Ghanaian immigrants has to deal with racism in the work force, profiling by the police and all the harms of systemic inequality while the same working-class Asian kid gets to slide into whiteness, how much advantage do you give to ameliorate the disadvantage between one immigrant and another? What if you replace the working-class Vietnamese student with the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, who, among other things, has had to deal with the profiling of Muslim communities and Trump's travel ban? These are not outlier examples used in bad faith to present a provocative but false choice. At Harvard and other elite schools, the outlier example is the "inner city" kid from Detroit.

These bizarre, discomforting litigations of race and privilege make sense only within the context of the most exclusive places in America. But if Harvard loses in the Supreme Court, Blum will be closer to his goal of eliminating racial preferences, not only in college admissions but also in every other corner of federal law. Even if Blum eventually loses this case, it's hard to imagine that he will stop. In 2014, S.F.F.A. filed another discrimination lawsuit, against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The U.N.C. case, which has yet to go to trial, is not about Asian-American applicants, but the goal is the same: end affirmative action everywhere.

On March 12 of this year, a group of federal prosecutors in the same Boston building as Judge Burroughs's courtroom unsealed the indictments in Operation Varsity Blues, the nationwide college-admissions bribery case that set off a monthslong media circus involving everyone from the actress Felicity Huffman to the head coach of Yale's women's soccer team. Legally speaking, Varsity Blues has nothing to do with S.F.F.A. v. Harvard, but the scandal recast the affirmative-action debate in a bit of a humiliating yet ultimately necessary context: It felt as if a bunch of minorities were clawing at one another while a line of entitled, less qualified white kids walked through the gates of Ivy League schools as their alumni parents unpacked an S.U.V. filled with weird rackets and skis.

A few weeks later, I met Alex again at a bubble-tea shop in Flushing. Congratulations were in order - after a somewhat rocky admissions process in which he had applied early to Yale and been deferred, was accepted to Binghamton, Rochester and Rice but rejected at Brown, Princeton and Stanford and was wait-listed at Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Duke, Alex had received some good news. He had been accepted at Yale, his dream school.

"How's it feel?" I asked.

"I mean, I'm excited," he said.

"Did you expect to get in?"

"Of course not! I mean, it's Yale. ..."

"Were you upset that you didn't get into some of those other schools?" I asked.

"No, why would I be upset?"

"Like Brown. ... Don't you think you were qualified to go to Brown?"

"Well, I don't think I really fit the type of super intellectually curious student that Brown says they're looking for," he said. "I mean, it's not that I'm not intellectually curious - I am - but they seem to want people who don't really know what they want to do yet and think the entire world is fascinating. I'm a bit more focused than that."

He said his opinion of affirmative action had evolved. "My thinking has really changed," he said, noting that his government class had discussed affirmative action and how it connected to white supremacy. He still thought it was "wrong to have a system where some people's work was less valued than others," but he said he appreciated why it might be necessary to adjust for differences in background.

My understanding of him had changed, too. Despite all his résumé building and the involvement in random clubs and his own admitting that some of that effort had been so much padding, I could see that his was an inquisitive mind, and he wanted more than simply to disprove the trope of the cynical Asian grade-grubber. His core interests lay in the sociological data projects he had done at N.Y.U. and then at the offices of Assemblywoman Niou. I asked if he had written about his data work for his essay. He said he had mentioned it, but that he had mostly written about being the child of immigrants.

"Didn't you know you weren't supposed to write about that?" I asked, thinking of Sally Chen's guidance counselor.

"What?" he asked.

"I think they're tired of hearing the immigrant story, especially from East Asian kids of college-educated parents," I said.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the high schools mentioned among the elite schools across the country. It is the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, not Thomas Jefferson Academy.

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 9 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

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A high-profile lawsuit against Harvard is forcing students and their families to choose sides. Credit Credit Photo illustration by Joan Wong. Photographs by Ronghui Chen for The New York Times. By Photographs by For the purposes of this article, Alex Chen, an 18-year-old senior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, is the "typical Asian student."

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Although what Alison said is right, I don't think that is because they are being racist in that case (for college). It is harder for us to get in because there are already a lot of asians. They want "diversity" to show them that their college is equal so they can attract more people. That's why they want people that constitutes a little percentage of what they currently have.

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I agree with what Richard said about how it is not really possible to stop racism because racial issue is an issue that started a really long time ago and yet has not been solved.

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I disagree with Alison, I think that affirmative action programs should exist because how else will we ever be able to lessen the amount of discrimination that people have for other minority groups. Moreover, affirmative group programs are created to give more opportunity to those who didn’t have those opportunities in the past, in a way.

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Of course we do not need any laws because
1. the problem doesn't exist in the first place
2. Trump has done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln
3. 99% of police are great, great people so the incidents like George Floyd are different. It is an one-time accident.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - In his comments since George Floyd died, President Donald Trump has shared lots of opinions about the need for "law and order," about fighting crime and the dangerous ideas of the "liberal left." When it comes to addressing racism, not so much.

Trump has remained largely silent on that, except to argue that a strong economy is the best antidote. He insists he's "done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln."

But the lack of substantive discussion of racism by the White House has opened the president to criticism that he has failed to show leadership during the unrest following Floyd's death and has inflamed the situation with his "law and order" mantra and tweets about looting and shooting, vicious dogs and ominous weapons.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, says Trump's relative silence on racism and harsh rhetoric toward protesters have created a confounding dynamic for a consequential national conversation.

"I think we have to have the conversation with him being absent," Bottoms said. "Having a conversation with him would be like having a conversation with a madman. It would mean nothing."

Trump, for his part, has been quick to cite an economy that hummed before the outbreak of coronavirus and benefited all racial groups, along with his work to secure permanent funding for historically black colleges and universities, opportunity zones in cities and an overhaul of criminal sentencing procedures.

But those who flooded the streets after Floyd's death want to know how he plans to address the systemic racism they believe is at fault - and what Trump himself believes.

At a recent event highlighting job growth during May, Trump was asked about his plan to address racial inequality and framed his answer through an economic prism:

"What's happened to our country, and what you now see, it's been happening, is the greatest thing that can happen for race relations. For the African American community, for the Asian American, for the Hispanic American community, for women, for everything, because our country is so strong, and that's what my plan is."

Housing Secretary Ben Carson, the highest-ranking black administration official, suggested over the weekend that Trump will address the issues "in some detail" this week and that Americans should "reserve judgment."

Administration officials say Trump is reviewing various proposals. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has avoided answering directly when asked if Trump believes systemic racism exists, replying only that the president calls out "injustice" when he sees it.

Some Trump advisers have spoken internally about having the president address the nation on police-community relations and racial injustice but others have counseled against it, believing it would do little good.

Presidents long before Trump have grappled with racism and its effects, from the Kerner commission that Lyndon B. Johnson created to investigate 1960s race riots to Bill Clinton's "Initiative on Race" to the White House "beer summit" Barack Obama held in 2009 with African American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the white Cambridge, Massachusetts, police sergeant who had arrested Gates after a misunderstanding outside his home.

More discussion is needed, said Meena Bose, a presidential historian at Hofstra University.

"I don't know that the United States has really had a sustained conversation about race and wrestled with these questions, really, in kind of that extended way that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s," Bose said.

Trump has said Derek Chauvin, the fired Minneapolis police officer charged with second-degree murder after pinning Floyd's neck beneath his knee for several minutes, must have "snapped."

Over two weeks of daily protests, tens of thousands of Americans from urban centers to small towns have called for police reform and a reckoning on the stain of racial injustice.

Trump, meanwhile, has focused on organized leftist protesters and tried to make the case that disaster awaits if the nation turns its back on him in November and elects Democrat Joe Biden. The president used Twitter on Tuesday to claim without evidence that a 75-year-old Buffalo, New York, protester who was seriously injured by police belonged to radical Antifa and Democrats should "let police do their job."

"Sometimes you'll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently," he said, referring to Floyd's death at a White House meeting Monday with law enforcement officials. "But 99, I say 99.9, but let's go with 99 percent of them are great, great people."

Trump, a former real estate developer who attended top schools and lived in a Manhattan penthouse before moving to the White House, has long had a complicated relationship with the black community.

In 1989, he took out a full-page ad in New York newspapers following the arrest of five young black and Latino men for the assault of a white woman jogging in Central Park in which he urged, "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" The convictions of the men, known as the Central Park Five, were vacated in 2002 after another man confessed. Trump never apologized.

Early in his real estate career, Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for violating fair housing laws by discriminating against black applicants. The Trumps ultimately entered a consent decree but did not admit guilt.

Before his 2016 run, Trump spent years pushing the false claim that President Barack Obama, the nation's only black president, was not born in the United States.

The Rev. Darrell Scott, a Cleveland pastor who has served as liaison for Trump to the African American community, said that before the killing of Floyd, there was a relative "détente" in the conversation because Trump had made progress in addressing economic inequity.

"The fact is the mainstream media won't give the president the credit he deserves for improving lives in the black community," Scott said. "And be sure, George Floyd's death will be a catalyst for change."

Bottoms, the Atlanta mayor, praised Defense Secretary Mark Esper for publicly disagreeing with the president's push to deploy active-duty military to quell the unrest, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis for repudiating the president's handling of the crisis. She noted that Trump's wife, Melania, has called for unity and peace.

"We may not agree on policies, but fundamentally there is a piece of goodness in everyone's heart," said Bottoms, who is among several people Biden is considering as his vice presidential running mate. "And that's what we are seeing from everyone other than Donald Trump."

___

Madhani reported from Chicago and Lemire reported from New York.

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Trump eyes racial equality debate through economic lens

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WASHINGTON (AP) - In his comments since George Floyd died, President Donald Trump has shared lots of opinions about the need for "law and order," about fighting crime and the dangerous ideas of the "liberal left." When it comes to addressing racism, not so much.

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I still don't think its fair to segregate people by race- I personally value diversity of opinion rather than diversity of race.

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There is no such thing as systemic racism in the United States. And people who claim that there is are just going to make the country weak and take down the hard work ethic built.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-keep-insisting-systemic-racism-isnt-real/vi-BB1aCS7c

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I disagree because they segregate by race, not by social-economic status. If they are providing for those with less opportunities, that is okay, but they are doing this based on race, not on socio-economic status.

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Yes, I believe so. America definitely has this issue. Many policies and laws nowadays are STILL discriminatory towards African Americans (lack of social security, lack of healthcare, more economically vulnerable, voting difficulties). Also, There are hundreds of cases of racist police violence all over America. It’s much harder for black Americans to get jobs and become successful.

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America’s Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism

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For many who have spent their lives fighting for racial equity, this moment of reckoning has been a long time coming

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it is claimed that Blacks have less of an advantage because of the slavery that happened a long time ago. I personally believe that this isn't true because after slavery ended as well as the jim crow laws and other segregation/ discriminatory things, they were able to get a fresh start. For me, I know that my mother came to America as an immigrant and had absolutely nothing. As a minority, I believe that there is nothing holding them back. And because of affirmative action, it was much harder for my mother to actually get a place in a university because of the competitive environment surrounding her. If my mother can go from nothing to something, then what is stopping blacks from doing the same?

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Have you not considered the people that affirmative action actually helps. People that are actually discriminated against and have a worse chance of getting into college (or whatever). I think this question of affirmative action doesn't just apply to college applications. Affirmative action in general is beneficial for groups that are discriminated against. You are against affirmative action because it lowers your chances of getting into college, without realizing the other things affirmative action does.

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I agree with Annette. As she mentioned before, there is already severe discrimination towards minorities so it’ll be almost impossible for these programs to give minorities an unfair advantage -- I'll draw a graph.

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Trump said that he thinks the concept of the federal government giving reparations is unusual and interesting but he doesn't see it happening.

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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said in an interview on Monday that he thinks the concept of the federal government giving reparations to the descendants of slaves is "unusual" and "interesting" but he doesn't "see it happening."

"I think it's a very unusual thing," Trump told The Hill when asked about the idea of trying to rectify the enduring effects of slavery's legacy. "It's been a very interesting debate. I don't see it happening, no."

On June 19, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing to discuss legislation introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, calling for the creation of a commission to study the lasting effects of slavery's legacy and what could be done to address it.

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who is running for president, has introduced a similar bill to create a commission to study "the impact of slavery and continuing discrimination against African-Americans and make recommendations on reparation proposals for the descendants of slaves."
More: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danny Glover call for slavery reparations before Congress
"We as a nation have not yet truly acknowledged and grappled with racism and white supremacy that has tainted this country's founding and continues to persist in those deep racial disparities and inequalities today," Booker said during testimony at last week's hearing.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he didn't think that "reparations for something that happened 150 years ago" is a "good idea."

"We've tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African-American president," McConnell told reporters.

Booker's legislation currently has 14 cosponsors, with six other presidential candidates among them: Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Mitch McConnell: List of 2020 candidates: Who is running for president? An interactive guide We paid for 'sin of slavery' by electing Obama
Lee's bill has been cosponsored by three Democratic presidential candidates: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Rep. Eric Swalwell of California.

Other Democratic presidential candidates who have expressed support for a study or for reparations include former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

Author Marianne Williamson has made the most ambitious proposal of all the 2020 Democrats so far, calling for $200 to $500 billion to e paid in reparations over 20 years,

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who maintains a wide lead in most Democratic primary polls, has not said what his current position on reparations is, but in 1975 hesaid, "I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago," according to an interview published in The Washington Post.

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Trump says slavery reparations debate is 'interesting,' but doesn't 'see it happening'

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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said in an interview on Monday that he thinks the concept of the federal government giving reparations to the descendants of slaves is "unusual" and "interesting" but he doesn't "see it happening." "I think it's a very unusual thing," Trump told The Hill when asked about the idea of trying to rectify the enduring effects of slavery's legacy.

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I agree with Annette and Richard too. In a world where they are treated unfairly, I don't think it's unfair to give them a slight boost so that they can have a CHANCE at being at the same level as other people. When people finally learn how to respect and treat them fairly, then we can reconsider removing the affirmative action programs.

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Those that need/want to climb higher up in on the socioeconomic ladder are mainly from minority groups, and if in order for them to do so, they need that boost from affirmative action programs to ensure equal opportunities. They need to start from identifying those minority groups (best done through the races of a nation), then to help them socially and economically.

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Explore CFI's free resource library of Excel templates, interview prep, and deep dives into the topics you need to know for a career in finance and banking.

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They talk about all the benefits of affirmative actions, and why they need to exist.

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Despite their efforts to impede the nation's progress toward educational equity and pit communities of color against each other, leading civil rights groups continue to defend the use of affirmative action, and research continues to demonstrate its need. Race-conscious admissions practices remain necessary in the fight for racial equity in higher education. In this column, we explore five reasons to support affirmative action in college admissions.

1. Students of color remain underrepresented on college campuses

College enrollment and completion rates have risen significantly over the past four decades. However, students of color, especially black and Latinx students, are more underrepresented at selective universities today than they were 35 years ago. In fact, a black student enrollment disparity exists at 45 of the 50 flagship state universities, meaning that the percentage of undergraduates who are black is lower than the percentage of high school graduates in that state who are black. For example, black students constituted 50 percent of 2015-2016 high school graduates in Mississippi, but were just 12.9 percent of University of Mississippi undergraduates.

Banning affirmative action only worsens this persistent problem. For example, one study found that students of color experience a 23 percentage point decline in likelihood of admission to highly selective public colleges after an affirmative action ban goes into effect.

While much progress has been made in recent decades, students of color still remain underrepresented on college campuses nationwide. Prioritizing diversity and employing race-conscious admissions policies are critical for promoting equity in higher education.

2. Prioritizing diversity benefits students of all races

Diversity on college campuses enhances the educational experiences of students of all backgrounds. Evidence gathered by the Century Foundation suggests that racially integrated classrooms can reduce students' racial bias, improve satisfaction and intellectual self-confidence, and enhance leadership skills. These benefits may translate to better economic outcomes and, among other payoffs, prepare students to work in a diverse global economy, increasing the productivity, effectiveness, and creativity of teams.

Institutions of higher education have placed a greater priority on integration and campus diversity in recent decades. White women may have been among the greatest beneficiaries of this effort. Between 1967 and 2009, female college enrollment more than doubled-from 19 percent of all students to 44 percent. During this period, the percentage of white women age 25 to 35 with college degrees surged from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent.

People of color have also benefited significantly from college integration and efforts to prioritize campus diversity. Between 1976 and 2008, black and American Indian/Alaska Native people saw their share of total college enrollment increase by 39 percent and 46 percent, respectively. Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander people's enrollment share more than doubled during this period as well.

Overall, an abundance of evidence demonstrates that systematic efforts to prioritize diversity in college admissions can improve the representation of historically excluded groups while bolstering the educational experiences and economic outcomes of all students.

3. Affirmative action in education promotes diversity in ways a focus on income alone cannot

While income can and should be considered as part of a holistic evaluation of applicants, it should complement rather than supplant the consideration of race and ethnicity. Income can serve as a good indicator of a household's ability to cover regular expenses, but it doesn't tell the whole story about economic well-being and access to higher education.

Wealth makes it easier for families to relocate to better school districts, purchase test preparation books and classes, and pay or help pay college tuition. But centuries of systemic racism and intergenerational transfers have provided white households with far more wealth than households of color, even after controlling for income. In fact, middle-income white households typically have twice as much wealth as their Latinx counterparts and three times more wealth than their black counterparts. As a result, students of color (especially black students) are more likely than similarly situated white students to attend underfunded and high-poverty K-12 schools.

Even when students of color have wealthy parents or attend the same schools as white students, they experience the U.S. educational system differently. For example, students of color are less likely to be referred to "gifted and talented" programs, even after controlling for test scores, health, socio-economic status, and classroom and school characteristics. Schools are also more likely to suspend or expel students of color than white students. Beginning as early as preschool, these experiences can hinder social-emotional and behavioral development; limit educational experiences; obstruct the process of identifying and addressing underlying issues; and contribute to increased family stress and burden due to challenges in finding an affordable and suitable alternative placement. Data also show that race-based bullying is on the rise, and black and Latinx students who experience bullying are more likely to suffer academically than their white peers. Until the racial wealth gap and other forms of structural racism are eliminated, income alone will be insufficient for promoting diversity on college campuses nationwide.

4. Affirmative action helps colleges take steps toward greater equity in admissions

Overall, affirmative action is a mechanism that has allowed historically excluded groups to attend college. Students of color have long faced systemic barriers in the American education system, including exclusion, segregation, underfunding, fewer resources, and lower familial wealth. As a result, students of color are more likely to fare worse on the indicators of success that colleges evaluate for admission, making it harder for people of color to access top-tier public and private colleges. Race-conscious admissions practices, such as affirmative action, attempt to remedy these inequities by encouraging colleges to take a closer look at some of the nontraditional factors that could make a student successful-factors often overlooked in traditional admissions criteria.

Wealthier, often white, students are more likely to have had a parent that attended college-meaning those students are likely to benefit from practices such as legacy preference. In addition, white students are likely to have greater amounts of wealth and attend K-12 schools that provide multiple extracurricular activities, sports programs, and college prep resources. As a result, these students are particularly competitive applicants for top-tier institutions. Affirmative action allows colleges to use holistic reviews to consider race as one of many factors under evaluation when reviewing applicants. Therefore, affirmative action betters the chances of a student of color receiving fair, comprehensive consideration instead of being overlooked for admission.

5. Affirmative action helps promote social mobility

Despite the barriers low-income students and students of color face to gain access to higher education, research has shown that once admitted to top-tier institutions, low-income students complete their degree at higher rates and earn almost as much as wealthy students postgraduation. These findings suggest that all students, regardless of background, benefit from the value top-tier institutions provide. So while some argue that low-income students and students of color may be overwhelmed by the academic rigor at selective colleges, research suggests the opposite.

Affirmative action can help to level the playing field by ensuring all students-regardless of wealth, privilege, or background-have a chance to benefit from the advantages selective colleges provide. As a result, low-income students and students of color increase their chances of emerging from poverty and stepping into the middle class.

Conclusion

For decades, elite colleges and universities closed their doors to students of color. As a result, students of color remain vastly underrepresented at the country's top-tier institutions. Affirmative action combats the effects of this discrimination by allowing colleges and universities to be more intentional in the ways they evaluate applicants. Put simply, affirmative action ensures colleges and universities provide opportunity to those historically shut out of the system because of their race, ethnicity, income, or identity. For this reason, it is critically important that policymakers and legislators work to protect the use of race-conscious admissions policies across the country. If not, inequality will continue to persist, and the American higher education system will fail to serve those that could benefit the most.

Connor Maxwell is a policy analyst for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center. Sara Garcia is a former senior research and advocacy manager for Postsecondary Education at the Center for American Progress.

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5 Reasons to Support Affirmative Action in College Admissions

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Race-conscious admissions practices remain necessary in the fight for racial equity in higher education.

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Can somebody give me a real actual evidence of strong discrimination.

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Trump has been clearing a way for the oil pipe line which affects the minorities that live there.

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Racial issue isn't something that just appeared out of nowhere, but it had lingered within the US for hundreds of years, since the start of the country's formation so it shouldn't be taken lightly or just brushed away because of political stance.

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No. This isn't a matter of reparations anymore. I think that education is important and what needs to be done is to give everyone who WANTS to receive education education.

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I disagree with Alison. Do you not think there is lingering racism and discrimination towards black people from white people? I think you're using your one example of how affirmative action wasn't fair and applying it to multiple scenarios. Americans can often hold views of people that aren't their color, and that prevents some people from getting jobs that are owned by certain people (people that don't like a certain race for example). Affirmative action can help to solve this problem.

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Republicans made it clear that no reparation bills would be passed. Some people argue that reparations would only insult the African Americans more and that it would further divide the nation. Some people argue that even though white people were responsible for slavery, none of the currently living people are responsible for slavery, therefore there shouldn't be reparations needed.

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Slavery reparations hearing ignites fiery debate in Congress

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Congress examines the issue for the first time in a decade, despite Republican opposition.

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What is stopping them from working harder in order to get up the ladder? I know that it is possible to go up the ladder with pure hard work. I believe that there are already opportunities there, it is just harder to get to them than other people, not because of race, but because of socioeconomic status. Affirmative action is all about race. I just dont see the point in making it easier for other people just because of skin color.

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I agree with Richard as well. Affirmative action program should still exist and I highly doubt that it will unfairly or overly give an advantage to minorities. If affirmative action program doesn't exist, discriminations will only get larger.

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I think that some of the affirmative actions should not be given because when you give them an advantage, you are unconsciously saying that you are in need of help which is kind of racist or discriminating.

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I agree with you that hard work could lead to a higher status socioeconomically, but it is because of race that they are not able to climb up that ladder. If there weren’t any discrimination, wouldn’t everyone have an equal start at the beginning? If everyone treated each other with respect, then affirmative action programs would not be needed. But because discrimination and racism already exists, there are factors that minority groups can’t control which affects their status in real life. And while not all minorities need the help of affirmative action programs, they are still there as an insurance for equal opportunities.

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I'm also unsure about my stance on this, but I think generally yes? For me, it's not really about a matter of giving black people an advantage, it's more of they should pay for what they've done and give the black community a peace of mind. What they did in the past is unforgivable, and it took YEARS of fighting and struggling to finally get rid of slavery. The fact that there is still racism, although not as extreme, in America today shows that some people still don't think they've done wrong.

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Not an entirely renewed act, but maybe add some amendments to the act (is that what renewed means...) so the act is more specific and will obviously stop people from discriminating against others (Blacks, immigrants, Native Americans), especially in regards to their health and education.

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Joe Biden says he's running for president to ease the racial divisions of our time.

source

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I still think that in certain cases it should exist because these minorities do not have the same starting line as us (edit: same starting line as others aka the privileged). However, there is the element of unfairness.

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I am not sure what my stance is on this, but I think it really depends on what sort of reparation it is. If it's money, I think it would be hard because how do you put a money value on an issue like this? Also, if any sort of reparation is involved, there will be a lot of complaining that comes with it. Is reparation the best option we have? Does it solve any issue? Or is is just temporary alleviation?

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we ARE minorities LOL

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If the government gives reparations to black people, then japanese people should pay white people and the germans should pay the jews and everybody that has ever been place below should also be given money. At this point, everybody will deserve reparations. If I'm lesbian, and the people before me were lesbian, but were also discriminated against, then all LGBT deserve reparations too. The government will run out of money. And I think it's racist to only give blacks money even though they had nothing to do with slavery, their great great great grandparents did. If blacks get reparations, then I want reparations too for my ancestors being killed for being LGBT.

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Well education wise? But yes we are.

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So if affirmative action were to apply to asians as well, you would have no problem with it?

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I think it’s wrong to say that blacks have nothing to do with slavery. The effects of slavery are still seen today, and is especially the cause of why there are discriminations and racists comments towards black. But I agree with you that if one case turns out in doing reparations, other cases should be too. HOWEVER, some of the cases that you’ve list up there are cases where the nation has given money/support for reparations.

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affirmative action already DOES apply to asians, only negatively. The affirmative action in colleges put us against our own race. I think that is not fair and they should put everybody against each other, or if they want to be more fair, everybody in the same income bracket against each other. people with higher income tend to have more educational resources, which is why it is harder for asians to get into college because they have the money and the tiger parenting culture to always focus on the studies. Although my family is more american cultured, I have to be compared to these others purely because of my race.

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There definitely is an issue with systematic, institutional racism and discrimination towards minorities. Just look at the news, it's everywhere in the US.

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If it applied to Asians positively, I can assume you'd be ok with it then?

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I don't think it's fair to compare slavery to the LGBTQ discrimination. Slavery was not just a form of discrimination, it was way more than that. They were treated like less than animals. They were whipped, humiliated, beaten for fighting for their basic rights, raped, criminalized, worked to death. All the worse things that could be done was done to them. It was also NORMALIZED, and because of that, some people today still have an image in their mind that black people should be below them.

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I don't think that america needs renewed Equal Rights Act. There are many black and white minorities across the world. Sure there are people that are racially discriminated and mistreated, but that doesn't mean everyone is.

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Do you not think it's fair for people with less opportunities and less financial stability to have an easier chance at getting into college than people like, for example, us that have much more opportunities and much more financial stability? It's not a matter of who works harder. Two families can work the same amount, but one family could have an easier chance at getting into college (if we're gonna stick with this example).

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if they changed it from race to economic status I would be okay with it. I dont like being segretated by race.

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yes i agree with that. If they have less financial and educational resources, then they should have an easier chance of getting into college. The thing with affirmative action is that it applies to race, not income.

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I think what you said makes sense! I don't like how it's by race too. I get what you mean now.

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People in the US during history also did horrendous things to LGBT people. For instance, there were a lot of different hate groups that would kill and torture LGBT people, which is still happening today in countries like Iraq. I don't think that people have an image in their mind that black people should be below them because they did not have exposure to the normalization of slavery during that time period. everybody that had exposure to that are basically all dead. There was violence towards LGBT people that can be compared to blacks.

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I think that the federal government should do some reparations for the history of slavery because that we actually owe them a lot just by doing a little will help a lot. But i don't think that the federal governments are responsible for the history of slavery because it was all in the past and if you want to argue you'll have to blame it on the old feds

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I suppose I didn't understand your initial statement. I agree with you that it shouldn't be separated by race. But, I think that when there is a general trend toward people of a certain race having lower economical resources than people of another race. In this case, I think it would be ok to separate by race.

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I do not think that the federal government is entirely responsible. But they are responsible for providing every citizen with security. Laws and limitations should be placed in order to provide these security. I think that reparation is not possible. There is no way to repair the damage we caused the slave. I think the only thing people can do is to remember what happened back then (learn from it) and never repeat it again.

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I think it depends on what kind of reparations it is, because like Republicans say, it might be a insult towards African Americans if the reparation happens in a disrespectful form. However, I think US students should be ethically educated with truth and clear history.

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Opinion (to whatever this discussion is)

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Opinion (to whatever this discussion is)

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The point of affirmative action is to make sure white people don't end up with all "the good stuff". Regardless of how we view the world, we need to understand that America is going to have some bias to white people. It's there, whether people know it or not. Affirmative action is meant to counter that bias in an effective and beneficial manner.

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Dems are in favor of affirmative action since they try to make places more diverse and equal.

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Affirmative Action began with a 1960's Civil Rights movement that was created to provide equal employment and educational opportunities to groups that had been historically discriminated against. The movement first became known as Affirmative Action in 1961, when President Kennedy issued an Executive Order that directed government contractors to take "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." This same order established the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which is now known as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Initially, Affirmative Action policies focused on improving educational and employment opportunities for African Americans. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an Executive Order requiring government contractors to increase their numbers of minority employee by enacting Affirmative Action policies. He expanded the policy to include women, and signed he Civil Rights Act into law, stating "And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom, but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, but human ability; not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result." This led to colleges and universities adopting similar systems over the following years. This caused enrollment rates for African American and Latino students to steadily increase. While there are still opportunity gaps that exist in the educational system, they have been steadily shrinking. However, the use of race as a factor in college admissions has been, and continues to be, a highly contested issue. Traditionally, the Democratic Party has strongly supported Affirmative Action, stating "Our commitment to civil rights is ironclad...We support affirmative action to redress discrimination and to achieve the diversity from which all Americans benefit."

Increasing Workplace Diversity

Many critics of Affirmative Action believe that the policies encourage employers and colleges to accept under qualified applicants simply to sway the acceptance statistics. The Democratic Party disagrees. They believe that the purpose of Affirmative Action is simply to ensure that all qualified candidates, of any gender or race, are fairly considered for the position in question. They believe that not only does Affirmative Action require employers and educators to draw on a wider range of candidates, it requires them to draw on a wider range of skills and knowledge.

President Clinton was a strong proponent of Affirmative Action and Democrats often call on his time in office to defend such policies. 60 percent of the federal judges appointed by President Clinton were minorities or women. 65 percent of his judicial appointees received the highest ranking by the American Bar Association. This percentage was the highest any recent president had ever achieved.

Democrats vs. Republicans on Affirmative Action

While in office, President Bush took action to lessen or eliminate the impact of Affirmative Action on the educational and employment systems. Many Democrats were greatly upset by these actions, due to the decline of minority enrollment in elite institutions after legislation against Affirmative Action was passed. In response to the controversy surrounding these issues, the Supreme Court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger that "diversity in education serves a compelling state interest and that race is therefore a constitutional factor in admissions decisions." They also ruled that Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which had previously been used to "disallowed use of race in assigning public elementary and secondary school children" was not relevant to cases of upper level education or employment.

This ruling called for President Bush to: reaffirm, strengthen and expand efforts to realize the goals of affirmative action...implement a policy of outreach to underrepresented constituencies in the awarding of government contracts, grants and opportunities." It also called upon him to be a role model regarding these policies by "Issuing an Executive Order giving the Administrative Judges of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the authority of Administrative Law Judges in other agencies of the federal government, so that they may rule on complaints of discrimination by federal employers without being overridden by the agency which is charged," and by "Requiring all federal agencies to document outreach in job recruitment, promotions, housing and educational programs." The policy goes on to demand an increase in funding for the EEOC, urge Congressmen of both parties to vote in favor of Affirmative Action in the future, and to urge concrete actions in support of continued diversity.

Public Opinion On Affirmative Action

While a large percentage of the general public supports Affirmative Action as a general idea, they also seem to have complicated and sometimes contradictory ideas surrounding the finer details of Affirmative Action policies. A Pew Research study showed that the more specific details of Affirmative Action were discussed, the more likely polltakers were to resist the idea. Opinions also tended to turn negative when programs involving preferential treatment for minorities were discussed. Only 16 percent of respondents reported being impacted by Affirmative Action. In general, white respondents reported being harmed by it, while black respondents reported being helped.

In a poll of 1,201 adults nationwide, 63 percent responded that they favored "affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs and education." When the question was rephrased to mention giving "special treatment" to these groups, only 57 percent responded in favor. A survey taken the previous year, which did not state the words "Affirmative Action" but discussed "preferential treatment" and supporting "every possible effort" to improve the position of minorities received only 24 percent support. All of the polls saw a larger support for Affirmative Action than a previous poll taken in 1995.

The Fairness Of Affirmative Action

While 60 percent of Pew Research study respondents reported feeling that Affirmative Action as part of college admissions was a good thing, this number was not supported by questions discussing the fairness of the program. Only 47 percent reported feeling that the policies were fair, with 42 percent stating that they were not fair. These statistics varied greatly with race and with gender.

Barack Obama on Affirmative Action

Like the majority of his party, Barack Obama supports Affirmative Action. While he did not weigh in heavily on the issue during his presidential races, this is because it was not a hot-button issue at the time. He told author Jeffrey Toobin that he believed Affirmative Action should continue "if the University of Michigan or California decides that there is a value in making sure that folks with different experiences in a classroom will enhance the educational experience of the students, and they do it in a careful way." He went on to add, "most of the time the law's principal job should be as a shield against discrimination, as opposed to a sword to advance a social agenda, because the law is a blunt instrument in these situations."

Obama also believes that college admissions and the job field should not be the primary focus of such initiatives. In a 2014 interview, Obama stated that he believed Affirmative Action policies should continue, but that programs that helped minority students receive their high school diplomas would be far more beneficial to the cause. He elaborated by stating, I understand, certainly sitting in this office, that probably the single most important thing I could do for poor black kids is to make sure that they're getting a good K-through-12 education. And, if they're coming out of high school well prepared, then they'll be able to compete for university slots and jobs. And that has more to do with budgets and early-childhood education and stuff that needs to be legislated."

Hillary Clinton on Affirmative Action

Hillary Clinton is a supporter of Affirmative Action. Many believe that she was a driving force in her husband's successful diversification of his cabinet during his time in office. For Love of Politics, by Sally Bedell Smith states "Hillary assigned herself the task of ensuring that Bill kept his pledge to appoint more women and minorities than any previous president, to make his Administration "look like America." She pressed him to fill half of the senior positions with women. And she urged her husband to make history by appointing the first woman to one of the big four cabinet posts."

When asked about Civil Rights issues, Clinton states that she believes in reparations for the past, but she also hopes to focus on fixing issues here and now. In a 2000 Senate debate she stated, "We have mental, emotional and psychological reparations to pay first. We have to admit that we haven't always treated people in our own country fairly. We have some issues that we have to address when it comes to racial justice right now. I'm willing to work hard to be a strong advocate for Civil Rights and human rights here at home and around the world. I want to do everything I can to make sure that the programs and policies that have helped generations of African-Americans have a better life in this country continue. I think we should be focused on the present and on the future. We owe an apology to African-Americans for hundreds of years of slavery." Clinton has also worked avidly for equal pay initiatives and other women's rights efforts.

Bernie Sanders on Affirmative Action

Bernie Sanders not only supports Affirmative Action, he received a 97% by the NAACP on Affirmative Action. This score has been interpreted as extremely pro-Affirmative Action. Despite this rating, Sanders is severely disadvantaged among African American voters. In a recent poll, he saw only 3 percent of black voter support, as opposed to the 91 percent that supported Hillary. Sanders believes that this is largely due to a lack of knowledge about his stance on such policies. In an interview on This Week, Sanders stated, "I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that. But I think the issues that we are dealing with, combating 51 percent African-American youth unemployment, talking about the need that public colleges and universities should be tuition free, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, creating millions of jobs by rebuilding our infrastructure. These are issues that should apply to every American."

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Affirmative Action began with a 1960's Civil Rights movement that was created to provide equal employment and educational opportunities to groups that had been historically discriminated against.

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systematic racism still exists in america; african americans are less likely to get job, hold high paying jobs, and less likely to get a good education

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Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics.

This, in part, can be explained by racist hiring practices that kept Blacks out of business for decades under Jim Crow. It can also be explained by more subtle forms of prejudice today.

One Harvard University study found that when Blacks and Asians "whitened" their resumes - for example, used "American" or "white"-sounding names - they got more callbacks for corporate interviews. Twenty-five percent of Black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only 10% got calls when they left ethnic details on their resume.

In addition, many companies rely on employee social networks for referrals, which can be problematic if your company is largely white, diversity experts told Business Insider. One survey found that three quarters of white employees don't have any non-white friends.

Equal pay day for a particular racial or gender group marks the extra days someone in that group has to work into the next year to earn what the typical white man earned in the previous year.

Based on income figures from 2018, it would take the median black woman worker 226 extra days into a new year to earn what a median white male worker made in the previous year.

A study by the Department of Education showed that in 2013, Black high school students were only a bit more than half as likely as white students to have any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate credit, and only about a third as likely to have AP/IB credit for math.

This chart, based on another study from Opportunity Insights, looks at the likelihood that a child whose parents had only a high school diploma goes on to earn a college degree or higher.

Only 15% of Black students from less-educated households went on to finish college, well below the 25% of white children who earned a degree.

The most recent numbers available on imprisonment rates come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' analysis of 2018 data, which showed that Black men aged 18-19 were 12.7 times as likely to be imprisoned as their white peers, and Black men of all ages were roughly 5.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men.

A Pew Research Center analysis of the data showed that the Black imprisonment rate has actually dropped by 34% since 2006 - the greatest decline across all races.

Yet even still, Black Americans - and particularly Black men - remain more likely than any other group to be imprisoned. For every 100,000 Black men there are 2,272 inmates, whereas for every 100,000 white men there are just 392 inmates.

According to the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, marijuana usage between Black and white Americans is similar. Just 18% of Black people over the age of 12 in 2018 reported using marijuana within the past year, while 17% of white people over the age of 12 reported the same.

But the usage rate is where the similarities end - that same year, Black Americans were arrested 3.6 times more often than white Americans for marijuana possession, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of FBI and US Census data.

According to the ACLU's analysis of marijuana arrest data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, racial disparities in marijuana arrests have continued in every state.

Despite widespread reforms to state marijuana policies, the racial disparity has even gotten worse over the years, not better. For instance, in 2010, Black people were 3.31 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, and over the years the rate ticked up to 3.64 in 2018.

The marijuana arrests that continue to the present day have disproportionately "caused profound and far-reaching harm on the people arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated for marijuana offenses," the ACLU wrote. "It has been a colossal waste of money and law enforcement resources that has only deepened the divide between communities and their governments and increased public hurt rather than safety."

Research from Columbia University's Justice Lab has shown that Black people are far more likely than white people to be under parole supervision. Though the federal prison system has largely abolished parole, most states still retain the practice of releasing some inmates from prison sentences early in exchange for heavy supervision while they try to get back on their feet.

New York state has a particularly extreme racial disparity when it comes to parole supervision. Black people are 6.77 times more likely to be under parole supervision than white people, the Justice Lab found. They are also 4.99 times more likely than white people to be re-incarcerated due to "technical" parole violations, meaning that they had parole revoked due to minor infractions such as missing an appointment, rather than committing a new crime.

A Justice Lab report said parole supervision has also had an unequal effect on Black people - even though some of the supervision requirements may seem neutral or sensible, they may be far harder for people in Black communities to abide by through no fault of their own.

For instance, one common parole requirement is for parolees to stay away from people who have felony convictions. Yet an estimated one-third of Black men have felony convictions. That means parolees could be ordered to stay away from friends, family members, and neighbors.

"People on parole ... may be forced to choose between obeying the rules on one hand, or, on the other, risking a parole violation by spending time with relatives and friends who could be valuable sources of support, stability, housing, or employment connections," the Justice Lab report said.

The Washington Post has compiled one of the most thorough datasets available when it comes to fatal police shootings, and it has sparked debate over what it means when it comes to racial bias in police killings.

The data show that more than half of the people fatally shot by police in America within the last five years were actually white - but fatal police shootings of Black people were disproportionately high, considering they account for roughly 13% of the US population.

As of June 12, 2,469 white people had been fatally shot since 2015 at rate of 13 per million, whereas 1,293 Black people were fatally shot at a rate of 31 per million.

The database also comes with a number of other qualifiers - namely, that it tracks only fatal police shootings, not fatal police encounters in general. So the deaths of Black men like George Floyd, which occurred after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, have not been included in the dataset, nor have the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, who died from a police chokehold, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who died of spinal injuries he suffered in a police van.

It's also worth pointing out that every fatal police shooting included in the database has its own unique set of circumstances that may or may not have justified a shooting. For instance, the database includes Omar Mateen, the mass shooter who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in 2016 before police fatally shot him.

The majority of fatal police shootings - 4,037 out of the 5,403 people fatally shot by police in the last five years - occurred when a suspect had either a gun or a knife.

Though the presence of a weapon does not in and of itself mean each of those police shootings was justified (for example, the database includes the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile, who was legally armed and obeyed the officer's commands during a traffic stop), officers are generally permitted to use deadly force when they believe a person poses a serious threat of injury or death.

But even when narrowing the data down to fatal police shootings of unarmed people, it shows a similar story as the aggregate data. Of the 352 instances where police fatally shot unarmed people, 145 of those people were white and 123 were Black (63 were Hispanic and 21 were designated "other" or "unknown.") - that's a rate of 10.7 white deaths per 10 million, and 30.1 Black deaths per 10 million.

More: Features Racism Education Unemployment

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26 simple charts to show friends and family who aren't convinced racism is still a problem in America

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics. This, in part, can be explained by racist hiring practices that kept Blacks out of business for decades under Jim Crow.

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The democrats think that America does have an issue with systemic, institutional racism, and that is why they are trying to solve the problem by passing the Equality Act and strengthening it. The Equality Act tries to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs, and credit. They also want to pass hate crime legislation including LGBTQ.

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However, with Republicans firmly in control of the White House and Senate, the bill's chances of becoming law appear slim.

While four currently serving GOP senators voted for the 2013 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which included some of the same protections as the Equality Act, only one Republican senator has so far backed the Equality Act: Susan Collins of Maine. In order to pass the Senate, at least four Republicans would have to support the bill (assuming every Democrat and Independent voted in favor).

In an exclusive interview with NBC News on Monday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., one of the bill's co-sponsors, said if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were to give senators a chance to vote on the Equality Act, they would support the measure.

"If you just had an up or down vote, we would have sufficient votes in both houses," Baldwin said.

When asked if McConnell - who controls which bills are brought to the floor for a vote - would bring the Equality Act up for a vote on the Senate floor after it is reintroduced, David Popp, McConnell's press secretary, was equivocal: "If the Leader issues a statement on this I'll be sure to forward it to you," he wrote in an email.

In a tweet shared on Wednesday, Rep. Cicilline suggested that McConnell may face electoral consequences if he chooses to block the law, which had 239 cosponsors in the House as of Wednesday afternoon.

According to CNBC, the Equality Act also enjoys the support of 161 of the country's largest and most valuable corporations, like Apple. CEO Tim Cook, who is gay, tweeted a message of support for the Equality Act.

But conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation say that "The Equality Act would undermine the freedom to think and act according to our beliefs," according to Emilie Kao, director of the foundation's Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society.

While President Donald Trump has not yet commented on the reintroduced Equality Act, he appears to have supported the idea of protecting gay people from discrimination in the past. In a 2000 interview with LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, Trump said he liked "the idea of amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation."

"It would be simple. It would be straightforward," he said. "Amending the Civil Rights Act would grant the same protection to gay people that we give to other Americans - it's only fair."

The Associated Press contributed.

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Democrats reintroduce Equality Act to ban LGBTQ discrimination

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However, with Republicans firmly in control of the White House and Senate, the bill's chances of becoming law appear slim. While four currently serving GOP senators voted for the 2013 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which included some of the same protections as the Equality Act, only one Republican senator has so far backed the Equality Act: Susan Collins of Maine.

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Trump believes that although discrimination is present it is not a huge problem because only a few "bad apples" are the problem. His secretary states that we should not assume an organization is rotten just because an individual is. Although the organization itself may not be rotten, Trump is underestimating the discrimination that occurs in America. There is far more than a "few bad apples". With racist people the organization will become racist as well. America has a racist system that discriminate the minorities. If the minorities feel secure with the system and has a sense of equality, protest would not occur. The US assume that inequality ended with the slavery and civl war. But the trauma still remains and some system still fail to have equality. These include education, health care, and economy.

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America’s Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism

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For many who have spent their lives fighting for racial equity, this moment of reckoning has been a long time coming

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I personally think that the equal rights act gave many equal rights to the minorities. However, I think that the equal rights act is ironic since it states everyone has equal rights but the act itself is showing that equality does not exist and therefore an equal right act exists. I think that all the rights given to American citizens should be accessible to everyone including the minorities. A separate act should not be necessary and equality should be normalized.

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I think that racism is an ongoing issue today, we America as a whole have to work together to advocate for this, without violence because it defeats the point. Even though there will always be racism, everyone being a part advocating for it will result in great benefits.

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To respond to Serina's Point: A separate act must exist because without this separate act, the Constitution is too board & generalized to specifically protect minorities. Like what James mentioned, not everyone is discriminated against. That's true, so an equal right, I guess, caters to those who are.

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I think affirmative action programs do not unfairly give an advantage to minorities, because they are a way for minorities to gain the needs they couldn't have. Minorities are less privileged compared to the majority, so it makes sense for them to try to make up for the difference.

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I agree with Serina on that reparation is not really realistic. It can't repair the damage of slavery that actually happened, because all the enslaved people are basically not alive now. I think the government should put more strength in promoting equality and anti-racism so that the citizens can know by heart that discrimination is wrong.