Racial Inequality After Racism: How Institutions Hold Back African Americans

Last summer, the killings of two unarmed African American men by white police officers reignited the national conversation about racial inequality in the US. The upheaval has stood in stark contrast to the promise of a transformation in race relations that Pres Barack Obama's inauguration appeared to told six years ago. A renewed focus on how racism survives through social and political institutions would draw on the numerous advances that the social sciences have achieved in recent decades, illuminating how institutional forces shape personal decisions and identities and how the interaction of individuals with their surroundings systematically influence behavior. The criminal justice system is hardly the only part of US society where institutional racism operates. The broader economy is full of often hidden forces that combine to exclude people of color from well-functioning, fair economic markets and connect them instead to markets that are distorted or broken. Finally, education is yet another arena in which a variety of forces combine to produce inequality in indirect ways.