Racial disparities are older than the United States itself

Evidence

By racial disparities, I mean how racial groups are not statistically represented according to their populations. If Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US population, then Black people should make up somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans killed by the police, somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere close to owning 13 percent of US wealth. But today, the United States remains nowhere close to racial parity. African Americans own 2.7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and make up 40 percent of the incarcerated population. These are racial disparities, and racial disparities are older than the life of the United States. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 11

Categorization

• DEFINE: Kendi’s working definition of racial disparity — statistical under/overrepresentation relative to population share — is foundational for the whole book’s analytic scaffolding.