Systemic racism is a global, national and local issue, underlying and amplifying many of our most critical social challenges. In this section, we examine racial and ethnic disparities in financial, education and community indicators.

Historic and current policies, practices and systems include housing policies that restrict access to people of color, employment discrimination, unequal access to financial services and capital, education systems that fail to equitably educate all students, racism in health care delivery, racial profiling and inequitable sentencing in policing and criminal justice and many others. These inequities have compounded over generations, impacting decades of family members. This is significantly illustrated by the redlining practices of the 1930s that blocked Black people and people of color from securing real estate, leaving them unable to benefit from a critical opportunity to create and transfer wealth across generations.

Racial and ethnic disparities impact our population of nearly 500,000 African Americans and 237,000 Latino residents in Arkansas. Arkansas is also home to more than 50,000 Asians, 31,000 Native Americans, 12,000 Pacific Islanders and 67,000 residents who have a multiracial background.

There is a wealth of resources to learn more about structural racism, including: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (https://newjimcrow.com/), Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein and Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. There are also data resources such as the National Equity Atlas; racial equity-focused research from organizations like the Urban Institute; tools for learning and change such as those available at Racial Equity Tools, and personal narratives from writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.