Race/racism

Ignoring Black Women Costs the U.S. Billions, the ‘Traffic to Deportation Pipeline,’ and Prince + Patti LaBelle

Catch up with this week’s racial news roundup.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

This week’s collection of race and racism news opens with some startling information about the ways the economy loses out when Black women can’t fulfill their potential. We also highlight some efforts to recognize the untold stories of Black working-class New Yorkers in the 1800s, and the names of enslaved Black ancestors whose names were never properly recorded. We close with something light — a story that brings together two music icons: Patti LaBelle, and Prince.

The high cost of counting Black women out

A new report by financial services company S&P Global has found that obstacles to Black women’s educational attainment cost the U.S $107 billion dollars in economic activity between 1960 and 2019. But that’s not the most stunning figure: “Moreover, if Black women had also been in positions that better matched their education and skill sets, the productivity boost would have added an overall $507 billion to the world’s biggest economy”, the U.S. That’s right, $507,000,000,000. More than half a TRILLION dollars. If you had a nickel for every time a Black woman faced structural racism or microaggressions, was shunted into low-wage work, saddled with debt from for-profit colleges, you — well, you get the picture. There are a lot of astonishing figures in the report itself, but if you want to see a good explanation of how the researchers arrived at these numbers, and how this is relevant to what your local congressional representative is (or isn’t) doing to close the wealth and pay gap, read this article in The 19th.

Is a kidney health algorithm putting Black patients at risk?

Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but more than 35 percent of the people on dialysis. Black folks are four times as likely as Whites to end up with kidney failure. But we are also less likely to get on the list of people eligible for a kidney transplant, and less likely to actually get a kidney. Why? Part of the answer may lie in a mathematical equation that evaluates how sick a patient is…