Sometimes a single statistic can help us understand staggering disparities in American life — in housing, education, health care, wealth, work and more. Our journalism is focused on this inequality, and these data points can be a starting point both for our investigations and for broader conversations about what this means for our communities, how we got to this point, and where we go from here.
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Thirty-eight thousand white people gained employment in December, but Black, Asian and Latino workers continued to lose their jobs. That’s mainly because a larger share of people of color work in the service industry, which has shed the most positions during the pandemic.
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COVID-19 has led to a reduction in U.S. life expectancy in 2020. And the decline is greater among Black and Latino populations. The average reduction is 1.13 years and the decrease for Black and Latino populations is 3 to 4 times that for white people. That means the virus could reverse over 10 years of progress made in closing the life expectancy gap between Black and white populations. A decrease in life expectancy may continue beyond 2020 as more coronavirus deaths occur and as a result of other long-term impacts of the pandemic. Read more inequality data about the COVID-19 risks in New York here.
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White Americans own almost 90% of corporate equities and mutual funds. And these investments jumped $2 trillion in value during 2020’s third quarter. The share of wealth held by Black Americans has decreased since 2017 and increased a bit toward the end of 2020, though it hasn’t fully recovered.
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This week, we took a peek into unemployment rates. Over 80% of Black workers have positions that don’t allow remote work, according to 2017-2018 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And by the end of 2020, Black people had the highest unemployment rates reported for any race and gender.
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