Curated Library of Research on Racial Inequality - Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality

The Stone Center’s Curated Library of Research on Racial Inequality grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement and the widespread protests in the summer of 2020. (See the note on our response at the time below). We’ve continued to add to the library, which includes a selection of Videos from our 2020 Conference on Coalitional Democracy and Inequality by the Numbers workshop, as well as other events; News and Commentary such as Scholar Interviews, Scholars’ Blog Posts, and Research Spotlights; and the growing list of academic research from our community of scholars.

A Note on Racial Inequality and the Current Protests in the United States (posted June 2020)

The massive Black Lives Matter inspired movement taking over our streets since the murder of George Floyd brings into relief the urgency of making more meaningful progress toward equality. The current movement also reveals the great promise of coalitions to bring people together across race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, in order to spark broad-based change.

The protesters on the front lines of this growing movement are raising wide-ranging issues. Renewed calls to “defund the police” do not stand solely on the grounds that large sums of public money from taxes and fines are used to terrorize communities of color. The impassioned signs and speeches also invoke the economic ravages of the coronavirus and a multitude of longstanding inequalities. What many communities really want, in other words, is both a dismantling of violent policing and a major investment in schools, jobs, health care, housing, and the environment. Each of these shifts is required to reverse inequalities that have not only skyrocketed over time but are literally off the charts in comparison to many other countries.

Our mandate here at the Stone Center is to study all facets of socio-economic inequality, primarily through analyses of quantitative data. We note that, for example, data recently highlighted by CBS News indicate that Minneapolis, where Floyd’s murder occurred, has one of the largest racial gaps in median income among comparably-sized metro areas, ranking just behind San Francisco. Several other measures of inequality capture how Minneapolis — considered by many to be one of the most progressive cities in the country — is, in fact, one of the country’s most racially unequal. Moreover, the types of racial economic disparities that are so destructive in Minneapolis are, in large part, the result of intentional policies, such as redlining and over-policing, designed to exclude Black people from any chance of economic success.

And Minneapolis is neither an exception nor an outlier. Plentiful data document racial inequalities throughout this country and around the world. It is our mission as an academic center focused on inequality to further educate ourselves and others about the underlying causes and consequences of institutionalized racial disparities, and we will continue to do so.

Yet, it is hard to look at the body of work in the field of inequality and conclude that it is enough. We understand that sometimes the dispassion of science and data can mask the real pain that we are feeling as a community. For all the work that we have done in the past and plan to do in the future — on inequality and racial disparities in academia, in income and wealth, in politics and policymaking, in social mobility, in health, and in numerous other fields — there is a palpable immediacy felt by the people experiencing those disparities.

As an initial response to that immediacy, we heed the call of the Graduate Center’s Interim President James Muyskens, who wrote that current events “remind us of the urgency of our work as educators; creators of knowledge; and members of this unparalleled, diverse, public university.” Below, we offer a curated list of academic research on and related to racial inequality from our international and multidisciplinary community of scholars, as well as other research on inequality by scholars of color associated with the center. We will continue to add to this collection, and hope that this will help to inform the conversation at this critical moment.