The Atlantic

White Privilege, Quantified

Recent experiments put numbers on everyday discrimination, shifting the dialogue away from victim-blaming and anecdotal observations.
Source: David Mercado / Reuters

Thirty-seven percent of white Americans believe that the police treat black people less fairly; 70 percent of black Americans feel the same way. Similar chasms exist when it comes to perceived discrimination in stores, the courts, and schools, which means that much of the nation's dialogue about racial inequality is defined by the clashing of intractable subjectivities.

Data alone can’t solve deep-seated social ills or mediate heated arguments, but it does have a habit of pulling conversations away from foggy abstraction and

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
The Americans Who Need Chaos
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why peop
The Atlantic4 min read
KitchenAid Did It Right 87 Years Ago
My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then. I

Related Books & Audiobooks