Vox analyzed dozens of studies and found that racism adds up in insidious ways.
Part of the discrimination issue of The Highlight. This story was produced in partnership with Capital B.
After a long search, Keisha Orr — a human resources manager working on Wall Street in the early 2000s — believed she had found the perfect candidate for a job at her financial tech company. The applicant had it all: an ambitious resume, a decorated educational career, and poise. Keisha asked her supervisor and the hiring manager to move the candidate to the next round. They bristled.
Even though the client service position didn’t require a degree, the hiring manager told Orr that the candidate wasn’t eligible because he hadn’t finished college, never mind that he was a college senior a few months away from completing his bachelor’s at New York University. Orr couldn’t help but wonder whether the resistance was because the potential hire was Black.
“It was almost like I was cosigning for him in some ways,” Orr, who is a Black woman, told Vox. “No one we had interviewed even held a candle to him. It was very baffling and mind-blowing to me.”
Thanks to Orr’s persistence, the candidate was eventually hired, staying with the company for years. Yet she’s never gotten over the sense of angst that she might be held responsible if he didn’t meet expectations. Only now, 20 years later, does Keisha recognize that what happened was discriminatory.
When something is as ubiquitous as discrimination, it becomes familiar, and what is familiar quickly becomes so ordinary as to be almost imperceptible. That’s why discrimination is regularly dismissed, even by those whom it affects the most. The hurdle for Keisha and others has long been that it’s often hard to prove.
Since 2022, Vox has partnered with the Black-led nonprofit newsroom Capital B to publish inclusive, rigorous journalism for our audiences.
A utopian vision for Black life
What to do about mass incarceration
The origins of the Juneteenth flag
The growing movement for reparations in health care
Our collaboration launched with a comprehensive look at Juneteenth as it became the nation’s newest federal holiday. You can read the entire discrimination package here.
Decades’ worth of discrimination studies collected by researchers at the University of Chicago and shared with Vox, however, spotlight how common experiences like Keisha’s really are. In the face of denials from many white Americans that systemic racism exists, the myriad studies provide tangible proof that it is, in fact, pervasive, affecting many areas of life.
“The thing we were surprised by was after George Floyd, there was this debate about, ‘I don’t know, is discrimination really systematic?’” said Devin Pope, a professor of behavioral science and economics and one of the University of Chicago researchers who set out to compile the data. “We’re like, wait, people don’t realize that this is a closed topic? The evidence is overwhelming that Black Americans get treated differently than white Americans in so many points of their lives.”
Research around discrimination in America continues to grow and capture attention. There are the big examples: Black people dying needlessly while giving birth, receiving smaller paychecks than their white colleagues, being excluded from certain neighborhoods and all the amenities and opportunities they provide. Discrimination steals their health, degrading their cells through a process known as weathering. It makes the American dream of embracing the freedom of the open road a nightmare. It prevents folks from accessing quality health care. It is buried in the code that powers the digital world. Each of those circumstances comes with its own anxiety and angst.
The studies provided to Vox by the University of Chicago researchers — Pope, Oeindrila Dube, and Sendhil Mullainathan — illuminate the everyday experiences: having emails go unanswered, having trouble getting help in public, being undertreated when in pain. Those quotidian tasks make up the average American’s day, yet when tainted by racism, they can make daily life for Black Americans more difficult, with myriad repercussions.
Vox’s review of more than 40 studies, which were conducted over nearly 50 years, animates a reality that any Black American could expound upon at length, offering a view into what discrimination snatches from individual Black Americans every day of their lives. It’s one thing to know that racism exists; that it has made life more challenging in both hidden and obvious ways and has not meaningfully improved in the last few decades. It’s another to see those experiences boldly affirmed in reams of data, to have tangible proof that what you think you’re experiencing isn’t just in your head, and that it is systemic and endemic.
The research used various methodologies (including correspondence studies, field experiments, statistical analyses, and review studies) and were conducted in a range of locations from North Carolina to Chicago to Seattle, looking at a range of ages and class divides. (The University of Chicago researchers worked on some of the studies; others informed their own work.) They all drew the same, insidious conclusion: Anti-Black discrimination practiced by Americans, white and otherwise, routinely robs Black people of opportunity, money, health, safety, and dignity.
Black life isn’t just unfairly strenuous; it’s also artificially short. The National Center for Health Statistics projects that the average life span for a Black American is 70.8 years. The projection for a white American? 76.4 years. That gap makes time all the more of the essence for Black people.
Yet anti-Black discrimination wastes their time — a lot of it.
Vox analyzed the data from the studies to provide an expansive picture of just how much. We learned that the average Black American could lose years, if not decades, of their life to discrimination.
The studies collected by Pope and his colleagues, as well as a breadth of other research, contain countless examples of this time-stealing phenomenon. Black Americans have to wait days longer for an appointment with a new doctor. They must be prepared to wait one day longer for a response for information about joining a new church and have to send out twice as many emails to get a response from a potential roommate. They spend more time applying for mortgages, and they see more Uber rides canceled — the list goes on.
Orr is just one example. She lost time — to worry, sleepless nights, and nerve-racking conversations with leadership — that she could have spent advancing her career or taking care of herself and her family.
A longer wait time doesn’t necessarily mean racism. Yet Black Americans feel negative consequences even from potentially discriminatory actions, the studies showed.
