By Valerie Rawlston Wilson, Ph. D.Unprecedented. It’s a word that has been used to describe the 2016 presidential campaign and election season, not to mention the nascent Trump administration. With unfinished business in the areas of racial justice, race relations and economic inequality, many anticipate a fight to defend the progress that has been made, while also resisting retrenchment in these critical areas. At the same time, a renewed spirit of activism has taken hold. In the last year alone, a number of protests and public demonstrations have taken place on behalf of the rights of African Americans, women and immigrants, to name a few. The 2017 National Urban League Equality Index provides a veritable “line in the sand” from which to measure where the country goes from here. As the National Urban League continues to press the case for closing the divide in economic opportunity, education, health, social justice and civic engagement, the 2017 National Urban League Equality Index is the 13th edition of this critical quantitative tool for tracking Black-white racial equality in America, and the eighth edition of the Hispanic-White Index. In addition to these national indices for America’s largest racial and ethnic groups, the Equality Index also includes the fourth edition of rankings of Black-white and Hispanic-white unemployment and income equality for roughly 70 metropolitan statistical areas (“metro areas” or “metros”) in Americai. NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUENotesiThese metro areas are those for which there were large enough samples of African-American and Latino populations to calculate reliable estimates.
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