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THE explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement into mainstream awareness has brought the prevalence of systemic racism and anti-Black bias into sharp focus. This isn鈥檛 confined to individual acts and attitudes. It is racism deeply embedded as normal practice in the systems, structures and institutions that underpin society. And although it remains invisible to some, a growing body of research shows that systemic racism has a hugely detrimental impact on people across the world.

In the US, where the most recent wave of anti-racism protests began, Black people are far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than white people for the same crimes. But the issues faced in the US and other countries go far beyond law enforcement. We know that racism is also baked into housing, education, employment and healthcare systems. In the US, UK and elsewhere, for example, the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on people from Black and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds has put a powerful spotlight on the way societal inequalities affect health and vulnerability to disease.

And yet researchers are still working to understand how societies hold back and harm BAME communities, running experiments and analysing existing data with fresh eyes to uncover all the manifestations of systemic racism. We spoke to five US-focused scientists who investigate concealed discrimination in various aspects of everyday life, from children鈥檚 academic development to health and disease in adulthood and interactions with technology.

EDUCATIONAL INEQUITY

Daphne Henry is a developmental and educational psychologist at Boston College in Massachusetts

In the US, Black children tend to get lower scores in reading and mathematics tests compared with white children. But I noticed that in a lot of studies of academic achievement, the majority of the participants from lower-income families were also from ethnic minority groups and the majority who were middle-income or above were white. This risks conflating the effects of socio-economic status with those of race and ethnicity. I wanted to figure out whether the benefits of higher family income led to similar levels of academic achievement for Black children as for their white peers.

My colleagues and I analysed data from a study that followed more than 9000 children across the US who started kindergarten in 1998 until they reached middle school 鈥� that is from about age 5 to age 14. We found that higher family socio-economic status was associated with a boost in children鈥檚 academic achievement, but the size of this boost differed between Black and white children. When family
socio-economic status increases, the academic achievement gap between Black and white children actually grows.

This is counter-intuitive. One of the foundational principles for work that examines achievement disparities is that if you just eliminate socio-economic disparities among African American families, then that will essentially close the achievement gap. My work suggests that doesn鈥檛 capture the entire story 鈥� socio-economic advantage may not bestow the same benefits on Black children that it does on white children.

This really speaks to the structural and social privileges and constraints that exist in US society, and to how those differ for Black and white children at the same socio-economic level. If you take a middle-income African American family and a middle-income white family, they are probably going to have vast disparities in wealth status, in terms of wealth accumulation and assets, as well as in the amount of debt they have. We know that African Americans have to take out more student loans to finance higher education, for example. They are probably going to live in very different neighbourhoods too.

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There is also some evidence to suggest that Black and white children in the same school district, or even sometimes attending the same school, may experience differences in the academic instruction that they receive. Teachers may consciously or unconsciously treat Black and white children differently, because everyone 鈥� including teachers 鈥� grows up in a social context. For instance, stereotypes about who is more or less academically qualified could result in teachers favouring children to go into 鈥済ifted and talented鈥� classes based on their race.

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Black children make up 18 per cent of preschool pupils in the US, but comprise nearly half of all suspensions

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TOXIC STRESS

Shawn Utsey is a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University

I went to graduate school during the tumultuous 1990s. Many people think today, with all of the police-related killings and vigilante killings of Black people, that we have entered a new realm of the Black experience. But that isn鈥檛 true. In the 90s, we had many killings on a regular basis by the police and by white vigilante groups.

At the time, I was also working as a counsellor in Harlem, New York. I noticed that the items on the life stress scale 鈥� a standard measure used by counsellors to assess people 鈥� didn鈥檛 reflect the lived experiences of my clients. There was no reference to racism or police brutality. So that included those items to try to measure life stress among Black populations.

I wanted to use my scale to investigate how racism and race-related stress impact people鈥檚 health, because we know that racism is a significant cause of stress among racial and ethnic minority groups and particularly African Americans. Black people in the US die disproportionately from stress-related conditions including high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

People feel stress emotionally, but the real damage is physiological. Through my research, I discovered that people reported experiencing physical symptoms of stress 鈥� such as increased heart rate 鈥� simply in the expectation of experiencing racism. Even just anticipating that you might be exposed to racism is stressful. My findings are unpublished, but .

Indeed, such stress isn鈥檛 only caused by overt experiences of racism. Often it is caused by the broader challenges associated with negotiating a racist society while being Black. For instance, Black people will sometimes experience the stress of racism when it happens to someone close to them or when they witness instances of racism through the media, such as videos of Black people being killed by police.

Race-related stress is chronic, and that creates this prolonged activation of physiological stress responses. I think this is a key contributing factor when it comes to racial health disparities.

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In Philadelphia, African Americans are almost three times more likely to be rejected for home loans than white people

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THE HEALTH GAP

Michele Evans is a medical oncologist at the National Institutes of 午夜福利1000集合 in Maryland

In the US, African Americans are 9.4 per cent more likely to have chronic kidney disease than white people, and when you look at end-stage kidney disease 鈥� where you need dialysis or a kidney transplant 鈥� it is almost a fourfold higher risk. But race isn鈥檛 a biological construct. So how are social factors putting particular groups of people at an increased risk of disease?

I decided to start looking at social determinants of health as though they were toxic agents. A study I started many years ago follows more than 2000 people in Baltimore, Maryland, through regular health monitoring and surveys. It is a cohort that includes Black and white people both above and below the poverty line.

We discovered that low socio-economic status was associated with a . But when we looked at white people, there was no statistically significant relationship between socio-economic status and chronic kidney disease. So poverty, or low socio-economic status, has a specific detrimental effect on African Americans in terms of their disease risk. It seems there is something unique or different about being both Black and poor when it comes to health.

When I became a medical oncologist, I started to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Maryland to look at the effect of racial discrimination on health. Racism is a psychological stressor and in the Baltimore study, we had noticed that higher levels of perceived racial and gender discrimination among African American women were over the study period.

African Americans are also more likely to develop Alzheimer鈥檚-related dementia, so we decided to use MRI to look at white matter lesion volume in people鈥檚 brains 鈥� an early indicator of cognitive decline. We found that, in older African Americans, increases in perceived lifetime discrimination burden were associated with increases in white matter lesion volume. We also discovered that African Americans who reported more perceived racial discrimination tended to have thicker arteries 鈥� a subclinical sign of cardiovascular disease.

Research into such health disparities is still in its infancy, because if you look at ethnic minority health in general, in the US we don鈥檛 collect adequate data on subpopulations, such as Native Americans. We are even in a situation where we are trying to make sure we have populations adequately represented in studies. How can you say that your finding is relevant to everybody when your study includes predominantly white people?

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Black people in the US are dying from covid-19 at three times the rate of white people

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VIOLENCE AND VOTING

Jhacova Williams is an economist at the RAND Corporation in Washington DC

I am a cultural economist. Something I have been working on for years is investigating how historical racial animus continues to influence the voting behaviour of Black people in the US. In the late 1860s, Black men in the US were given the right to vote, and they voted. Voter turnout at that time was nearly 90 per cent among Black men. This caused a lot of animosity and was associated with an increase in lynchings of Black people, which led to a decline in voter turnout. By the 1940s, only 3 per cent of Black men in the South were registered to vote.

These racist and terrorist acts caused a lasting change in the behaviour of Black people. shows that Black people who live in areas that historically had more lynchings are less likely to be registered to vote in elections today. They stopped voting, of course, to protect their own well-being, to make sure they wouldn鈥檛 be lynched, to make sure their family wouldn鈥檛 be lynched. I believe that this has been passed down from generation to generation, and it has a huge impact on who gets elected.

Two things you always hear people talk about are voter ID laws and gerrymandering. But I think the biggest act of voter suppression is that there is a lack of trust in voting within the Black community. We have to get at why that is. When you see people across the globe looking at George Floyd being killed, imagine what that does to Black people in their psyche. When you see things like that it makes you feel like you aren鈥檛 a part of society, like you鈥檙e not actually American even though you were born here and are raising your family here. This was a huge challenge for people working to enfranchise Black voters in the latest US election.

Voting is a social norm. It proves that you have social capital; that鈥檚 why you are participating. If I don鈥檛 believe that I am a part of society, why would I vote?

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FACIAL RECOGNITION

Deborah Raji is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, based in Ottawa, Canada, and a fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League

During my first major tech internship, which lasted for a year from May 2017, I was the only Black person and the only woman in the applied machine learning team. I was working on computer vision models, programs that can identify different objects. I noticed that the engineers were making a bunch of assumptions that they weren鈥檛 aware of. For example, as a team we were asked to build a model to classify hair, and there were 20 different categories of hair textures and only one category for all the afro textures common with Black hair. I know we have more hair textures than that.

Then there was another project I was participating in, developing a model that could filter out inappropriate images, particularly pornography. I realised that the model wasn鈥檛 performing well for darker-skinned individuals. The pornography being used as examples for the system of what is inappropriate material was more ethnically diverse than the stock images we were using as examples of what is appropriate. Because of the bias in the data sets, the model was filtering out the content of people of colour disproportionately, flagging it as inappropriate.

Right after my internship ended, I joined Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab. She had noticed that facial recognition software couldn鈥檛 detect her face very well, which is a darker-skinned face. We started to collaborate and we discovered that several publicly deployed facial-recognition products developed by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon weren鈥檛 performing well on darker-skinned individuals. Later, researchers at IBM reported that some 80 to 95 per cent of the faces in the data sets used to develop these systems were from lighter-skinned individuals.

These are the same types of facial-recognition systems that are being used by major technology companies. In 2018, we found that Amazon鈥檚 facial-recognition system, called Rekognition, was . That isn鈥檛 a good enough performance for it to be deployed as a product. And definitely not good enough to be pitching the technology to police departments, which the American Civil Liberties Union reported that Amazon was doing at the time. People with darker skin would be more likely to have their faces falsely detected in CCTV footage of crimes they weren鈥檛 involved in, for example, and potentially even wrongfully arrested because of it.

This June, Amazon finally announced a one-year moratorium on the use of the facial-recognition technology by police departments. IBM had already announced that it would stop developing or selling facial-recognition software altogether. And Microsoft also said it won鈥檛 allow its facial-recognition system to be used by police.

In addition to lack of representation in the data sets that many models and algorithms are trained on, decisions made by engineers also introduce biases that it is important to pay attention to. The tech industry is very homogenous. You鈥檒l go to these tech company campuses and you won鈥檛 see a Black person for miles. I think that there is ignorance about the fact that, although they aren鈥檛 necessarily seeing a lot of people of colour in their environment, those people do exist and are actually the ones affected by their technology.

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US job applicants with Black-sounding names are about half as likely as those with white-sounding names to get an interview, even when they have identical resumes

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