On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities.
Fifty years removed from that milestone, it's apparently easy to think that we're over racism.
Here are 15 facts that prove that's not the case.
1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.
2) There's a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.
3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.
4) The Great Recession didn't hit everyone equally.
5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.
6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.
7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.
8) School segregation is still widespread.
9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.
10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.
11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.
12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.
13) A clean record doesn't protect young black men from discrimination when they're looking for work.
14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.
15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.
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