State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2015 - United States

In the first half of the year the early effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which seeks to expand access to affordable and quality health insurance, began to be felt across the United States. Previously uninsured and poor populations – disproportionately represented by minorities of various ethnic backgrounds – were especially targeted for enrolment. In California and Connecticut new methods were employed during the second open enrolment period for health insurance coverage under the ACA at the end of 2014 to reach out to Latinos and African Americans, particularly young men in urban areas. In light of this a new strategy was initiated, using community newspapers and local media to advertise the benefits of signing up for coverage through the ACA that would more readily access Latino and African American men in urban centres. By the end of the year, the proportion of the country's uninsured population had fallen from 18 per cent in 2010, when the ACA was signed into law, to 13.4 per cent.

But while a majority of states expanded health care coverage to this demographic through Medicaid as part of their implementation of the Act, 16 states refused to do so, impeding access to health insurance for those most in need of coverage. Among them was Texas, where a highly restrictive anti-abortion law that took effect on 1 September has forced many of the state's abortion clinics to close. By the end of the year, only one continued to operate south of San Antonio. This specifically hinders Latina women, who represent a large percentage of those living along the Texas-Mexico border, from accessing sexual and reproductive health care.

Indigenous land rights continued to be threatened by major development projects, specifically linked to the extractive and fossil fuel industries. Throughout 2014 indigenous groups in the United States, including the Ponca Nation and Oglala Lakota, led land rights movements in opposition to a bill that would allow the expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline connecting the oil sands in Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska. The bill was subsequently vetoed by President Barack Obama in February 2015.

A surge of unaccompanied minors from Mexico and Central America arriving in the US in spring 2014 set off heated debates surrounding the country's immigration policy, including the detention of children. One positive milestone for many of the country's immigrants was Obama's announcement at the end of the year of an executive action which would potentially provide amnesty for nearly 4.9 million undocumented migrants. The Board of Immigration Appeals also made a watershed ruling that 'married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationships' constitute a unique social group who may apply for asylum. Both measures attracted strong resistance, and at the beginning of 2015 the Amnesty Bill was put in jeopardy as Republicans in the House of Representatives sought out means by which to cut the required funding to the Department of Homeland Security.

Yet the event that arguably had the greatest implications for minority rights during the year, sparking protests and allegations of institutionalized racism in the country's police force, was the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on 9 August. Although witness testimony is conflicting, Brown was described by some as holding his hands up while he was shot repeatedly. In the ensuing weeks, the streets of Ferguson were filled with demonstrators who believed that Brown's death reflected widespread racial prejudice among law enforcement personnel. Though there were incidents of looting and arson of local businesses, the response by police was also criticized as excessive. Within a week a state of emergency was declared in the suburb and a midnight curfew was enforced.

The demonstrations and violence in Ferguson led to ongoing discussions about ethnic profiling and the incidence of homicide by police while on duty in the United States. This is a particular problem in its cities, where ethnic minorities are often concentrated – in 22 of the country's 100 largest urban areas, they now make up a majority of the population – as evidenced by statistics on police stops and street interrogations in New York City. Data collected by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) since 2002 on the use of 'stop-and-frisk' by the New York Police Department (NYPD) shows that, of those individuals engaged by the NYPD officers, 54 per cent were African American despite them making up just 25.5 per cent of the city's population. Nearly 9 out of 10 of those targeted were completely innocent, a fact corroborated by the NYPD's own reports.

Research published during the year, drawing on data between 2010 and 2012, revealed that African American men and boys are 21 times more likely to be killed by on-duty police officers than their non-Latino white counterparts. In 2014 some of these individuals included Akai Gurley, Ezell Ford and Rumain Brisbon, though one of the most high-profile incidents was the killing of 43-year-old Eric Garner by an NYPD officer on 17 July in Staten Island, New York. The arrest and fatal choking of Garner, who was unarmed, were captured on video and quickly spread across the internet. In the video Garner can be heard pleading, 'I can't breathe' 11 times. This plea, along with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, soon became rallying cries of the anti-police brutality and racial equality movements in the United States. Popular outrage was further inflamed by grand jury rulings towards the end of the year that closed criminal proceedings against both officers involved in the Brown and Garner killings, triggering further protests in cities across the country.

However, though protests during the year focused almost exclusively on incidents of police brutality against the African American population, in recent years indigenous people have been killed by law enforcement at nearly the same rate as African Americans. While garnering little to no media attention, indigenous groups utilized the hashtag #NativeLivesMatter to galvanize support within their community and to highlight the disproportionate levels of police brutality experienced by some of the 5.2 million indigenous people in the country. As is the case with African Americans, these incidents occur against a broader backdrop of social disenfranchisement: 27 per cent of indigenous people live below the poverty line nationwide, compared to a national average of 14.3 per cent, and with more than 70 per cent of indigenous people now residing in urban areas these high poverty rates are now experienced significantly within metropolitan settings. Furthermore, indigenous people living in urban areas also encounter increased impediments to accessing education, employment and health care: for instance, only about 1 per cent of spending by the Indian Health Service is allotted to urban programmes. While these issues intersect with some of the inequalities experienced by other ethnic minorities in urban areas, indigenous peoples have experienced discrimination where other ethnic minorities have found opportunities, particularly in relation to accessing urban labour markets.

One contributing factor to the tensions that arise in urban areas between minority or indigenous communities and law enforcement agencies is the involvement of some members in violent crime, including gang membership. However, this occurs among the complexities of social, political and economic exclusion that fuel criminal behaviour – factors that are often overlooked in public discussions of urban violence within minority communities. The simplistic and discriminatory representation of these issues was reflected in comments by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who stated in an interview in the wake of Ferguson that '93 per cent of blacks are killed by other blacks' and argued that attention should be focused on reducing crime within African American communities rather than the killing of Brown by a white police officer, which Giuliani regarded as 'the significant exception'.

While Giuliani's comments were criticized by many commentators as harmfully reductive and misleading, evidence suggests that crime within African American communities is disproportionately high, with African Americans being four times more likely to die from homicide compared to the national average. However, in addressing urban violence it is not useful or effective to reinforce the inaccurate notion that members of minority communities form the overwhelming majority of perpetrators. New research on gang membership is evidence of this. A joint report from the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) reveals that the use of law enforcement data creates incorrect perceptions about the ethnic make-up of gangs. The National Gang Center relies heavily on this data set and in doing so reports that 84 per cent of gang members belong to ethnic minorities. However, when these statistics are combined with self-reporting studies, the demographic of gang membership changes considerably. This is the case in the evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education Training (GREAT) programme, which indicates that nationally about 25 per cent of gang members are non-Latino whites. The report further notes that the factors driving gang membership should not be simplified in these terms: 'most risk factors cut across racial and ethnic lines, including the negative consequences associated with poverty, immigration, discrimination and social isolation'.

The protests against the killings of Brown and Garner were also demonstrations against segregation in the cities of the United States. Demonstrators filled the country's metropolitan freeways as a means to draw attention to the historical role they have played in dividing urban populations, dating back to 1956 when Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act. This facilitated the expansion of suburban, mostly white and middle-class neighbourhoods and assisted in the overall economic growth of the United States. However, the ramifications within urban areas are still felt today, as freeways frequently divided them along ethnic lines, isolating majority from minority communities. Urban infrastructure, along with other development projects and subsequent housing schemes, helped establish spatial segregation. Other factors include the movement of non-Latino white households out of integrated neighbourhoods, self-segregation by minority communities and, more recently, discriminatory gentrification projects in minority neighbourhoods.

Decades of research has tried to determine to what extent spatial segregation impacts on minorities in urban areas and issues such as educational attainment, social isolation, housing, poverty and health. In Chicago, a 2012 joint report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Center on Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University found that ethnic segregation in the city's neighbourhoods caused as much as a 33-year difference in life expectancy between non-Latino white residents and certain minorities. However, other recent studies based in Chicago and elsewhere have suggested that African American and other non-Latino minorities were more likely to report poorer health while living in predominantly non-Latino white neighbourhoods compared to those living in segregated minority neighbourhoods. One rationale given for this, substantiated by past studies, is that social isolation of minorities living within non-Latino white neighbourhoods leads to higher incidence of poor health.

Another issue that is especially acute within urban areas is educational inequality, with new evidence demonstrating continued school segregation, particularly within the country's inner cities. A report from the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights from March 2014 identifies that African American and Latino students on average have less access to rigorous educational programmes and are more frequently taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience Furthermore, African American students are four times as likely and Latino students are twice as likely as non-Latino white students to attend schools where one out five teachers do not meet all state teaching requirements. The same Department of Education report found that ethnic minorities are more likely to be suspended or expelled overall, and that African American students are three times as likely to be suspended or expelled compared to their white peers. Though the reasons for the increasing segregation within the schooling system are diverse, there are clear indications that school zoning policies favour affluent neighbourhoods, leaving minority students from poor inner-city areas disadvantaged and forced to attend under-resourced schools. The movement towards privately funded charter schools is also exacerbating unequal access to quality education among the country's youth.

Sub-standard education for poor students attending schools in less affluent neighbourhoods, as is the case for many minority children, has a lifetime effect on their future economic well-being. Furthermore, limited educational opportunities for minority students have been associated with a phenomenon known as the 'school-to-prison pipeline', particularly as the expansion of police officers inside schools has led to increased contact with the criminal justice system. Infractions which were previously dealt with by teachers and school administrators now lead to fines and even incarceration in juvenile facilities. This experience has long-term ramifications, as children and adolescents sent to juvenile facilities are 37 times more likely to be arrested again as adults. Students with criminal records are further marginalized in some school districts through the use of alternative schools, which segregate them from the general student population. The discrimination faced by African American and other ethnic minorities within the school system is borne out in their disproportionate incarceration rates in the country's prisons, with African Americans accounting for 41 per cent of those imprisoned despite making up just 13 per cent of the national population.

Housing in urban areas of the United States has played a long-standing and important role in establishing and maintaining segregation. The 1937 United States Housing Act (USHA) led to large-scale public housing projects nationwide, which accelerated in the country's urban centres in the 1950s and 1960s. Ethnic minorities have historically been over-represented among those in public housing within city centres. The USHA housing scheme has also been associated with high crime rates and perpetuating cycles of poverty. By the 1990s a number of major cities, including Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and New Orleans, began tearing down public housing units, replacing them with mixed-income housing. The full impact of this shift in urban housing is not yet known, and controversy remains over whether it is helping to alleviate segregation or simply pricing low-income and working-class families out of their neighbourhoods.

In the years prior to the recent housing crisis in the United States, a shift in the urban demographic took place as African Americans started moving to the suburbs – a product of the demolition of public housing but also a developing African American middle class. During this period, owning a home became a reality for more and more minorities, with home ownership among African Americans and Latinos peaking in 2006 at the beginning of the recession. However, home ownership throughout the country began to stall in 2007 and dropped off steadily in 2008 when the housing market crashed. Since then, an increasing amount of evidence has shown that minorities were exceptionally hard hit. This was due to a number of factors, including predatory lending tactics by banks that saw African Americans and Latinos taking out a disproportionate number of risky subprime mortgages and high-cost loans. This led to massive foreclosures on homes owned by minorities, with certain urban areas, such as Detroit and Atlanta, particularly devastated.

However, throughout 2014 the effects of the recession continued to subside. In December unemployment declined to its lowest rate since mid-2008, the housing market was bouncing back and more people in the United States were once again buying homes. Yet the economic recovery did not benefit everyone equally, as African Americans and Latinos continued to face high rates of unemployment and under-employment, as well as foreclosures and discrimination in accessing home loans. One factor in this unequal recovery is that minorities experienced significantly greater losses as a result of the recession: Federal Reserve Data shows that from 2010 to 2013 the median income of minority households fell 9 per cent, compared to 1 per cent for non-Latino whites. Home ownership among minorities during that same period fell from 50.6 per cent to 47.4 per cent, but among non-Latino whites the period saw a reduction from 75.3 per cent to 73.9 per cent. The decline in home ownership also disproportionately harmed minorities, particularly African Americans. One reason is that financial assets, such as stocks and bonds, have recovered in value quicker than housing, which non-Latino white households are more likely to own through retirement accounts compared to minority households. Therefore, during the foreclosure crisis when African Americans and Latinos lost their homes they were also frequently losing their main asset and source of savings.

Furthermore, in 2014 a new trend in the housing market emerged that is unequally harming certain minority groups, particularly in urban areas most affected by the recession. Home equity firms are buying up large numbers of foreclosed houses in these areas and then renting them back out, frequently to African Americans and Latinos who lost their homes during the crisis. This has, in part, led to what was described by Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan as 'the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known'. In Los Angeles, for example, where Latinos make up 48.3 per cent of the city's population, residents are now experiencing the highest rent to income ratio of any city in the country. Yet within certain neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, community-led initiatives are working to provide affordable housing as well as social services. The Esperanza Community Housing Corporation (Esperanza) is one such initiative. Established in 1989 to respond to development projects that threatened destruction of homes within the Figueroa Corridor neighbourhood, where 70 per cent of residents are Latino with the rest a mix of African Americans, Asians and non-Latino whites, the organization began providing affordable housing, health, arts, education and economic development programmes. By the end of 2014 Esperanza had completed nine affordable housing developments totalling 165 units, and had begun the Mercado La Paloma community revitalization and entrepreneurship project, and initiated the Semillas de Esperanza ('Seeds of Hope') community garden, all the while continuing to provide a number of services to the local community.