This article from today's New York Times discusses a study that demonstrates continued discrimination faced by African-Americans, this time in the area of bankruptcy filings.
Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found.
The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially, in part because of biases, whether conscious or unconscious.
The study described in the article also included a kind of "blind taste test" to assess racial bias among the lawyers doing the steering, a test similar to that which found clear discrimination in hiring ("Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," published by Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan in the National Bureau of Economic Research). According the the NYT piece:
Results from the second part of the study, which illustrated the lawyer’s influence in determining which bankruptcy chapter to choose, came from a survey sent to lawyers asking them questions based on fictitious couples who were seeking bankruptcy protection. When the couple was named “Reggie and Latisha,” who attended an African Methodist Episcopal Church — as opposed to a white couple, “Todd and Allison,” who were members of a United Methodist Church — the lawyers were more likely to recommend a Chapter 13, even though the two couples’ financial circumstances were identical.
Sorry for the humor, but otherwise this stuff might be too depressing.
The point is that some people in our political discourse have suggested that the major problem in race relations is that blacks are "angry" or "separatistic" or somehow get unfair advantages to make up for non-existent discrimination. We progressives know that's not the case, but these kinds of studies are important to document the reality of present day discrimination. The point is, black people aren't making this stuff up.