The Atlantic

White Privilege, Quantified

Recent experiments put numbers on everyday discrimination, shifting the dialogue away from victim-blaming and anecdotal observations.
Source: David Mercado / Reuters

Thirty-seven percent of white Americans believe that the police treat black people less fairly; 70 percent of black Americans feel the same way. Similar chasms exist when it comes to perceived discrimination in stores, the courts, and schools, which means that much of the nation's dialogue about racial inequality is defined by the clashing of intractable subjectivities.

Data alone can’t solve deep-seated social ills or mediate heated arguments, but it does have a habit of pulling conversations away from foggy abstraction and

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