Addressing Racial Inequalities in America- A United Nations SDG Audit of US Black Communities

After anti-racism and Black Lives Matter protests swept the country in 2020, states and cities grappled with transforming words into action. Dramatic policy proposals, sweeping acknowledgments and apologies, and close scrutiny of law and police structures followed, but pledges for racial equality go unmet. In the Red: the US Failure to Deliver on a Promise of Racial Equality puts these failings in the context of basic human rights: with race in focus, no state has met the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

This Capstone seeks to examine specific city sites based on the SDGs. Students will engage in ways to democratize data collections by engaging student and community researchers.  By using the SDG framework to analyze Black American experiences An Audit of US Black Communities seeks to link national discussions on inequity and anti-Black racism to global discourse on basic human rights.  While some cities in the United States have heralded their success, data is limited to that of the general population, obscuring economic, educational, and health inequity as experienced by marginalized groups. The research project undertaken as part of this Capstone will measure the well-being of the Afro-descendent population, using the SDG targets and indicators as units of measure. The analysis will shed light on structural patterns of inequality that threaten to derail any chance for U.S. achievement of the SDGs by 2030.