It is unacceptable that in today’s America we have black households making on average 13 times less than white households, African Americans dying a full 3 years earlier than whites, significantly fewer African Americans having earned college degrees, all while having a higher chance of going to jail or dying by homicide in comparison to whites. It’s been eight years since we elected Barack Obama to be our president, but the battle for racial equality is still far from over.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which was sparked by the unjust treatment of African-Americans by the police force, has taken the spotlight in this battle for racial equality, and while I do agree that this is a major issue, there are other problems to take care of, namely the lack of access to a high-quality education and the barriers that hinder economic mobility for many African American individuals. In America, the idea is that if you work hard enough, you will be able to prosper in life, but what people are seeing is that those who are on the lower end of the economic ladder are not showing that significant growth after many years of work, while those on the upper end do. If you add these economic problems to the already existing social and political issues plaguing African Americans, you have a recipe for disaster.

Perhaps one of the major issues to focus on as one step in solving these problems is a lack of diversity in our nation’s schools. Our public schools are outstandingly divided by race – according to the Civil Rights Project, a white student’s class of 30 had “22 whites, two blacks, and four Latinos, while the class of a typical black or Latino student had at least 20 blacks or Latinos and eight whites.” These Black and Latino children are often part of schools that do not receive the same level of funding and resources that are found in schools that have mostly White children. While a simple answer to the problem would be “just move to a better location and send your child to a better school,” the reality is that most Black and Latino families do not have the resources to do so. Therefore, it should be in our best interest that we take on many of these smaller issues in our communities as a way of addressing the larger issue of racial conflict and inequality.