Coloured vision

Racial inequity manifests in many ways. Consider the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic: job losses were greater for people of colour, children of colour experienced outsize learning loss, and Black workers – who make up a disproportionate share of frontline workers – had both more exposure to the virus and inadequate access to healthcare. These inequities cost lives and widened a pre-existing racial gap in life expectancy.

These trends and others are national in scope in the US, but the specific ways racial inequity manifests may be vastly different from one state, one city, and one neighbourhood to another. Each locality experiences a specific combination of interconnected factors that shape the lives of its Black and Hispanic residents. To properly diagnose racial inequity in the US, then, it is crucial to understand the historical context of each locality….

This thinking is consistent with the findings in a previous McKinsey report, which outlines the case for inclusive growth, which outlines a three-stage approach for embedding equity into economic and community-focused growth strategies: diagnosing the current state and developing a bold vision for change, designing comprehensive community- and human-centred interventions, and taking coordinated action to ensure long-term accountability and momentum.

From ‘Zooming In: Using Local Insights to Inform US Racial-Equity Efforts’, McKinsey & Co