evidence: - With respect to homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration, America has failed to deliver any progress for African Americans over the last five decades. In these areas, their situation has either failed to improve relative to whites or has worsened. In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate. In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period. And the share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate. [...] One of the most important forms of wealth for working and middle-class families is home equity. Yet, the share of black households that owned their own home remained virtually unchanged between 1968 (41.1 percent) and today (41.2 percent). Over the same period, homeownership for white households increased 5.2 percentage points to 71.1 percent, about 30 percentage points higher than the ownership rate for black households.9 [...] 9. Homeownership rate data are from Laurie Goodman, Jun Zhu, and Rolf Pendall, "Are Gains in Black Homeownership History?" and accompanying downloadable spreadsheet, Urban Institute, February 15, 2017. The 1968 figure is estimated as 0.2 times the figure for 1960 and 0.8 times the figure for 1970. Most recent data refer to 2015.