The incessant killing of Black people and "The devaluation of Black lives in all domains of American life," as sociologist Aldon Morris writes, continue to power the Black Lives Matter movement, which was launched in 2013 after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer in Florida.
Discrimination oppresses and disenfranchises people everywhere.
Even the way people talk about certain scientific fields keeps women and minority groups excluded from academia and related professions.
Public health expert Camara Phyllis Jones explains why such institutional racism, not race, has made people of color more than twice as likely to die from COVID-19.
Irrespective of the global pandemic, Black children and other minorities are disproportionately born into poverty and thus incur more health risks throughout their lives.
Black mothers suffer higher rates of maternal mortality, and doctors and algorithms often overlook or discount medical symptoms experienced by Black people.
In the wake of Floyd's murder, civil rights expert Alexis J. Hoag recounted to Scientific American the violent, racist history that brought U.S. society to a breaking point-one where Black people are about three times more likely than white people to be killed by law enforcement.
People of color are more likely to suffer the consequences of a degraded and plundered environment as well: Those with power benefit from exploiting the natural world, but it's the poorest among us who bear the impacts, including toxic pollution.
Asian, Hispanic and Black people experience the highest rates of asthma in the nation, which are strongly linked to dirty inner-city air.
In her influential book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum analogized racism this way: as a moving walkway at the airport that will carry you along unless you walk, vigorously, in the other direction.