There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

In the United States, race is the primary obstacle to opportunity. Racial prejudice has been woven into the country’s social, economic, and political fabric over the centuries since the Atlantic slave trade began. Black and other minority Americans face the same constraints on opportunity as everyone else—poverty, socioeconomic class, place, and gender—but race plays into all of these. It amplifies the other disadvantages.