Equality

This is the 2009 State of Opportunity report.  Here you may download the final report, the final report with accompanying charts, a synopsis, and each of the indicators individually.

Read more about the report here.

Since the last version of this report was released in 2007, state court decisions utilizing and interpreting international human rights law have increased in both number and depth of consideration.

In this "friend-of-the-court" brief before the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, The Opportunity Agenda urges the court to read the New York City Human Rights Law as its authors intended it to operate: as a broad protection for New Yorkers against all discrimination, even when caused by problematic systems rather than prejudiced individuals.  

Human rights are a crucial part of the United States’ legal and cultural foundation. The founders of our country declared that we are all created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights.

And the United States helped to craft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights system after World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust.

This memo offers communications advice for talking about protecting and expanding opportunity during the current economic downturn.  It draws on recent opinion research, media analysis, and experience from the field to offer promising approaches and messages.

These talking points provide advice on talking with journalists and other general audiences about US compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

This publication contains a balance of historical context, framing advice, resources, practical tools and strategies for moving toward a new political conversation.  

Originally written in November 2007, these are talking points for discussing New York’s (then) drivers’ license proposal.

 A Filipina-American media producer talks about the support she receives from the gay community, and why strong, supportive communities are a key to opportunity.

This report offers new and crucial information to the Governor and the Legislature as they consider what steps to take to ensure access to quality health care for everyone in the State.

If the promise of opportunity is a core national commitment, it is essential to measure our success in fulfilling that commitment.  This report assesses the nation’s progress toward protecting and expanding opportunity for all Americans and encourages our policymakers, through bold leadership and innovative policies, to ensure the promise of o

This report focuses on Chinese print media in the United States.

State of Opportunity Equality Indicator Update

Recent analysis of government economic data by The Opportunity Agenda finds that national measures of opportunity are in decline and that unequal barriers to opportunity facing women and people of color do not rise or fall with the overall economy. A report analyzing updated equality indicators from The State of Opportunity in America concludes that economic recovery efforts must address racial and gender gaps in opportunity, as well as overall national indicators in employment, wages, poverty, and education.

Alan Jenkins, Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, writes in The American Prospect on how continued racial barriers hold back our economy.

In her blog today, Arianna Huffington asks if CBS’s new reality offering, Undercover Boss, is the most subversive show on television. It’s a provocative question, as most of us would like to think that a reality show existed that could turn the genre on its head.

An analysis of ten of Silicon Valley's largest companies shows that of their employees, just 33 percent are women. This is despite evidence that women in the workforce are clearly beneficial.

As seen in the chart below, that's been making the rounds, the stimulus is working. The Obama Administration, using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is touting that the number of jobs lost is lessening.

Belief in opportunity is a bedrock American value. The lure of the hope that your circumstances will be dictated by your ability and your effort is the primary motivation that brings people from the rest of the world to our shores. Central to a belief in opportunity is the ideal of equality – the thought that we all begin from the same starting line.

President Obama’s State of the Union address and the Republican Response by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell each called, as they should have, for a renewed focus by government on jobs and the economy.

Recovery from a natural disaster should be able to make survivors “whole.” However, when the starting point is life in one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the Western hemisphere, getting back to normal becomes a trickier proposition.  Haiti has the highest rates of infant, under-five and maternal mortality in the Western hemisphere.  In 2003, 80% of the population was estimated to live under the international poverty line.  As demonstrated by the extended recovery process from Hurricane Katrina, economic condition has a determinative effect on the a

Today, the public will get a look at how funds distributed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are being spent when the reports from agencies receiving these stimulus funds are released.

Only two people know what actually went down between Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley last week, and even they disagree—apparently in good faith—about what transpired. So as the two prepare to have a beer with President Obama later this week, let’s move on to a more productive conversation about race and law enforcement.

It is certainly an important time for America's discussions of health, but also an important time to talk about equality in America as it relates to access to reproductive health care.

In nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the President has made good on his promise to appoint someone with stellar qualifications and intellect who understands the experiences of everyday Americans. Raised in a Bronx housing project by her widowed single mother, Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and has had a remarkable legal career as a prosecutor, a private attorney, a trial court judge, and an appellate judge.

The theory behind high-quality public education is that there’s real value—civic, economic, and cultural—in providing every member of our society with the tools to fully utilize his or her potential.   When we all understand our civic rights and obligations, our democracy is stronger.  When we’re all skilled, our economy is more robust.  When our imaginations flourish, our culture is richer.  Conversely, when we systematically fail to provide some members of our nation with a quality education, we preclude these individuals from making their full contributions to our nation, our economy, and our culture.  It is disturbing, then, that persistent educational inequalities exist.

Brentin Mock at The American Prospect reports on the nomination of West Coast green jobs and urban revitalization advocate Van Jones to the White House position of Green Jobs Czar. Van Jones is the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All.  He is author of the New York Times Bestseller The Green Collar Economy.

Education is perhaps the closest thing we have to a social panacea.  When it works, it can fuel social mobility, economic productivity, crime prevention, and personal fulfillment.  And we know that the earlier a child enters school, the more likely he or she is to have a successful academic career.  So why is it so hard to make universal preschool a national priority?

The Opportunity Agenda is pleased to announce the release of our 2009 State of Opportunity in America report. The report documents America’s progress in protecting opportunity for everyone who lives here, and finds that access to full and equal opportunity is still very much a mixed reality.

In the days just before and after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 80th birthday, I had the opportunity to visit two places that are integral to his modern day legacy: Washington, DC and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. As I witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president, I thought of Dr. King’s admonition, in his 1963 I Have a Dream Speech, that “we cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” Despite some continuing problems at the ballot box, this was an election about which Dr. King could be truly satisfied; African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect the nation’s first African-American president.

In the same speech, Dr. King reminded the nation that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

For anyone who’s visited the Gulf Coast recently, it is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as the people of the Lower Ninth Ward—overwhelmingly poor and African-American—are concerned. The world witnessed in 2005 how our government left the region’s people to drown in their homes and suffer unspeakable conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome. More than three years later, that abandonment continues.