In recent years innumerable studies have examined the disadvantages that minority groups in the United States face, particularly the effect of material deprivation on livelihood prospects.
However a new study published in Science magazine this week shows that in the case of African-Americans, it is not poverty or illiteracy that holds them back from ascending the professional ladder but insidious discrimination in terms of opportunities made available to them.
In an unusually self-critical appraisal the National Institutes of Health, the government-run facility that oversees $31.2 billion annually in medical research, announced that a study that it had commissioned found that African-American applicants from 2000-2006 were 10 percentage points less likely than Caucasian applicants to be awarded research project grants from the NIH.
According to a statement by the NIH it had initiated the study in 2008 to determine if researchers of different races and ethnicities with similar research records and affiliations had similar likelihoods of being awarded a new NIH research project grant.
The findings, which have raised a storm over the discriminatory nature of the peer-reviewed funding process at NIH, were part of a study called Race, Ethnicity, and NIH Research Awards .
While the study suggested that Asians faced a less harsh discrimination in this area even they had to contend with being 4 percentage points less likely than Caucasians to receive medical research grants.
Science magazine quoted NIH Director Francis Collins saying, “I was deeply dismayed... This is simply unacceptable that there are differences in success that can't be explained.”
Along with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, Mr.Collins quickly authored a response in the magazine in which they outlined the steps the agency would take to address such racial disparities.
“As much as the U.S. scientific community may wish to view itself as a single garment of many diverse and colourful threads, an unflinching consideration of actual data reminds us that our nation's biomedical research workforce remains nowhere near as rich as it could be,” they said.
The finding comes on the back of numerous, sometimes troubling, race-relations questions focussing on the negative social and livelihood outcomes for African-Americans under the Obama administration.
Several high-profile incidents over the last two years had raised questions about whether African-Americans had seen any welfare improvements at all since an African American President had entered the White House.
Notably the cases of the Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard University professor wrongfully arrested by the police, and of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her job as Director of Rural Development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture over false allegations of racism, suggested that racial harmony in the U.S. has by no means improved since 2009.
