Businessman and former NBA basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson, left, blows a kiss to a member in the audience as he arrives with television sportscaster Ahmad Rashad, right, for the “My Brother’s Keeper initiative announcement.By the time black boys hit fourth grade, 86 percent of them, along with 82 percent of Hispanic boys, are reading below grade level. Comparatively, 54 percent of young white boys in the fourth grade read below proficiency.
Here’s where that disparity leads:
• Black male students are four times more likely, and Hispanic students twice as likely, to be suspended from school than their white peers.
• Black and Hispanic young men are more than six times as likely to be victims of murder than their white peers. In fact, young black and Hispanic men account for almost half of the nation’s murder victims each year.
• And together, blacks and Hispanics comprise about 58 percent of all prisoners, even though blacks and Hispanics make up only about one-quarter of the U.S. population.