Q.Find out more about racial inequality in the US. Which group or groups in our country suffer from similar inequality? What kind of policies have been adopted in the US to reduce this inequality? Is there something to be learnt from their experience?

The cartoon "A Dream Deferred" points to how, decades after the US civil rights movement won legal equality for African Americans, real gaps in wealth, voting access and opportunity persisted. …

The cartoon "A Dream Deferred" deliberately echoes Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech from the civil rights era, and contrasts 1968 with a later year to make a point about continuity: even though the US formally ended racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights through civil-rights-era legal reform, real economic gaps between Black and white Americans — in wealth, in the real value of wages, in access to voting itself — remained strikingly persistent. The message is that legal equality, won through hard struggle, did not by itself close the underlying economic and social gap.

In India, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Dalits and Adivasis) face a broadly comparable historical pattern — long-standing social exclusion, denial of access to education, property and public spaces, and continuing gaps in outcomes like education (as the table discussed earlier in this chapter shows directly) that closely track this history of exclusion.

On policy, the US relied on civil-rights-era legal reform — ending legal segregation and guaranteeing voting rights — combined with affirmative-action programmes in education and employment aimed at correcting the accumulated effects of past discrimination. India's own affirmative-action tool is its policy of reservations in education and public employment for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, built on very similar reasoning: that formal legal equality alone does not undo the practical, lived effects of a long history of exclusion. …