In early March, Karen Kama woke up early to hand out flyers in her neighborhood. She wanted people to know about a program at her local library in Reading, Pennsylvania, that helps people learn how to use the internet.
Two out of every three residents in Reading are Hispanic, so Kama’s flyers have one side in Spanish and one side in English.
It was only one year ago that Kama started using the internet herself. She described for me a whole world opening up to her: using Google to translate conversations with her Spanish-speaking neighbor, playing games to keep her brain sharp and looking up test results from her doctor. But she said the best part has been showing people in her community what the internet can do for them.
“I’m so grateful for it because now I can tell somebody else how to do it,” she said. “I’m proud to show somebody what I can do.”
Kama is one of the millions of Black Americans who have been impacted by the digital divide, the gulf between people who have access to any internet at all and those who don’t. For as long as the internet’s been around, people of color have been more likely than their white counterparts to fall on the wrong side of this divide.
The Pew Research Center has asked US adults about how they use the internet since 2000, and every survey has shown Black and Hispanic Americans lagging behind white respondents.
Internet access is a force multiplier. It significantly improves health outcomes, increases employment rates and even boosts our psychological well-being.
“I like to joke that you give me an issue, and I’ll tell you why internet connectivity impacts it,” said Claudia Ruiz, a senior analyst at UnidosUS, a civil rights organization.
The flip side of that coin is that people without it — a group that is disproportionately Black, Hispanic and Native American — experience all those effects in the opposite direction.
To reap the benefits of the internet, you need three things: a connection available where you live, the means to afford it and the tools to use it. Every situation is unique, but in my seven years of reporting on the broadband industry, I’ve found that those boxes have often gone largely unchecked for minority communities.
“Having access to the internet is a social determinant of well-being, and it is something that improves quality of life, which has a series of economic and social outcomes for communities,” said Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
What is the racial digital divide?
There are a lot of statistics you can look at to try to figure out how different groups use the internet, but the source researchers pointed me to the most is the Pew Research Center.
In Pew’s most recent survey, from June 2024, 83% of white respondents said they subscribed to home internet, compared with 73% each for Black and Hispanic adults. (Native Americans weren’t included in Pew’s survey, but US Census Bureau data has them at similar adoption rates as Black Americans.)
A McKinsey analysis of census data found that the gap was even larger in some places: Black households in Chicago and Baltimore, for instance, are twice as likely as their white counterparts to lack a high-speed internet subscription.
“This question is pretty roundly studied across the country, and the results are almost always the same, where Blacks and Latinos just universally lag behind in broadband and devices,” said Drew Garner, a director of policy engagement for the nonprofit Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.
The reasons for the gap are more complicated, but let’s start with the money. The latest Federal Reserve data shows that for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold only $16 and Hispanic households hold $22.
“The racial divide is, to a large extent, a proxy for the income divide, which is what drives broadband adoption,” said Alisa Valentin, broadband policy director at the digital advocacy nonprofit Public Knowledge.
That tracks with Pew’s survey results, which show that 92% of Americans making over $100,000 have home internet, compared with 57% who make less than $30,000.
These numbers paint a simple picture: Poor people can’t afford internet access, and poor people are disproportionately Black and Hispanic in the US. But to get a better view, you have to go back to the 1930s.
Digital redlining: How neighborhoods get left behind
The term redlining has its roots in the New Deal when the Federal Housing Administration was created in 1934 to provide insurance for mortgages from private lenders. With the help of real estate agents, the government created color-coded maps to rank neighborhoods from least to most risky in terms of loanworthiness. Not coincidentally, they assigned the “most risky” grade to neighborhoods where Black residents lived, effectively barring them from qualifying for loans.
The practice was banned when the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, but by then, the damage had been done. A 2022 FiveThirtyEight analysis of 138 metropolitan areas found that “nearly all formerly redlined zones in the country are still disproportionately Black, Latino or Asian.”
What does all that have to do with internet access? Pick out any city in the country. If you place a map of redlined neighborhoods next to one showing internet speeds, you will likely see the same pattern: faster speeds in neighborhoods given the “least risky” grade and slower speeds in redlined areas.
An analysis by The Markup and the Associated Press found that slower speeds were offered in historically redlined neighborhoods in cities like Kansas City, Missouri.
This practice has been so thoroughly documented already that it hardly needs repeating here. In Los Angeles, Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, New York and Oakland, California researchers found slower speeds in poorer neighborhoods.
The most damning evidence came from a 2022 report co-published by The Markup and the Associated Press, which analyzed 800,000 internet plan offers in 38 US cities. In two-thirds of the cities where they had enough data to compare, internet providers offered the worst plans to the least-white neighborhoods.
“I don’t think it’s a case of executives at AT&T sitting in smoke-filled rooms conspiring about how to not build infrastructure in mostly Black and brown neighborhoods,” said Sean Gonsalvez, a director of communication with the advocacy group The Institute for Local Self-Reliance. He said internet service providers don’t always see the economic incentive to build network infrastructure in these neighborhoods. (AT&T recently pulled its wireless internet plans in New York in response to a state law requiring ISPs to offer low-income residents plans of $15 monthly.)
“We’re focused on doing our part to close the digital divide across the country,” an AT&T spokesperson told CNET in a statement. “As we expand high-speed internet connectivity, we consider a number of factors, including costs, competitive offerings and customer demand. Any suggestion that we discriminate in providing internet access is wrong.”
Barriers to homeownership created wealth disparities; wealth disparities meant that those same redlined neighborhoods have been last in line for technologies like fiber, which is considered “the gold standard” for internet connectivity, according to Cornell rural planning researchers.
But it’s probably too simple to say that income is the only determinant of where broadband infrastructure is built. In a study of Los Angeles County from 2014 to 2018, researchers at USC looked at where fiber had been deployed.
“Income was the main driver of the disparities, but even after controlling for income, we did find a significant racial disparity in some areas lagging behind fiber deployment,” said Hernan Galperin, a professor at USC and one of the authors of the study.
Cid Espinal, who works at the Reading Public Library in Pennsylvania training seniors in digital literacy skills, has seen these disparities firsthand. One 2024 study published in the Annual Review of Sociology determined that the city of Reading had the highest segregation rate between white people and Latinos of any city in the country.
“You’re literally crossing the bridge. Here, on one side of the bridge, is strictly Comcast. The moment you cross the bridge, you have access to FastBridge Fiber,” he said.
FCC broadband map of fiber availability in Reading, Pennsylvania
The FCC’s broadband map shows fewer than 1% of homes can get fiber in Reading, compared with 41% across the Schuylkill River in the adjacent borough of Wyomissing. That doesn’t necessarily mean people in Reading can’t get fast internet — Comcast offers download speeds up to 2,100 megabits per second in parts of the city — but it does mean there’s a lack of competition.
“Comcast has a chokehold on the city. They get to charge whatever price they can because there are no competitors here,” Espinal said.
Comcast’s prices start at just $35 per month in Reading, but after two years, the same plan jumps to $83. When that happens in a city with essentially one provider, consumers are stuck with three options: try to negotiate a better deal, cancel or pony up.
“We offer low-cost Internet options like Internet Essentials for $14.95 and prepaid NOW Internet for $30, and a variety of other speed tiers, that cater to every household and budget in Reading and nationwide,” a Comcast spokesperson told CNET in a statement. “We encourage our customers to contact us when their promotional period ends, so we can find an Internet plan that meets their needs.”
The FCC created digital discrimination rules, but they haven’t been implemented
“Is it systemic racism? Yeah, obviously it is,” said Andy Stutzman, executive director at the nonprofit Next Century Cities. “Whether it was intentional or not is another question. I think in many places, it probably was.”
This question about intent in digital redlining has been the subject of much debate. In 2023, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that intent isn’t necessary to allege digital discrimination; only conduct with a “discriminatory effect, based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin” is.
“The idea was to better understand and even define what we mean by digital discrimination, which the FCC defined as direct and indirect acts of discrimination, which ISPs hated,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State University who sat on the FCC council that helped draft the rules.
It would be exceedingly difficult to prove that internet providers directly discriminated against minority communities. Indirect discrimination is another story.
“You didn’t have to prove AT&T was racist,” Garner said. “You just had to prove that the effect of their network design disproportionately disadvantaged racial minorities.”
The FCC adopted these rules in November 2023 and was almost immediately sued by the US Chamber of Commerce and two cable industry lobbying groups. The rules are currently being challenged in court, and industry experts don’t expect Trump’s FCC to defend them. (The FCC didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
“They really haven’t been implemented yet,” Stutzman said. “I think we were looking towards a brighter future. But that’s not what we’re necessarily seeing at the moment.”
Rural doesn’t always equal white
When we talk about the broadband gap, rural areas tend to get most of the attention (and funding). Take the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment program, a $42.5 billion fund passed as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
“The idea [with BEAD] was always to take the number of options that people have from zero to one. It is never to take them from one to two,” said Bill Callahan, director of the nonprofit Connect Your Community.
BEAD prioritized fiber as often as possible, with an exception for sparsely populated areas where fiber would be prohibitively expensive to build. (I recently reported on how this fiber preference is starting to change with the Trump administration, which is expected to shift BEAD’s rules to favor satellite options like Elon Musk’s Starlink.)
“Historically, when we were talking about issues related to the digital divide, I was hearing it more so as ‘digital divide equals rural issue,’ and then folks would say rural equates to white. And that’s not true,” Valentin said.
According to the 2020 census, nearly 14 million rural Americans identified as Black, Hispanic or Latino, Native, Asian, or multiracial — a population larger than that of New York City and Los Angeles combined.
A 2021 study from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that 38% of Black Americans lacked home internet access in the Black Rural South, compared with 23% of white Americans in the region and 22% of Black Americans nationwide.
Even when it is available, it’s often much slower. The report notes that 36.6% of all American households don’t use the internet at speeds of at least 25Mbps download — the FCC’s minimum definition for broadband at the time — compared with 72.6% in the Black Rural South. Last year, the FCC quadrupled the broadband threshold to 100Mbps download to reflect the greater needs of Americans for fast internet.
In other words, the racial broadband gap doesn’t just exist in rural areas too — it’s actually wider than it is in cities in some cases.
Affordability is a bigger barrier for most people
Digital redlining has kept many minority groups from a speedy internet connection, but the cost of a connection is an even bigger hurdle for most people.
A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that one in five people who don’t have home internet cited cost as the main reason — the highest of any answer and well above the number who said service isn’t available. Another study found that “for every American without broadband service available, up to twice as many have service available but still don’t subscribe.”
“As folks in this space like to say, if it’s not affordable, it’s not accessible,” Gonsalvez said.
Over the years, the vast majority of federal broadband money has gone to expanding infrastructure. Comparatively little has been spent on helping people afford an internet connection once it’s there.
That started to change with the COVID-19 pandemic, when Congress passed the Emergency Broadband Benefit to help low-income families keep internet service. At the beginning of 2022, this morphed into the longer-term Affordable Connectivity Program.
“The ACP program really saved my life,” said Dorothy Burrell, a digital navigator with the Kansas City nonprofit Essential Families.
The ACP provided $30 monthly to anyone making below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines, or $60,000 for a family of four. By the time the $14.2 billion program ran out of money in May 2024, more than 23 million households had enrolled.
According to a (since-deleted) White House fact sheet, one in four households participating in the ACP program were Black, one in four were Latino and nearly half were military families, along with 4 million seniors and 10 million Americans over the age of 50.
“The No. 1 reason that we hear from our community on why folks are not adopting broadband is cost,” said Daiquiri Ryan Mercado, strategic legal adviser and policy counsel for the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
Digital literacy and tools
Along with the ability to access and afford an internet connection, you also need the tools to use it. Otherwise, it’s like having a meal in front of you but no utensils to eat it with.
The data shows that the digital divide is just as strong on the device end. According to a 2021 Pew survey, eight in 10 white adults own a desktop or laptop computer, compared with 69% of Black adults and 67% of Hispanic adults.
Additionally, 22% of Hispanic and 19% of Black adults are considered smartphone-dependent, meaning they own a smartphone but don’t subscribe to home internet service, compared with 12% of white adults.
“It’s really hard to apply for a scholarship or a job on a [mobile] phone,” Mercado said.
Several nonprofits working to close the digital divide provide free or discounted devices, and some providers like T-Mobile will give students a laptop or tablet at cost. CNET editor Josh Goldman also recommends buying a used or refurbished laptop.
“Sites, including BackMarket and eBay Refurbished, sell deeply discounted laptops from qualified refurbished, and they typically come with a one-year warranty,” Goldman said.
Along with the devices themselves, many marginalized groups have never been taught the skills to use them. Essential Families partnered with T-Mobile to offer people living within 150% of the poverty level discounted internet plans and devices, plus an initial two-hour training session.
Dorothy Burrell started as a student in the program but has since become a digital navigator herself, teaching people in the program how to use their new devices.
“I let them know that I was once where you were sitting. And that kind of gives them hope that, okay, I can do this,” Burrell said.
Lynnette White, a 77-year-old in San Francisco, told me she’s noticed that Black people are often quieter in her digital literacy classes with the nonprofit Community Tech Network.
“It has a lot to do with their pride,” she said. “They don’t want people to know that they don’t know.”
Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that it’s important not to teach minority communities outdated digital literacy tools.
“That often happens in an economy where digital literacy is tethered to racial stereotypes and tropes,” she said. “Low-income black people in particular are sort of stereotyped into being seen as people that know nothing about how to turn on a computer.”
“In actuality, we should be also catering digital literacy towards ways in which they can protect their online privacy.”
“Sprinting before so many of us even walk”
When I asked Burrell whether she would ever consider canceling her internet, she seemed shocked that I would even ask.
“Never. Never. You need it. You need the internet no matter what,” she said. “I could go without getting my nails done, but not my internet.”
Phyllis Jackson, a retired administrative assistant in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, gave me the same answer.
“I can’t live without it,” she said. “I will find some way — cutting down on food or heat or whatever. Because it’s really necessary. I live alone, and the computer’s like my best friend.”
Ultimately, the broadband divide isn’t a force with a mind of its own — it’s a result of our choices as a country. And those choices don’t just leave communities of color behind.
“Equity does not just mean racial equity,” said Valentin. “We’re talking about rural communities, low-income communities, veterans, communities of color, of course — and all the ways in which those intersect.”
It can be hard to wrap your head around. At the same time that OpenAI builds data centers that would collectively consume more electricity than every home in Massachusetts, 21% of Americans don’t have a broadband internet connection to use the tools it produces.
“We’re sprinting before so many of us can even walk,” said Claudia Ruiz, the civil rights analyst at UnidosUS. “We’re all so focused on what AI can bring, on how AI is going to revolutionize everything. But we still haven’t even dealt with the basic gaps of digital connectivity.”
Several of the experts I spoke with for this article recommended contacting your representatives and letting them know that the digital divide is a top concern. You can find the contact information for your senators and representatives by entering your address on Congress’ website.
“If constituents come to their members and say, ‘This is something that impacts us,’ I think at least it will give them pause,” said Mercado.
