To understand health disparities that disadvantage marginalized racial communities, you need to understand health equity. It is important to understand that public health and health equity are not limited to just the medical healthcare field, as many may believe, but are both concepts are involved and are integral to the overall health of the community. While this does include access to reliable and cost-effective medical healthcare, it also means having access to clean and fresh food in supermarkets, access to quality parks services, as well as housing, education, and law enforcement. Systemic racism is a very prevalent factor in terms of explaining health disparities. Take the education system, for example; public education is funded predominantly by housing tax so this means that Black and brown communities are more likely to only have access to poor-quality education because of the history of redlining in America. Redlining was a racial segregation practice that limited access for people of color to take out certain housing loans, consequently placing them into zones of cities and towns where resources were inequitably distributed to those zones, creating very intentional disparities across communities. These issues in health equity have only begun to grow as the systems that uphold these issues continue to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing social environment in the United States. In the present day, we are able to discern the lasting effects of of things like redlining and the impact it has on things like education and preventing communities of color from thriving. For example, the percentage of Black Americans who live below the poverty line (17%) is nearly over double the amount of white Americans in the same socioeconomic demographic (8%), which provides some insight into how the segregation practices of Black Americans in the early 20th century still play a role in placing not only Black communities, but other communities into the margins and keeping them there. Because the poverty rate is so high among specifically Black Americans and Latino Americans, those communities aren’t able to fund their public education systems as well as other areas where local property tax is much higher, meaning that not only are marginalized communities not receiving as many resources as their higher-income counterparts, but the resources that they do receive are likely to lack in quality as well. The outcome of this is found within the school-to-prison pipeline, where students are put in a poor quality educational environment resulting in lack of educational and counseling services, harsh disciplinary punishments among other factors that also effect a students ability to perform well in school, leading to higher dropout rates. In sum, the lack of quality, care, and funding of public education systems in areas that are majority minority criminalize students’ behavior, failing to meet their needs, and create unequal opportunities increase the likelihood that students will be funneled into the criminal justice system rather than given a chance to succeed academically and personally.