With a broad coalition of civil rights and advocacy organizations, MAP – Movement Advancement Project recently released Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for LGBT People of Color, which documents how anti-LGBT laws and systemic failures to protect people from discrimination drive and trap LGBT people of color into a devastating cycle of poverty. The report details the ways in which a wide array of legal failures, combined with the disparities faced by people of color in general, result in higher poverty rates and increased economic insecurity for America’s 3 million LGBT people of color.

Three key failures of the law financially penalize LGBT people of color in the United States:

The law fails to protect LGBT people of color from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, compounded by the added impact of racial and ethnic discrimination;
The law refuses to recognize LGBT families-and LGBT people of color are more likely to be raising children than other LGBT people; and
The law fails to protect LGBT students, in particular LGBT students of color.

The report summarizes research about the economic insecurity experienced by LGBT people of color compared to their white LGBT counterparts and non-LGBT people of color. As with all of MAP’s reports, Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for LGBT People of Color includes recommendations to reduce the unfair financial penalties experienced by LGBT people of color because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as recommendations to address the systemic and persistent disparities that harm the economic security of people of color in the United States. Visit www.lgbtmap.org/unfair-price-lgbt-people-of-color for more information.

An overview infographic summarizing the report’s findings is available at www.lgbtmap.org/unfair-price-LGBT-people-of-color-infographic.