I think there are two tacks to take here, depending on whether your goal is reducing racial disparities or addressing discrimination itself.
1. Because of the heavy focus on poverty in developing countries, donations to normal EA charities also serve to reduce international racial disparities. The development gap between Africa and the rest of the world is strongly tied to colonial policies designed to enrich European countries at the expense of majority-black countries.
2. If you want to focus on racial discrimination, I’d suggest charities aiming to provide help to refugees of genocides. In this case, I’d suggest donating to GiveDirectly’s refugee assistance programs, which aim to provide those fleeing racial, ethnic, and religious genocides with enough money to survive.
Using a new database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans we examine whether colonial origins affect modern economic outcomes. We argue that the nature of discovery and colonization of islands provides random variation in the length and type of colonial experience. We instrument for length of colonization using wind direction and wind speed. Wind patterns which mattered a great deal during the age of sail do not have a direct effect on GDP today, but do affect GDP via their historical impact on colonization. The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island’s GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality. This basic relationship is also found to hold for a standard dataset of developing countries. We test whether this link is directly related to democratic institutions, trade, and the identity of the colonizing nation. While there is substantial variation in the history of democratic institutions across the islands, such variation does not predict income. Islands with significant export products during the colonial period are wealthier today, but this does not diminish the importance of colonial tenure. The timing of the colonial experience seems to matter. Time spent as a colony after 1700 is more beneficial to modern income than years before 1700, consistent with a change in the nature of colonial relationships over time. [emphasis added]
I think there are two tacks to take here, depending on whether your goal is reducing racial disparities or addressing discrimination itself.
1. Because of the heavy focus on poverty in developing countries, donations to normal EA charities also serve to reduce international racial disparities. The development gap between Africa and the rest of the world is strongly tied to colonial policies designed to enrich European countries at the expense of majority-black countries.
2. If you want to focus on racial discrimination, I’d suggest charities aiming to provide help to refugees of genocides. In this case, I’d suggest donating to GiveDirectly’s refugee assistance programs, which aim to provide those fleeing racial, ethnic, and religious genocides with enough money to survive.
Has anyone seen a study on how much of the income gap is due to colonialism?
Colonialism and Modern Income—Islands as Natural Experiments
Many studies have been done on this in econometrics; very few of them are good.
Good answer. Helping refugees of ethnic cleansing is a good way to go here, I think.