If we calculate the overall Civic Health Index separately for Whites, African Americans, and Latinos, we find that Whites have the highest score and Latinos have the lowest. (Unfortunately, data are not available for Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others, except for voting and volunteering.)

Race and ethnicity, however, are not like educational background, for which all the components show the same patterns. On the contrary, minorities are ahead of Whites on some measures and behind on others. We therefore believe that aggregating all the indicators into indices by race and ethnicity would be misleading; it would obscure a complex picture. Instead, we provide a sample of indicators below.