When self-appointed civil rights leaders shine a spotlight on racial inequities, they are treated as fighting the good fight. When Donald Trump does it, he’s called racist.

Trump has taken many blows over his comments last week in Michigan decrying problems in the black community: “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?” by voting for him?

Many of the voices now stridently criticizing Trump have spend their careers drawing attention to these very same inequalities.

Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, joined the pile on Thursday in Reno, Nevada. She called Trump’s remarks “such insulting and ignorant terms.”

Trump tends to exaggerate. Obviously, not all African-American are poor, and not all black children attend bad schools. But reams of studies over the decades make it clear that black Americans continue to lag on many indices of well-being.

The Brookings Institution last year reported on research indicating that half of black Americans born poor stay poor (compared with 22 percent of whites). What’s more, most black middle class kids are downwardly mobile; 7 out of 10 blacks born in a family with an income in the middle 20 percent fall below that as adults. That compares with 34 percent of whites born into middle-income families.

Brookings also reported that black kids disproportionately attend bad schools. Black students, on average, attend schools at the 37th percentile for test scores. The average white student, meanwhile, attends a school in the 60th percentile.

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Many of the voices now stridently criticizing Trump have spent their careers drawing attention to these very same inequalities.

“The demand for our schools to meet new college-and-career-ready standards is happening in the wake of a record number of children living in poverty and an increasingly diverse student population,” the National Urban League wrote in an open letter to President Obama in 2014. “Students of color represent more than 50 percent of youth and are more than twice as likely to attend segregated schools. Second language learners whose first language is not English now represent 10 percent of all public school students nationwide, and students living in poverty represent virtually half of all US public school students.”

Five years ago at a forum in Miami, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson asked the crowd at the predominantly black church how many people knew someone looking for a job. Several hundred people stood up.

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“This is a state of emergency,” the former Democratic presidential candidate declared.

USA Today in 2012 quoted Jackson decrying the high numbers of blacks dying at the hands of criminals in American cities.

“If a foreign foe took these lives, we would mobilize armies and armadas to stop them,” he said. “But here, because much of this violence is contained in racially concentrated neighborhoods, there is too much resignation and too little outrage.”

In 2008, according to USA Today, the Rev. Al Sharpton — also a onetime Democratic candidate for president — lamented a study showing that black and Hispanic teenagers, on average, had math and reading skills no higher than the typical white middle school student.

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“We are in an age where we are trying to move beyond race, but achievement in education is not beyond race,” he said. “Our children are drowning in the waters of indifference and old coalitions that no longer work and no longer care.”

In 2011, it was the Congressional Black Caucus sounding the alarm regarding high black unemployment.

“We want him [President Obama] to know that from this day forward … we’ve had it,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said, according to The Washington Post. “We want him to come out on our side and advocate, not to watch and wait.”

Rep. Donna Edwards, a black Maryland Democrat, told the Post that African-Americans strongly support the president.

“At the same time, we all want to make sure we hold the White House and the Congress’s feet to the fire when it comes to spurring jobs and opportunity for African American families,” she said.

There is no public record of Clinton criticizing Jackson, Sharpton or black members of Congress for pointing out problems related to crime, education, jobs and poverty in the black community. But when Trump does it, she calls it “insulting and ignorant.”