Forum Survey Gives Local Context to Emerging National Debate on Race

Say what you will about the tone, content or motivation behind Senator Barack Obama's speech on race relations earlier this week, but it is difficult to refute the positive aspects of having a national dialogue on race.

A little more than a year ago, the Public Policy Forum tried to launch a similar conversation here in Milwaukee. Our race relations survey -- conducted of 1,000 whites, African Americans and Latinos in Southeastern Wisconsin -- was a concerted effort to explore how people of different races in our region perceived themselves and other races, and to quantify just how much of an impact the state of race relations was having on the general health of our community.

Those who have been captivated by the emergence of the race issue in national politics should check out our 2006 report. Among the findings:

• Younger people in our region felt much more positive about people of other races than older people.


• 24% felt race relations were growing worse, a stark contrast to the 56% who felt that way in a 1991 Forum survey.


• Half of the African Americans surveyed felt they had been stopped by police because of their race.


• Most whites believed racial profiling by police or avoiding non-white neighborhoods to be common sense, while most African Americans believed such actions to constitute prejudice.

Interestingly, when asked what has to happen to improve race relations in our region, a typical response from individuals of all races was that "people need to learn how to discuss race." To the extent that the attention given to Obama and his former pastor has generated such discussion, we are making progress already.

Justice and the racial divide

In a recently released study, the Milwaukee County Audit Department analyzed the jury selection process in the wake of last year’s Frank Jude case, in which an all-white jury acquitted three white defendants in the beating of a biracial man.

The audit finds that people of color are under-represented in the county’s jury trials. Of the 3,856 jurors empanelled in 2006, the study found, 79% were white whereas 66% of the general adult population in the county is white. In contrast, 24% of the county’s voting-age citizens are African American, but just 16% of the jurors are. The audit acknowledges that any changes in the process of drawing the jury pools would require statutory changes and would certainly be challenged in court. Thus, more representative juries will not likely come from broad policy changes, but from tinkering with the incentives to serve. The auditors suggested several ideas for improving the racial balance on juries by increasing the portion of people who report for duty of all those who receive summons. Increasing the jurors’ daily pay or moving to a “one day or one trial” system are just two ideas.

If successful, those tinkerings may have as big an effect as would broad policy changes; the citizens of our region report very different views of the justice system depending on their race. The Public Policy Forum’s comprehensive race relations survey, released late in 2006, interviewed 1,000 citizens of the seven-county Milwaukee region, who suggested that creating a sense of fairness in our justice system is the greatest single challenge to racial harmony in our region. For example, the vast majority of African Americans felt “police brutality…is way out of hand,” but only 18% of whites felt that way. Also, 28% of African Americans -- but just 4% of whites -- reported someone in the family was in prison, on probation or on parole. Ensuring juries are representative could be a big step toward improving the perceptions of our justice system, for all those who encounter it…plaintiffs, defendants, and the jurors themselves.

A New Commission?

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Governor Doyle has appointed a Commission to Reduce the Racial Disparity in Wisconsin's Criminal Justice. The key is to figure out why Wisconsin has the third highest ratio (18:1) of incarcerated minorities to whites, and to fix it.

While the main charge of the group seems to be to look for discriminatory practices throughout the state's criminal justice system, the story said the governor wants to consider how poverty, parental involvement, education and abuse all factor into the crimes. That is certainly a laudable goal, but doesn't an examination of the root causes of crime deserve its own high-profile commission?

PPF in the morning

The reaction to Don Imus referring to female basketball players as “nappy-headed hos” highlights an important finding from the Forum’s 2006 survey on race relations: Whatever our race, we are typically not exposed to offensive racial terms. In the survey, we asked 400 whites, 400 blacks and 200 Hispanics: “In the past year, …has someone called you an offensive term?” Responding “yes” were 11% of whites, 23% of blacks, and 32% of Hispanics.

Interestingly, the survey found that people of color are more likely to feel ignored than insulted. Half of African Americans and 38% of Hispanics report having been ignored because of their race, presumably by a store clerk, a loan officer or perhaps a teacher. While overt racial jokes and slurs draw attention, saying nothing whatsoever can be offensive too.

PPF Presents

On April 25th, Forum president Jeff Browne will present the results of our race relations survey at a breakfast event sponsored by The Business Journal, the Valuing Diversity Task Force of Sussex/Lisbon, the Sussex Area Chamber of Commerce, the Menomonee Falls Chamber of Commerce, and the Hamilton School District.

After Jeff’s presentation there will be a business panel discussion on “Diversity and Doing Business in Waukesha County.” The panel includes: Keith Everson, President, Rexam Sussex; Gloria Keshemberg, Manager of Employment and Employee Relations, Community Memorial Hospital, Menomonee Falls; Pat Pearman, Global Manager of Diversity, GE Healthcare; Rob Quadracci, Director of Employee Services, Quad/Graphics, Inc.; Mark Sabljak, Publisher, The Business Journal of Milwaukee; Daniel Trawicki, Waukesha County Sheriff; and Daniel Vrakas, Waukesha County Executive.

For more information and to register, call the Hamilton School District at 262-246-1973 ext. 1100.

Click here for more details on the April 25th diversity presentation.

Also, next week Forum senior researcher Ryan Horton will present findings from our recent analysis of City of Milwaukee economic development efforts. The presentation and following discussion will be held on April 10th at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) building in Room 345 from Noon - 1:30 pm.

The lecture is part of SARUP's Smart Growth Lecture Series. The Spring 2007 theme for the lecture series is Hidden Assets: Building Community Wealth.

Click here for more details on the April 10th economic development presentation.

UWM student journalist punctures Mayfair Mall media hype

A story on Frontpage Milwaukee, an online newpaper run by UWM journalism students, illustrates how the local mainstream media has focused disproportionately on Mayfair Mall's crime problems. The author, Matthew Hrodey, found:

In 2006, police made 731 arrests at Mayfair Mall, only 11% more than Mayfair's five-year average - and about half the number arrested last year at Southridge Mall, a mall in Greendale that had about 30% fewer visitors in 2006.

In addition, the mall arrest statistics show that adults committed twice as many crimes as junveniles and that most thefts were committed by women and girls. Read the whole article for an in-depth analysis of the arrest statistics for both malls, including demographic data.

The article is a great example of the facts calling our perceptions into question. And yes, I'm tagging this post "race relations."

Hat tip: Mobile's Take


UPDATE: The mainstream media jumps on the bandwagon.

Race relation-omics?

The Forum's public opinion survey on race relations released late last year found race relations in SE Wisconsin are poor and not perceived as getting better. But we also found that in areas of interpersonal relations, such as marriage, adoption, friendship, etc., attitudes toward people of another race have improved across the board since we last surveyed on the issue in 1991. How can one survey find such disparate results? The answer may lie in economics.

A recent column by Tim Harford in Forbes magazine highlights the research economists have done on racism and concludes:
Economists tend to assume that people respond to the incentives they face. If that's true, we have to face up to the fact that young black Americans are facing some lousy choices. There is a lot of work for all of us to do.

Turns out economists are making a distinction between "taste-based" discrimination and "statistical" discrimination. The former is when discrimination occurs because of a dislike of minorities, the latter is when race is used as a marker for a trait to be selected out. Harford explains:
Non-racial statistical discrimination is actually rather common: An insurer will consider your age and your sex when deciding how much to charge for auto insurance. Why? Because the stereotypes, however crude and however unfair to individuals, contain a bit of extra information.

Harford's pessimistic conclusion arises from the realization that statistical racial discrimination by employers could be an economically reasonable position, if race is, in fact, a relatively reliable marker for something such as the quality of school attended. In that case an employer will respond to the positive incentive resulting from discrimination:
A racist who turns down workers even though he knows them to be competent will take a hit to the bottom line, but statistical discrimination could improve profits, which makes it harder to stamp out. As long as an employer can learn something extra from an applicant's race that he can't learn from looking at a résumé...then the worrying possibility for profitable discrimination exists.

So, the longer most minority children are attending the country's worst schools, the more reliable race is as a marker for quality of schooling. Even more troubling, however, is evidence that statistical racial discrimination based on an unreliable marker can cause the marker to become more accurate.
[Roland] Fryer and two colleagues, Jacob Goeree and Charles Holt, showed how statistical discrimination could easily lead to a vicious circle. They used computer-based classroom games that assigned students the role of employers, "purple" workers and "green" workers. Students in the role of employers quickly jumped to the mistaken conclusion that purple workers were uneducated, and that view became self-fulfilling, as purple workers abandoned hope of getting hired and stopped paying for education. Once the downward spiral set in, a color-blind employer would actually lose money.
"I was amazed," recalls Fryer. "The kids were really angry. The purple workers would say, 'I'm not investing [in an education] because you won't hire me', and the employers would respond 'I didn't hire you because you weren't investing.' The initial asymmetries came about because of chance, but people would hang onto them and wouldn't let them go."

Thus, if people feel that the instances in which they make distinctions based on race are not due to dislike of that racial group, but to a racially-relevant factor, we can find individuals reporting that their own attitudes about race have improved while race relations overall continue to be dismal. Because, if you're on the receiving end of the discrimination, does it really matter what label an economist has given it?