The Dress (and Finding Common Ground in Race Discussions)
A year and a half ago the most controversial issue on social media for a week was The Dress. Facebook raged with the following debate: is the dress pictured below white and gold, or is it blue and black? (I still maintain that it’s white and gold).
Advocates on either side of the issue dug their feet in, and families were torn apart. No matter how hard most people tried, they could only see the dress in one set of colors. Fast forward to July 2016, and we can only wish that it were this easy to agree to disagree.
Yet The Dress is still relevant today because it is a perfect example of a debate in which people held both divergent and deeply held views — so deeply held that most people couldn’t willfully change their own perception even though they knew that it was possible to see the the dress in another way. This was true even though everyone knew that everyone else had zero stake in how they perceived the dress. Even when we have facts, such as a color analysis supporting ambiguity, or the actual color of the dress, it’s hard for us to change our perception.
The Venn Diagram
I’d argue that it’s at least as difficult for many whites and blacks to come to a common agreement on race / police issues, in part because people have more of a stake in the issue. As with the dress, facts don’t necessarily help with the perception. But fortunately there is a lot of common ground. Below is a Venn diagram showing where whites and blacks in America intersect in opinion on various topics based on recent polls.
(References for each item are in parentheses and linked below. I’ve omitted survey results about Black Lives Matter because fitting those results into this diagram wouldn’t do the nuance justice. You can find those statistics in Pew 2016. I have left other ethnic groups out because a 4+ dimensional Venn diagram would have been too complicated to create and display.)
The goal of this post isn’t to argue that one side of this diagram is more correct than the other. It’s not to argue that Black Lives Matter or that All Lives Matter or that white privilege exists or not.
The goal of this post is to emphasize the issues on which whites and blacks agree (which is also generally the same issues with which other ethnic groups agree) and to propose that we move forward with those things in mind.
Before talking about those things, it’s still worth scanning the topics about which people tend to disagree. The New York Times even has an article and survey in which they demonstrate that people will come to different conclusions about what happens in police videos given their preconceived notions. The only thing that’s uncontroversial is that peoples’ preconceived notions affect how they interpret events. Like The Dress, people have a difficult time changing their perception of the issue once they’re locked into one mode, regardless of facts (and they tend to interpret facts based on their preconceived notions). Unlike the dress, people often have a vested interest in one side of the debate, which will make it that much more difficult to change their views.
The Common Issues
So, what is the common ground? It’s actually quite broad — arguably much more than what’s under debate (I didn’t include common ground on other political issues like abortion rights, immigration, etc.; there was surprisingly broad consistency across race on those things).
The things that stand out to me in the intersection are:
- The majority of people across ethnicities agree that people should have the right to say in public things which are offensive to minorities.
- The majority of people across ethnicities agree that police should wear body cameras and that ethnic profiling by police is wrong.
- The majority of people across ethnicities agree that a lack of quality schools are a reason blacks have a hard time getting ahead.
- The majority of people across ethnicities agree that the wealthiest Americans should pay higher tax rates, and the U.S. spends too little on the poor.
Freedom of speech.
The majority of people across ethnicities support freedom of speech even if that speech is offensive. While politicians like Trump are criticizing “political correctness”, it’s interesting to note that nobody — even minorities — are trying to take away your right to say offensive things.
This item speaks volumes about how strongly American values run through the fabric of our society and how brave many minorities are to support this right even though much of this speech targets them.
Police Body Cameras.
Police body cameras and ethnic profiling by police are self-explanatory. Even though whites believe less often than blacks that racial profiling by police occurs, they agree that racial profiling by police is wrong, that police should use body cameras, and that the public has a right to videotape police. Mandatory body cameras on police seems fairly uncontroversial. (I haven’t researched how these opinions vary by state, so if those numbers are relevant in enacting change, please feel free to leave these details in the comments.) You can find more information and review / sign a petition for universal body cameras here.
Education.
Next, the majority of people across racial lines agree that education is a barrier to blacks getting ahead in life. The average African American is up to five years behind their age peers in public schools. This is simply unacceptable. There’s plenty more to support improving education: the majority of blacks and whites agree that we also spend too little on education. Moreover, U.S. K-12 schools are two years behind their global peers in subjects like math (ranking somewhere around Italy and Vietnam). This seems like a fairly uncontroversial area for improvement.
Personally I’d love to see a social media campaign in which students attending low-income schools post photos of their decrepit infrastructure. We might call it the #MinoritySchoolShame campaign. I don’t lurk around grade schools, so I don’t have photos to share, but I’m sure many of them would look much worse than this one I found on the Internet (from a school near my hometown). I encourage you to shame your lawmakers into action:
Finally, while there is no clear indication that education spending is correlated with achievement, we can and must demand more from our leaders so we can start to even understand how to improve our educational system, since it seems that now there’s not much political will to do much of anything about education right now.
Decreasing socioeconomic inequality and increasing social mobility.
Finally, the majority of both blacks and whites agree that the minimum wage should be increased and that spending in areas like education, healthcare, and helping the poor should increase. How should we pay for this? Fortunately the majority of whites and blacks also agree that the most wealthy people in the country should pay higher taxes. So it seems fairly uncontroversial that a bigger emphasis on socioeconomic equality and mobility has broad support. Because the personal wealth of whites in America is 13 times that of blacks (Pew 2016), this is likely to disproportionately benefit low-income minorities.
But this post ignores the real issues that are out there!
Yes, we skirt the controversial issues. It is an explicit non-goal of this post to take a position which may alienate a large set of readers. Once again, there’s plenty that we do agree on, and I hope to see more attention given to those common things.
Finally, please let me know if you find survey results that supersede the ones listed above (e.g. because the survey is more recent or its methodology was more reliable).
References
On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart. Pew Research Centers Social Demographic Trends Project.(Pew) http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/
The Great Recession, fueled by the crises in the housing and financial markets, was universally hard on the net worth…www.pewresearch.org
Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry. Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/
Juliana Horowitz and Gretchen Livingston. How Americans view the Black Lives Matter movement. Pew Research Center (Pew 2016) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/08/how-americans-view-the-black-lives-matter-movement/
Richard V. Reeves. The Other American Dream: Social Mobility, Race and Opportunity. August 28, 2013. The Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2013/08/28-social-mobility-race-opportunity-reeves
Timothy Williams, James Thomas, Samuel Jacoby, and Damien Cave. Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?
Now watch the same encounter filmed from the police car's dash camera. That didn't add much clarity, did it? Professor…www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/01/us/police-bodycam-video.html
The Dress. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon)
Frank Newport. Most in U.S. Oppose Colleges Considering Race in Admissions. July 8, 2016. Gallup http://www.gallup.com/poll/193508/oppose-colleges-considering-race-admissions.aspx?g_source=Politics&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles
Sean Last. Political Ideology in America by Race. April 28, 2016 (includes Gallup, Reuters, Smith 2005, and Pew 2015 polls.) http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/04/28/political-ideology-in-america-by-race/
Views of Gun Control — A Detailed Demographic Breakdown (Pew Research Study). January 13, 2011. http://www.pewresearch.org/2011/01/13/views-of-gun-control-a-detailed-demographic-breakdown/
Law Enforcement and Violence: The Divide between Black and White AmericansAssociated Press. NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP) http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/law-enforcement-and-violence-the-divide-between-black-and-white-americans0803-9759.aspx#sthash.fyLQlynI.dpuf
Kathleen Weldon. Black, White, and Blue: Americans’ Attitudes on Race and Police. Huffington Post (with ROPER poll results). September 22, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-weldon/black-white-and-blue-amer_b_8178048.html
Emily Ekins. Poll: 70% of Americans Oppose Racial Profiling by the Police. Oct. 14, 2014. http://reason.com/poll/2014/10/14/poll-70-of-americans-oppose-racial-profi
Body cameras petition. http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/bodycams/
Trip Gabriel. Black Boys Score Far Behind White students. November 9, 2010. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40095887/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/t/black-boys-score-far-behind-white-students/