I’m a little shocked at the negative reactions to the results of the Civil Rights Project’s study of perceptions of discrimination in Boston. Some of our state’s white residents seem either angry that black residents perceive widespread racism and discrimination or else upset that those perceptions have been published. If you read their letters to the editor and blog comments, race can’t possibly be the cause of discriminatory practice, it has to be reasons X, Y or Z instead. (Though why classist discrimination would be better than racist isn’t even considered.) Black men and women, the case goes, must be imagining it all. Well, of course, they can in many instances be imagining something that’s not there, but I’d more likely question the confidence of whites who seem so sure that race has nothing to do with events they may not even have been witness to. (There’s an odd parallel to those social problem films of the 40s, 50s and 60s that showed the problem being the black or Asian-American person’s imagination of racism rather than racism itself.)
The study opens itself up for these criticisms by dealing only with surveys of African-American perceptions. More detailed empirical studies are more expensive to do, perhaps, but if the authors want to incontrovertably show, especially to the skeptical, that discrimination is rampant in Metro Boston, they should make the discrimination itself the object of study. They do this through some intellectual slight of hand; at one point they claim,
Some scholars argue that beliefs about racial discrimination among Whites stem less from contact with racial minorities and understandings of their actual experiences, and more from abstract ideologies or White group interests. In contrast, minorities tend to develop their perceptions of discrimination levels through their own experiences.
only to write later on, “Although relatively small shares of African Americans and Hispanics believe they have experienced housing discrimination themselves, substantial portions of our sample believe that housing discrimination persists against the broader African American and Hispanic populations in Metro Boston.” Perceptions of discrimination are either based primarily in lived reality or in application of ideological-perceptive models on reality. Which is it?
Discrimination, too, seems to mean different things across the study. Either conscious or unconscious, legally-defined or common-usage-defined, resulting in different life-chances or no, the concept here refers to it all. This gets confounded when the survey asks respondents about “discrimination.” The authors spell out one set of meanings - what do the respondents mean by the term?
Thus my problems with the study are intellectual rather than political, a cynicism about Press Release policy writing that doesn’t really illucidate the causes or solutions of the problem but merely comes up with a desired press soundbite (”Discrimination still a problem in Boston” “CEOs awarded for Outsourcing”, etc.) and works backward to find intellectual window-dressing for the case. And the window-dressing abounds here, with references to mental health, public health concerns and declining state population, as if it’s not bad enough to have discrimination, you have to have pathology and dollar signs attached to it, no matter how tenuous those claims are (and they are tenuous). One howler even comes up with a quasi-social-scientific concept of “social trust,” for which a footnote cites a report “that Boston was tied with four other cities in the 39th position because low shares of Boston respondents said they trusted others ‘a lot.’ ”
This is unfortunate. In my mind the last thing we need is a talking-past-each-other debate over whether we’re a New Boston who’s kicked off the shadows of its busing episode or whether racism is alive and well in the Metro area. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. Let’s accept that and move to figure out policy and politics that will enable us to address race and class inequality of life chances the best we can given the constraints of state politics and our economic system.
No comments have been added to this post yet.