Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Research
The Creation–and Consequences–of the Model Minority Myth
07 months ago
Asian-Americans face significant challenges to getting their education, says a new report out from the National Commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islander Research in Education. And the study has got everyone from experts to students talking, because the findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom about Asian American students as high-achieving, so-called model minorities.
The picture of Asian Americans is distorted by the broad lens too much research uses. While Asian Americans as a group record high levels of educational attainment that match and occasionally surpass that of whites, large sectors actually deal with high dropout rates from high school and college. The study also underscores the complicated reality of the Asian-American community. Asian Americans are not a monolithic group and the experiences of Hmong, Laotian and Cambodian Asian Americans differs greatly from that of, say, East and South Asians growing up in the U.S.
Here’s some of the hard math:
- Nearly 70 percent of Indians in the U.S. over 25-years-old have a bachelor’s degree, according to the study, and over 50 percent of Chinese, Pakistani and Korean-Americans over 25 also have college degrees.
- But fewer than one in 10 Samoan-Americans can say the same. Cambodian, Hmong and Laotian Americans also record college degree attainment levels that hover around 12 and 13 percent.
- All this is crucial because educational attainment translates directly to unemployment levels. Between 2006 and 2008, 15.7 percent of Tongans were out of work, according to CARE, a level that is close to the unemployment levels of black Americans, while just 3.5 percent of Japanese-Americans were unemployed in the same time period.
But in the age of the Tiger Mom, who’s emerged as 2011′s spokesperson for the model minority myth, much of this information about Asian-Americans gets lost in the shuffle. The study calls for the disaggregation of data collection on Asian Americans and education issues and reiterates over and over the dangers of buying into the model-minority myth, which suggests that Asian Americans owe their relative wealth and high educational attainment to cultural values and hard work.
To get some perspective on the persistence of this myth of Asian American exceptionalism, I spoke with Oiyan Poon, a research associate at the University of Massachusetts’s Institute for Asian-American Studies and former academic adviser at George Mason University and the University of California, Davis. Here’s what Poon had to say about the myth’s enduring legacy, and how it impacts other students of color.
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On the ways the model minority myth plays out in real life:
People are not being blatantly racist, but as an academic advisor I’ve seen educators say, “Well, my class is half Asian, they must be doing something right.” That hyper-visibility may lead to an interesting invisibility. At UC Davis, we asked the institutional research office to go through their data set and one year everyone was shocked because Korean men in the early 2000s had one of the highest push-out rates. But no one would have known.
The lack of good data–and the pervasiveness of stereotypes and not looking deeper at a very complicated population and understanding those complexities–leads to things like this. There’s a lack of high school outreach programs and community partnerships and things that completely overlook the Asian-American community even though students may be low-income and there is serious need there.
On when the model-minority myth ends up excluding Asian-American students:
There are actually minority scholarships that exclude Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, like the Gates Millennium scholarship. It’s a national scholarship geared toward low-income, first-generation college students that was only open to African American, American Indian and Latinos students. Advocacy organizations fought them on it and were able to get them to realize they should be open to Asian Americans because, in fact, around a third of Asian-American students are the first in their families to go to college. And for Hmong, Laotian and Cambodians, just [over 10 percent] of the population over 25 has college degrees, and that’s among the lowest of any population.
On the actual barriers Asian-American students face in college:
When I was working at UC Davis, there was summer orientation, and all these college campuses have a family track. What struck me was that at the student portion of the orientation, there were huge numbers of Asian students, but at the family or parent track, it was almost always all white. There’s a disconnect in parental support and a lot of students don’t get any help in putting together financial aid papers or figuring out how to navigate which classes they should take.
I met a lot of Asian-American students who faced sexual or racial discrimination and harassment on campus and they didn’t know where to turn for help. For many students who are the first in their family to go to college, they often don’t know there’s a counseling center that’s there for emotional support, or other campus resources.
Why Asian-Americans just can’t be seen as a monolithic group:
There are huge disparities within this population that make this title, “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” sort of arbitrary. It’s a geographic identifier; it’s not a socioeconomic status identifier, though in some ways it can be.
The experiences that each group has–the migration histories; the culture; the language; the circumstances of arrival, from being refugees to being highly educated professional immigrants; and now you have a second and third generation that’s facing different issues–mean everyone has very different challenges. In a way you could say this about a lot of different populations and perhaps this is just a challenge of data systems in general. For Latinos, you’ve got Cubans, who tend to be more highly educated, and Puerto Ricans who don’t have the immigration issues that Mexicans or Central Americans have.
But for Asian-Americans, we end up having this conversation [about the need to disaggregate data] much more because the differences are so much more pronounced. And when there isn’t information, then there are just assumptions that people have to go on, and then the Tiger Moms of the world can keep going on and on as long as they want.
On the dangerous political utility of the model-minority myth:
People have to think about why this model-minority position came to be in the first place. It was to silence other people of colors’ attempts at demanding equity. Everyone who cares about racial equity should care about countering the model-minority myth because the whole purpose of it is to undermine claims of racism. People will say, “Oh, you’re going to riot and say there are inequalities and that blacks and Latinos face racism? Stop complaining, look at this non-white population over here. They’re doing fine.”
The model-minority myth tries to tell people: there are no structural barriers; it’s all in your mind.
It’s true that some Asian Americans are doing well. Sure. It’s true. But does that mean that we ignore the people who aren’t doing well? What’s my responsibility, and what’s our responsibility as people who are concerned about equity, knowing that there are specific groups facing distinct patterns of inequality? Do we say to that Hmong kid who kind of looks like me because we both have black hair, it’s okay, her struggles are not an urgent issue?
What’s Racism? That’s Harder for Youth to Answer Than You Think
07 months ago
Editor’s note: This essay is the second in a three-part Colorlines.com series on research conducted by our publisher, the Applied Research Center, on young people’s opinions about race and racism. Part one challenged the conventional wisdom that today’s youth are “post-racial.” Part three will highlight innovators helping young people organize around structural racism. You can download the research project’s full findings at ARC.org.
If someone asked you to define contemporary racism, what would you say? What would be the first things that came to mind? And do you think your answer would be any different from people of a different racial or ethnic background?
If you are anything like most of the young participants in a series of focus groups conducted by the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, you’d struggle for words. In fact, when we asked dozens of 18 to 25 year olds to answer this question, remarks about the difficulty of the seemingly simple query were perhaps the most common response.
“This is a hard one. Racism today would be, um…” stumbled Jenny, a 21-year-old Asian-American college student in the Los Angeles area, where we held focus 16 groups in late 2010 and early 2011. “I guess discriminating based on the color of someone’s skin,” Jenny continued, falling back upon the type of relatively generic description that many participants of all races and ethnicities used. (Our focus groups consisted of four sessions each with African-American, Asian-American, Latino, and white Millennials.) Carmen, a 19-year-old unemployed Mexican-American woman, answered similarly, defining modern-day racism as “when you’re judged by the color of your skin, by your ethnic background.”
Language describing “institutional,” “systemic,” and “structural” racism may be commonplace in the racial justice movement and related activist circles, but they are not on the tips of young people’s tongues, based on our in-depth study of Millennials’ attitudes about race and racism.
Last week, we published the full findings from our study, “Don’t Call Them Post-Racial,” which debunked the growing conventional wisdom declaring today’s historically diverse youth to be post-race. In fact, once asked to discuss racism in depth, the majority of young people in our focus groups declared race still matters in our society. (Here’s my previous Colorlines essay describing those findings.)
But notably, the young people struggled to come up with language describing racism itself. To be sure, our discussions brought out some responses that showed an understanding of institutional or structural racism–mostly from people of color with some organizing or political experience, and from some white college students who had taken courses focused upon race and ethnicity. Generally though, our participants–60 percent of whom were current college students or college graduates–kept their answers simple.
“Racism is when a person bases their behavior toward or treatment of another person solely because of their race,” according to Courtney, a 19-year-old, white female college student.
Daniel and Luis, two Mexican-American participants in their early 20s from a session in South Los Angeles, also chose words of emotion to describe racism, but notably in more explicitly group, rather than individual terms. Racism is “a little bit of everything. Jealousy. But mostly it’s built up when that other race knows you’re moving up,” stated Daniel. “Grudge, envy [because] they are getting left behind,” added Luis. “People of a different color try to go against you.”
Luis and Daniel’s responses provide a window into the first major difference between how white Millennials and young people of color define racism today. Although a majority of Millennials in each racial and ethnic group stumbled at the question or defined racism in interpersonal terms, young people of color were more likely to see it as a shared, group experience, while white Millennials saw racism as something that is perpetrated or experienced by a single person.
To be fair, it was relatively rare even for young people of color to automatically describe racism in institutional terms–as a series of unfair policies and practices in schools, courts, hospitals or other institutions that help produce broad racial disparities. In broader discussions about those institutions, young people of color made it clear they think race limits opportunities and leads to discriminatory treatment. But when you ask them to explicitly define racism, the institutional dimension is usually included only as an implication.
Talking Race
We asked a total of 80 young people in our focus groups how they define racism today, first asking them during the 90 minute discussions and then again in a post-session survey. Data from the written responses reveal that white Millennials tended to use the word “someone” far more often (more than 40 percent of the time) than young people of color (only 10 percent). As indicated in the word clouds below, in fact, only the words “race” and “racism” appeared more often than “someone” in whites’ written responses. In contrast, “group” was one of the most commonly used words in the responses of people of color. White Millennials used the word “you” as often as they used the word “group.” The top 12 most commonly used words by people of color didn’t even include “you.” These word choices show that white Millennials think about racism more in individualized terms than do young people of color.
Generally, when asked to provide examples, participants of color reflected upon their personal, family, and/or group experiences within institutions or systems. For example, Alexis, a 23-year-old African-American junior college student, reported, “I had an economics teacher who didn’t teach us absolutely nothing … because obviously he didn’t care. So that’s racism.”
On the other hand, Justin, an 18-year-old first-year college student who is white, said when asked if the public school system is racist, “I mean, in my experience in my life, from the schools I have been to, I haven’t experienced racism. I haven’t seen, you know, my schools deny service to any specific race. It is just predominantly white, predominantly Jewish, because that is where I live, and that is how it is. I have never witnessed, you know, someone’s race being a factor in school.”
Justin’s answer revealed a broad tendency among our participants who were white college students, and came from comparatively privileged backgrounds. They didn’t believe their high schools intentionally discriminated against anyone; the segregation they witnessed and the corresponding difference in resources were just “the way it is,” and there was no need to question that fact. Participants like Justin generally did not talk about the policies and practices that created their public school systems–property tax-based funding, abundant availability of college-prep courses, and low student-counselor ratios, among others.
During our focus groups, we discussed for almost an hour the ideal purposes and actual performances of various key systems in our society–from the criminal justice system to public schools to the employment system. Then we asked participants if they believed any of those systems could be described as racist, and how they could know one way or the other.
Most young people of color had little hesitation labeling at least two or three of the systems as racist (criminal justice system and employment, in particular), and in many cases argued that “all” of them were at least somewhat racist and, moreover, intertwined in their inequity. Among white Millennials, however, many participants bristled reflexively at the suggestion, at least when the question was first posed.
“Well, what do you mean by racist?” college student Anna asked her session’s facilitator, after a puzzled pause. Jody, another white female college student from the same session, added, “Calling a whole system racist is, like …” before trailing off skeptically with Anna’s approval. “Besides immigration,” Jody continued, “I guess the public schools system is more ‘classist,’ if you will, than racist. But it comes to the same thing sometimes in some areas. Criminal justice? Probably. It depends on the judge or jury, I guess. Employment? Also, technically not supposed to be, but maybe [it] is, depending upon the employer.”
After Anna acknowledged that there were definitely “aspects” of racism in all the systems, Courtney, a third young white female college student from their session, felt compelled to explain why she, too, hesitated to label any of the systems racist as a whole. “I think none of them, at least today, intend to [be racist] … but because of corruption … because unfortunately, a lot of, like, lower-class areas are filled with minorities, you know, unfortunately they have the effect of being racist. But I don’t think that any of them really intend to be racist. Some of them have in the past. … At least now, none of them overtly strive to be racist.”
The Burden of Proof
Young people of color, like Filipina college student Margarita, believed that it’s easier for more people to say racism no longer exists “because we don’t have the overt racism of, like, segregation where it is spelled out, like, ‘You can’t come here because of your color.’ “
That appeared to be the case when white Millennials were asked, “So how would you know if any of these systems were racist?”
I guess you could go back to segregation if you really want to see racism. There wouldn’t be any Black kids or Asian kids going to the same school together…Now, obviously, we’re all pretty much in the same places. Like at my school, there were a bunch of races. In the jails there’s a bunch of races.
–Jody, white female college studentAfter the reconstruction in the South, you had all these laws being re-enacted that prevented African Americans from voting. Inherently racist right there, the grandfather clause, the literacy test, that kind of stuff, and you know you can clearly see that a certain group is being discriminated against. If you are in L.A. and you had one school that just outright denied African Americans from going there, like, then that is, like, racist.
–Justin, white male college studentYou’d have to have like a blatant. I don’t know that is hard cause you’d have to have someone saying that “They refused to sell me this because I’m, you know Asian as opposed to Black” or whatever. I don’t know, but then the real estate agent could just be like, no they didn’t fit the [profile]… like their money situation just wasn’t… I mean it is hard to say.
–Mirna, 20, white female college student
For Jody, Justin, and Mirna if it’s not overt, racism must not hurt. In fact, it might not even exist save in the overt form. The almost entirely white neighborhood that created Justin’s affluent public school isn’t evidence of any racism. Jody manages to gloss over the striking racial imbalance in our state and federal prisons. And Mirna’s not thinking about the steering of black and Latino borrowers to subprime mortgages, even when they qualified for more favorable loans. So even when there is strong evidence of a race playing a role in how people succeed or fail in a given system, the absence of an explicit rule showing racist intent kept these young people from seeing racism at work.
There were certainly a minority of young people of color who, like Courtney and a large portion of white Millennials, also seemed to require the presence of “intent.” Typically, such participants were like Martha, a Latina college student who said, “I’d have to add that maybe it’s not the systems, necessarily, that play on these identity roles, but more so the people in the systems…. [It] depends on the individuals running the public school systems, individuals running the healthcare systems.”
Nevertheless, some young people of color–particularly those with experience in community organizing or other social and racial justice volunteer work–articulated definitions of institutional racism.
Leata, a 20-year-old college student whose family is from Samoa, said, “I don’t think racism today is like racism was in the ’60s–like very overt: ‘You’re Black, drink from that fountain.’ … I think it’s more institutional and hidden in the laws that we create.”
Harold, an African-American youth organizer, described how his aunt helped him understand present-day racism. She told him, “Race is a system. And so white folks don’t have to, like, call you an n-word to your face now. They just make sure that you live, you know, close to the 110 freeway. Or they just make sure you go to schools like Manual Arts, or Dorsey, or Crenshaw.” Another African-American participant, Stacie, said, “Racism plays out a lot within policy and things that are institutionalized. It can be within school, within prisons, the county. Within public entities in general.”
Some white college students who had taken race and ethnicity courses in sociology or other related fields also showed signs of being able to articulate definitions of racism at the institutional and structural levels. One female college student contributed: “I think today structural racism is kind of more prevalent than just like one-on-one interaction racism. So, like, today racism is the fact that there is severe residential segregation that leads to economic stratification. And just … the fact that the system puts minorities at a disadvantage, whether that it is on purpose or not, but just the fact that the way that the system is disadvantages minorities is like the main racism today.”
Racism Today, and Tomorrow
Defining racism today for Millennials and all others in society needn’t be about the same pin-the-tail-on-the-racist game of older generations, where one person accuses another of being or doing something racist, while the others deny being racist or make counter accusations. This is often a fruitless stalemate, particularly when the dominant white majority (and a minority of people of color) holds a definition of racism that requires proof of intent.
One Latina college student, Martha, expressed frustration late in her session: “I hate the topic of race. I hate it. Because you start seeing … people who are Latinos, who are blacks, hating white people.” Whereas Julia, another 19-year-old Latina college student, said, “I feel like if the white privileged communities were to pay attention to all this research they would be like, ‘Oh, well, they are just playing the race card,’ or something, and might not pay attention to it. Or maybe they just don’t understand at all, like what is going on. Like we grew up in these communities so we understand that there is, you know, these serious issues that they are not affected [by]. And maybe people towards the top, they don’t see that and they feel their policies are working.”
Martha is not alone in wanting to avoid talking about race, and Julia is not alone in having little faith that whites want to engage in the conversation.
But before political commentators and journalists officially declare racism dead, perhaps we should gain consensus upon what exactly we collectively believe racism to be. We need to ask ourselves what type of society do we want to proactively create? If racial justice is to be a key component of that ideal society, can we say we have achieved such a society given our past and current racial disparities–in incarceration rates, in high school and college graduation rates, in household and extended family wealth, in health and on and on.
Until our collective understanding of racism moves beyond the interpersonal level, and regularly includes an understanding of how broad and interconnected policies and practices profoundly impact opportunities and racial outcomes in our society, our spectrum of solutions will remain painfully limited.
PART THREE: Next week, Colorlines will profile several organizations and campaigns that are working with young people to address institutional and structural racism.
All names of focus group participants have been changed. This essay has been altered since publication.
Don’t Call Them "Post-Racial"–How Young People Actually Think About Race
08 months ago
“I think that’s a big fat lie,” responded Jose, 20, when asked the question so many people want to know about his future: whether the fact that his generation elected the first black president means America is, finally, over race. He’s a young Latino man of Mexican descent who works multiple part-time jobs, including painting cars, being a security guard, and doing construction. “It’s been a thousand years that racism has been going on, up ’til this date,” Jose said. “It’s still a whole bunch of things going on.”
Andy, a 19-year old white community college student, was more blunt still. “That’s a load of crap. There are still racists everywhere,” Andy scoffed. “[It] can still hold you down, and make you less successful. And impact your life.”
Jose and Andy are members of what sociologists and journalists have dubbed the Millennial generation. These young people, born after 1980, have been correctly recognized as the largest, most racially and ethnically diverse, and most progressive generation the United States has ever known. Many journalists, political commentators, and even researchers have taken the established fact of increased racial tolerance among them and hastily labeled them “post-racial.” The conclusion fits neatly with the mainstream political narrative of the Obama era–that race and racism are no longer significant barriers to success in our nation.
The Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, found this narrative a bit too tidy. So Research Director Dom Apollon and his team did something that needs to happen more often: Actually ask young people what they think about race. They conducted more than a dozen in-depth focus group discussions in the Los Angeles-area with 80 young people like Andy and Jose, ages 18 to 25, on the intersections of race with key systems of society. They found a far more nuanced set of ideas than conventional wisdom has asserted. Download the full findings of the focus groups at ARC.org. Below, Apollon explores the findings in a three-part Colorlines series. Part two, which will be published next week, will explore the language young people use to discuss race. Part three will highlight innovative groups working with young people to organize around structural racism.
HOW YOUNG PEOPLE THINK, ACT AND TALK ABOUT RACE
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DON’T CALL THEM “POST-RACIAL” [ESSAY] Results from focus groups with dozens of multiracial young people show |
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Research director Dom Apollon explains the project and speaks with some of the focus group participants on camera. |
Don’t Call Them "Post-Racial." Millennials Say Race Matters to Them
08 months ago
Editor’s note: This essay is the first in a three-part Colorlines series based on a series of focus groups conducted earlier this year by our publisher, the Applied Research Center. Part two will explore the language young people use to discuss racism and part three will highlight innovators working to help young people organize around structural racism. You can download the full findings of the focus groups at ARC.org.
“I think that’s a big fat lie,” responded Jose, 20, when asked the question so many people want to know about his future: whether the fact that his generation elected the first black president means America is, finally, over race. He’s a young Latino man of Mexican descent who works multiple part-time jobs, including painting cars, being a security guard, and doing construction. “It’s been a thousand years that racism has been going on, up ’til this date,” Jose said. “It’s still a whole bunch of things going on.”
Andy, a 19-year old white community college student, was more blunt still. “That’s a load of crap. There are still racists everywhere,” he scoffed. “[It] can still hold you down, and make you less successful. And impact your life.”
Jose and Andy are members of what sociologists and journalists have dubbed the Millennial generation. The parlor game of naming and identifying themes for every crop of Americans can be inane, but there’s no denying that people are a product of their times–and, in turn, that each generation collectively gives birth to a new cultural, political and economic ethos. Children of the Depression intuitively grasp sustainability and saving. Baby Boomers can’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Generation X took its own revolution online. And the young people born after 1980 have been correctly recognized as the largest, most racially and ethnically diverse generation the United States has ever known.
The Millennials have already helped usher in two massive, irreversible changes in the 21st century: the election of the first nonwhite president and the news, as of the 2010 Census, that America is just a generation and a half away from being a majority nonwhite nation. As a result of these tectonic shifts, everybody wants to know what young people think about the country’s maddeningly perennial problem: race.
Or, more accurately, everyone wants to declare what young people think about race. Too many journalists, political commentators, and even researchers have taken the established fact of increased racial tolerance among today’s youth and hastily labeled them “post-racial.” The conclusion fits neatly with the mainstream political narrative of the Obama era–that race and racism are no longer significant barriers to success in our nation. Mass market publications have outdone one another with trend stories suggesting that Millennials’ comfort with diversity–whether in identifying as multiracial or dating outside of their race–is proof of that equity.
At the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, we found this narrative a bit too tidy. So we decided to do something that needs to happen more often: Actually ask young people what they think about race and racial equity in their lives and their futures. We conducted more than a dozen in-depth focus group discussions in the Los Angeles area with 80 young people like Andy and Jose, ages 18 to 25. We will be expanding the research to additional cities later this year, but so far, two themes emerged clearly from these conversations.
One is that Millennials do believe that race still matters. The majority of people in our focus groups continue to see racism at work in multiple areas of American life, particularly in criminal justice and employment. When asked in the abstract if race is still a significant factor, a minority of our focus group participants initially said that they don’t believe it is–and some young people clearly believe that class matters more. But when asked to discuss the impact, or lack thereof, that race and racism have within specific systems and institutions, a large majority asserted that race continues to matter deeply.
Of course, the fact that most Millennials believe race still shapes American life should not mask the very real differences of opinion both across and within racial groups about the extent to which it matters. Which is the second theme that emerged from our focus groups: There are real differences in how young people of different races and ethnicities think and talk about this subject. Young people of color are more likely to independently bring up race, resources and access to them, while white Millennials are less likely to make connections across systems like housing and education, and less likely to prescribe political action to fix it.
There’s little question that most Millennials struggle to articulate their views on how race and racism operate in their lives. But our focus groups’ deeper discussions revealed that a structural understanding of racism–of racism as something that grows out of political and economic systems rather than individual animus–is not completely lost on this generation. And that, of course, has serious implications for how they will go about eradicating it from our society.
The Margin of Error on Race Polling
The United States is undeniably becoming more diverse. The 2010 Census found that 39.7 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds are Latino, African American or Asian American / Pacific Islander, and that the population of people of color increased by 80 percent between 2000 and 2010. Preliminary estimates based on these findings project that people of color will become the majority of the U.S. population by the year 2045.
Ever since Barack Obama won the Democratic primary, reporters and commentators have eagerly spun this expected demographic shift together with the president’s political ascent to create the story of America’s post-race future.
Pollster John Zogby, who has labeled Millennials the “First Global Citizens,” wrote in a post-election op-ed, “I anticipate the race issue will diminish as the nation gets more comfortable with [President Obama] as its leader, and as the First Globals are followed by the next wave of young adults, who will be even more accustomed to a multi-racial society.” In early February 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama was gaining traction in the primaries, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Tim Rutten, who argued that Obama was the beneficiary of young voters eschewing both the polarized “racial identity politics” of the left and the religious, “confessional” politics of the right. “What the post-racial perspective of this new generation gap may offer us,” Rutten wrote, “is a chance to see that many of the problems we continue to regard as most intractable are rooted in issues of class rather than race.”
Zogby and Rutten are hardly alone in drawing these conclusions and trumpeting them. The loudest proclamations have come predictably from right wing commentators like Bill Bennett, who declared Obama’s election an end to “excuses” about educational achievement among kids of color, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which suggested “we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”
But the post-race idea is popular among more sober analysts as well. The Pew Research Center reports that “more than two decades” of its surveys confirm that Millennials are more tolerant: “In their views about interracial dating … Millennials are the most open to change of any generation.” Pollsters have been asking similar or identical questions about interracial dating continuously for about five decades, providing comparative data to demonstrate very real generational changes in attitudes over time on an historically painful issue. However, it is a great–and unjustified–leap from there to the assertion that members of the diverse Millennial generation are “post-racial” simply because they date each other, or don’t object when others do.
In fact, these sorts of surveys, and the media response to them, illustrate a large part of the problem in accurately gauging what young people think about race and racism in their lives: polling agencies generally demonstrate a lack of understanding of how racism functions on a systemic level. As a result, pollsters simply aren’t asking the right questions. Often, researchers (at least the ones who garner the most national press) are asking narrow questions about race relations and diversity to gauge attitudes toward race. Those sorts of questions miss the point, so it’s no surprise that the responses they generate seem to miss it, too.
Racism in the Obama Era
Among the 80 racially and ethnically diverse young people who participated in our 16 focus group sessions, conducted between October 2010 and February 2011, a large majority believes that race still matters in society, President Obama notwithstanding. Typically, young people did acknowledge that the 2008 election signaled racial progress, given our nation’s history. As Alice, a 23-year-old college student of Taiwanese descent, put it, “Ten to 20 years ago people would never imagine us to have a black president. So I think it’s moving in a good direction.” It’s the rest of her statement that so often gets overlooked: “But racism is definitely still around.”
Harold, a 22-year-old African American youth organizer, elaborated on the same
point. “It took a lot of white people to get [Obama] elected, but [racism]‘s definitely not over,” Harold said, quipping, “He’s kinda like Oprah.” Harold contrasted Obama’s individual success with more general indicators of African American male success in contemporary society, saying, “There are very few [black] men in four-year universities. And there are so many in prisons.”
Harold was not the only participant to consider the president an exception–as opposed to the rule–for what outcomes can be expected more broadly for African American men or other people of color. There were young people of all races who viewed Obama and/or his election as a special case. In contrast to many commentators on election night, young people in our focus groups largely recognized that the way race does or doesn’t operate in a presidential election can be very different from how it operates in more common arenas. “[Ok, so] about the presidential part, [race] don’t matter. But there are other parts,” said Vicente, a 19-year-old unemployed Latino.
Still, there was significant variation between our focus groups, which were arranged by race, in how young people see race playing out in the Obama era. Interestingly, black youth often felt they’d been backed into just the kind of defensive space that commentators like Bennett ascribed for them.
Participants in a focus group of African American college students, for instance, felt that white people were trying to get them to “stop whining” about racism. “I feel like since Obama has become president, Caucasians want to put it in your face,” said one participant. “We hear it in class, from professors with a PhD. That’s the scariest thing,” said Stacie, who grew up in a lower-income household in South L.A. Earl, who was also in that session, agreed. “I had a prof say that because we had a black president, he felt racism was ending, and that we don’t really have a racist country,” the young man recalled, twisting his face into an incredulous look. “I brought up the comment that also there’s the idea that [white voters] felt guilty.”
Earl also expressed a sentiment that distinguished him and other young people of color from whites in our study: concern about the increasingly hostile tone of the political climate, as reflected by white conservatives and the tea party movement. Two comments are worth quoting at length:
Ever since Obama came into office, I’ve noticed that the political climate has become really racist and racial too. First, it was kind of towards blacks, and now we are having issues with the borders and “let’s hate the Mexicans.” And 9/11–”Oh, we still hate the Muslims.” And white people, there are groups of white people that are, like, “Yeah, let’s embrace this racist attitude we have,” and now it’s becoming okay to say some of these things in a political nature in media. And, wow, this is insane.
–Theresa, 24, biracial (Filipina and white) college graduateIn my political science class, I’m hearing whites go off. They seem very angry. They kinda feel threatened…. The tension is there, you can feel it. It’s just interesting. They say stuff about immigration, where their money for taxes is going. They feel they should go to their schools, not schools in L.A. or Long Beach. They feel like their money should stay in their community. They don’t feel the need to help others. They feel like … why should they be penalized for our sufferings, basically.
–Ed, 24, Filipino American, part-time student, part-time product developer
Reactions similarly differed across racial groups when asked about the demographic projections for the U.S. population. Notably, the white participants in our study generally did not respond in depth when asked how they felt about the nation’s shifting profile and gave comparatively dispassionate responses. The responses of a group of white Millennials who are not in college, for instance, ranged from “it will be good [to have] more diversity” to “[it] will lead to more tolerance” to “there will be more conflict, but eventually things will cool down.” But as a whole, this group expressed a vague sense of optimism. “I don’t know anybody who’s angry/worried about it,” said one person.
Among young people of color, however, the topic generated much more spirited discussions. Reactions ranged from concern over the racist backlash against President Obama and anti-immigrant sentiment in today’s political climate to a minority view of sympathy for the loss of whiteness in the traditional American identity. Some also articulated a disbelief that the changing demographics would come with a change in material circumstances for people of color.
For instance, Daniel, a part-time junior college student in a Latino focus group, argued that having more people of color in the U.S. won’t necessarily bring about equity. “It’s pointless if we’re not moving forward. If we’re not getting the higher education. We could keep on having immigrants coming over, but it’s pointless if we’re stuck in the same place.” African American college student Stacie made a similar point:
In terms of who holds power more politically, economically … as far as, like, land, homeowners, things of economic value? And that really make the economy turn, and that kinda thing? We are not on the radar for that as much as we should be.
Sofia, a 21-year-old college student whose parents are from Costa Rica, similarly
remarked that a demographic shift toward majority status for people of color is “not
necessarily a great thing. The rich are getting richer. And the poor are getting poorer. It
could just be a little bit of white people who are very wealthy, and we could have a lot
more poor people, too.”
Criminal Injustices
Our focus group participants’ responses make clear that, while most Millennials believe that race still matters in our society, there’s a wide variation in how they see it playing out in a world with a black president and a coming demographic majority of people color. But our discussions also delved into the more detailed ways in which race impacts life by focusing on the intersections of “Race and…” several key systems in our society–from public schools to criminal justice to employment to immigration. Those discussions made clear Millennials of different racial/ethnic groups also think in different terms about the extent of race’s impact. Young people of color typically had no problem labeling the criminal justice and employment systems as “racist,” for instance, while whites tended to believe there were simply some racist individuals within those systems. (I’ll describe this difference in more detail in a second essay on our findings next week.)
There is, however, one particularly striking point of agreement: a super-majority of all races/ethnicities in our study said that racism continues to be a significant problem in the criminal justice system. All but 10 percent of focus group participants circled criminal justice when asked, in a post-session survey, “In which of the following areas of society, if any, do you do you think racism is still a significant problem? Options: Educational system; Employment; Housing; Criminal Justice system; Health system; Other_“.
Even a handful of white participants felt comfortable labeling criminal justice as such. Andy, the 19-year-old junior college student, asserted that criminal justice is the “most racist system … on every level.” His friend Jon, who initially was one of the very few participants who did not believe race still mattered in the Obama era, said there was “definitely more prejudice” and “white cops are usually more mean.”
But while white young adults tended to focus their comments on racial profiling and speak about things that they’d heard about, people of color, particularly African Americans, often spoke in starkly personal terms. Donnell, a 24-year-old African American who is a part-time sales rep, offered a representative comment:
I’ve never seen anything correct about the criminal justice system, so I really don’t know what [it] is. I got pulled over two days ago for no reason. Right on the corner [in South L.A.] where I lived for over 20 years. And that’s not the first time, and I know it won’t be the last.
Besides criminal justice, employment was the only other choice that a majority across racial/ethnic groups agreed is an area where racism continues to be a significant problem. On education, a majority of all young people of color groups believed that racism continues to be a significant problem, whereas only a minority of white Millennials agreed. A majority of whites and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders believed that racism is still significant in housing, while less than a third of Latinos and African Americans circled this sector in the post-session survey.
Class, Culture and Action
Typically, all of our focus groups, regardless of racial and ethnic make up, had at least one participant who believed firmly that class is a more important factor than race in predicting individual and/or group outcomes in society. Though they never explicitly described it as such, these individuals viewed the racial demographics of the socioeconomic classes in our society as coincidental.
“I feel like it has more to do with money than race,” said Makeda, a 20-year-old black college student who is the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. “I feel like all these tie more into how much money you make. ‘Cause if you have more money you can go to better schools. You can avoid going to jail. Have a better job. Get better health care. Live in a nice home.” Edward, a 23-year-old unemployed, Chinese American college graduate, agreed. “Especially looking at that educational system. When [I was] applying for colleges, USC was among them, and the very first interview question is, ‘How are you going to pay for tuition?’ ” he recounted. “I mean in this country, money does, in fact, talk.”
From this point of view, the fact that the upper class consists overwhelmingly of white people, while people of color are greatly overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, is either an historical accident or currently irrelevant.
The American Dream defines aspiration in the U.S. The idea that ability and hard work will lead to material success for every individual is a dominant cultural and political ethos, regardless of race and class. Indeed, with all that divides our country, it is perhaps the most unifying belief. So it is not surprising that many participants in our focus groups emphasized the importance of individual effort and of education in changing the racial disparities they identified.
This was particularly true of the white participants and those young people of color who said class is a more important factor than race in shaping the 21st century United States. Both of these groups also tended to remark that society is “not perfect” and that individuals of color have the choice, and even “special” opportunities or “advantages,” to overcome most challenges they face.
Some of the young people of color who suggested that individual initiative was the key factor to success in our society used themselves or people they knew as proof that it could be done. Some college students, like Rajni, challenged their peers who, for instance, decried racially disproportionate educational resources:
Maybe the way of allocating money isn’t fair, but I think that coming from a school that is, y’know, kinda low income, we had–if people wanted to succeed, we had resources to succeed. My roommate’s from Inglewood, and she got [to college]. My other roommate [is from] the bad district of Long Beach, and she’s [received an academic scholarship]…So, I feel like the resources are there, it’s just changing the motivation in the kids who are there. You have to inspire them to want to do better and use the resources they have.
Some white participants, meanwhile, explained racial disparities as a function of not only individual initiative, but also “cultural” factors. Twenty-year-old college student Mirna pointed to an exchange she had with a Mexican American friend:
She was saying, basically, she wants to move in with her boyfriend, and her mom is going crazy, she is saying, “You are doing the typical Mexican thing where you are gonna move in and get married, and your husband is gonna have to pay, and you are, like, just gonna pop out a bunch of kids,” and, like, she was telling me that that is kind of, like, what somewhat like Mexican ethic. So if you are gonna have, like, people who do that, they are not gonna make as much money, they are just gonna keep, you know, the income inequality is just gonna keep going.
All of these ideas are crucial to understand because they also shape how this generation will choose to act upon racism and racial injustice. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who put stock in individual efforts to overcome the racial disparities they see at play also largely threw up their hands at solutions.
“I think that this is the best it is gonna get,” reflected Courtney in one of the white focus groups. “I think that somebody can probably think of something better than I can somewhere down the line. But as of right now this is doing pretty well, even though it is sometimes racist because of the individual aspect of it, but how are we really gonna fix that?” In fact, the most common response among white focus groups to the question of how change happens was that “time” would improve conditions.
This sentiment also came up in people of color focus groups, but there was typically a greater range of perspectives offered. In fact, to the degree that the Millennials articulated urgency around creating racial justice, it came perhaps predictably from people of color. And it was among these action-oriented individuals where the gap between Millennials and the conventional wisdom about race in the age of Obama was largest.
Harold, the 22-year-old African American high school youth organizer, for instance, drew a starkly different lesson from Obama’s election than did mainstream political and media commentators. “It was masses of people that got Barack Obama elected,” he pointed out. “You need to organize, like, masses of people. Any major movement or change involves masses of people.”
PART TWO: Next week, Dom Apollon will further explore the ways in which young people of different racial and ethnic groups define contemporary racism. “While white Millennials tend to focus upon individual-level racism, young people of color are more likely to think in terms of groups and have less trouble describing entire systems as racist,” Apollon explains. “But regardless, institutional and structural racism are rarely the first definitions that come to mind for Millennials of any race or ethnicity.”
You can also hear more thoughts from the young people in the focus groups by watching Dom Apollon’s Reporter’s Notebook video.
Reporter’s Notebook: Inside the Focus Groups on Young People and Race
08 months ago
Mainstream news media seems pretty certain that today’s young adults, sometimes referred to as Millennials, don’t see race. They date interracially, they identify as mixed-race, and they voted for Barack Obama; the only possible explanation is that they don’t care what color anyone is, right?
The problem, of course, is that nobody’s bothered to test this idea. That’s why Dom Apollon, research director of the Applied Research Center, decided to collect some real data and question the assumption. In this video, Dom discusses the need for the research and the methodology used, and lays out the three major findings about young people’s racial attitudes in the new report. He also interviews participants from the Los Angeles focus groups, asking their opinions on Barack Obama and the United States’ fast-changing demographic profile.
Police Forum Recommends Limitations on Investigating Immigration Status
011 months ago
The role of local police in immigration enforcement continues to be a complex policy and legislative issue at both the state and federal level. State legislatures, for example, are contemplating bills designed to increase the role of local police in immigration enforcement while federal legislation targets cities with so-called “sanctuary policies.” And as programs like 287(g), Secure Communities and other federal/local partnerships continue to expand, local police are now more involved in identifying undocumented immigrants than ever before. Many law enforcement officers, however, find that enforcing federal immigration law may interfere with their ability to prevent crime and keep neighborhoods safe, so they have designed tailored local policies to ensure that they maintain the best possible relationship with their communities. In a new report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), local police speak out on the difficulties of enforcing immigration laws and talk about best practices for navigating immigration issues in the future.
In Police and Immigration: How Chiefs are Leading their Communities through the Challenge, (PERF) looks at several case studies (New Haven, CT; Prince William County, VA; Montgomery County, MD; Minneapolis, MN; and various law enforcement agencies in Phoenix, AZ) to show how police efforts to engage with immigrant communities makes cities safer.
Each of these cities works with ICE in one way or another to aid in immigration enforcement. However, these cities have worked with local police on policies regarding the way police enforce federal immigration laws, i.e. when police officers can question arrestees about immigration status, when cops contact ICE, and how witnesses and victims of crime are treated. While each of the policies is different, each one was developed over time with input from various stakeholders and was custom-made to serve the best interests of the local community.
However, federal, state, and local policymakers continue to impose policies and responsibilities on local police without getting their input. In the interest of looking tough on illegal immigration, some policymakers continue to claim that these localities are giving “sanctuary” to unauthorized immigrants and to criminals, and seek to undermine all of the hard work and thought put into designing their community policing policies.
At the same time, ICE continues to expand the Secure Communities program, forcing local police to send fingerprints to DHS to be matched against immigration databases. When there’s a hit, local jails are asked to hold those individuals that ICE is interested in, at the expense of local taxpayers. While the police aren’t deputized agents making arrests for immigration violations, the effect on the community can be the same—immigrants fearful of reporting crimes to the police, endangering everyone. DHS is not giving local police jurisdictions the ability to opt out of Secure Communities, even if the locality determines it is in its own best interest to do so.
PERF’s report offers many excellent recommendations for ensuring that federal agencies consult with state and local police as they craft immigration policies—not just impose something on them after the fact. They also recommend ICE increase coordination with and responsiveness to local police agencies and be more engaged and active in explaining their policies and actions to local communities. Furthermore, the role and authority of local police needs to be more clearly defined by the federal government.
As for the police, PERF recommends officers be prohibited from arresting or detaining persons just to investigate their immigration status. Police must uphold Constitutional and civil rights, and protect crime victims and witnesses regardless of their immigration status. Similar to their recommendations for ICE, local police must engage their communities in dialogue about their policies and programs, educate their communities about their authority and actions, and develop clear, written policies and procedures regarding the handling of unauthorized immigrants.
Enacting these recommendations would go a long way toward ensuring that police and policymakers are on the same page, and that the best interest of the entire community is front-and-center in the immigration debate.
Photo by Lester Public Library.
How Reuters, Northeastern University Stifle Immigration Debate by Suppressing Labor Analysis
01 year ago
On January 20, Reuters published a news article with the following headline: “Exclusive: Over a Million Immigrants land U.S. jobs in 2008-10.” The article, which reported on data exclusively provided to Reuters by the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) at Northeastern University in Boston, appeared just a few days before the House Immigration Subcommittee held its first hearing of the new Congress criticizing the Obama Administration on worksite enforcement. The article was also quoted in testimony by Mark Kirkorian of the Center for Immigration Studies as proof that the native-born are losing out to immigrants in the work force. The CLMS “study,” however, which supports the flawed restrictionist theory that America can deport its way out of unemployment, actually backfired during the hearing.
Committee member California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), also interested in understanding the findings of the study, instructed her staff members to request a copy from CLMS, which they were denied. The Congresswoman took issue with this in the hearing.
LOFGREN: Mr. Krikorian, just briefly, you, in your testimony today, discussed a recent study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University that purported to demonstrate that recent immigrants were gaining employment while Americans were losing their jobs.
And then you cited a story by Reuters in your written testimony, not the report itself. Have you seen the report itself and analyzed its data?
KRIKORIAN: I’ve looked for it. No, I’m not sure — I think they did it for Reuters. So I’m not…
LOFGREN: Well, I asked my staff to call the center and ask for the report. And they refused to give it to us. And they said it’s — it isn’t being made public. I just wondered if you had a copy…
KRIKORIAN: No, I do not.
LOFGREN: Yes. I — I’ll just advance my view that if something can’t ever be examined by people, I’m not going to rely on it.
The Reuters article reports that CLMS analyzed data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. This data is not impossible to access, but how the data is analyzed is the key hidden component. CLMS has, to date, refused requests to provide this analysis so that it can be reviewed and/or replicated, which is the norm in academia.
Also troubling was the lack of double sourcing by Reuters. Journalists normally double source or verify the information they report on with a second source. Given that the study is not publicly available, this should have compelled Reuters to conduct their journalistic due diligence.
Pushing aside the missteps of both CLMS and Reuters, the article presents data on immigration and unemployment that is far more nuanced than its shrill title would suggest. At first glance, the story seems to incorrectly suggest that every job filled by an immigrant since 2008 could have been filled by an unemployed native-born American. Numerous, public studies have refuted such findings. Indeed, the story itself makes the following observations:
- Some immigrants “land jobs that unemployed Americans turn up their noses at or lack the skills to do.”
- “Some of those who entered the country since 2008 were employed in sectors that generally require a high level of skills and education, such as finance and insurance.”
- Some “newcomers since 2008 got work in health care and social services, a fast-growing sector where skills are in demand.”
In other words, not all unemployed Americans possess the skill sets required to fill the jobs which became available. Not to mention the fact that many unemployed Americans may not even live in the same part of the country where job openings occurred. This isn’t to say that some unemployed Americans didn’t find themselves in direct competition with immigrants for the same jobs. But the Reuters story uses hyperbole and insinuation to greatly exaggerate the extent to which this occurs.
Developing immigration policies that maximize the many benefits that have been bestowed on America by immigration while minimizing the potential negative effects on the current labor force isn’t easy. CLMS and Reuters decision to manufacture a “study” without making it available to policymakers simply adds more heat to a debate that is already too heavy on rhetoric and short on facts.”
Photo by (cup)cake_eater.
Say What? Senators’ Reasons for Opposing the DREAM Act in Dire Need of Truthiness
01 year ago
After Sen. Harry Reid tabled a vote on the DREAM Act this week in order to take up the passed House version of the bill next week, thousands of students, advocates and community leaders have and will continue to urge their Senators to pass the DREAM Act. Unfortunately, some of these calls are being answered with excuses—excuses which are in dire need of what Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert would call “truthiness.” Disagreeing with a specific piece of legislation based on its merits is one thing, but making up your own facts out of political convenience is just plain wrong. It’s also an incredible disservice to your constituency and the American public. The following are excuses reiterated by Senators who have previously voted for the DREAM Act but who may now vote against it. The facts follow their excuses.
CLAIM: DREAM Act beneficiaries will bring family members en masse.
FACT: DREAM Act Will Not Open Flood Gates to Family Members
It would take upwards of 25 years for a DREAM Act beneficiary to get a green card for their parents, and 30-40 years for their siblings. (A U.S. citizen CANNOT petition at all for a grandparent, niece, nephew, uncle, aunt, or cousin under our immigration laws). DREAM Act beneficiaries would have to wait in line for 10 years under a conditional nonimmigrant status before they would be able to adjust to a lawful permanent resident status and three more before becoming US citizens. After this 13-year process to become citizens, they could finally apply for their parents or siblings only to come to the U.S. If their parents (presumably) entered illegally, they would be subject to a 10-year bar from being in the U.S., if they are even eligible at all. So, in order to legalize, they would have to wait the initial 13 years, plus leave the U.S. for another 10, and then finally apply—a process which would probably take upwards of 25 years. The wait for any siblings would likely be even longer. They would also likely be subject to the 10-year bar, and in addition, would have to wait in the backlog for a visa—a process which could take up to 30 more years.CLAIM: The DREAM Act will encourage more illegal immigration.
FACT: The DREAM Act DOES NOT encourage more illegal immigration.
The DREAM Act is not a magnet for new arrivals. Only those who have been here for five years or longer before enactment will qualify and they must have arrived when they were under 16-years old. You can’t be older than 29 to qualify.CLAIM: Americans want Congress to work on reducing the deficit and fixing the economy.
FACT: The DREAM Act will reduce the deficit and create jobs.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the House version of the DREAM Act (H.R. 6497) would reduce deficits by about $2.2 billion and increase revenues by $1.7 billion over the 2011-2020 period.CLAIM: We must secure the border first.
FACT: The border has more boots and dollars on it than ever before.
The annual budget of the U.S. Border Patrol stood at $3.0 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2009—a nine-fold increase since FY 1992. The number of Border Patrol agents stationed along the southwest border with Mexico grew to 16,974 in FY 2009—a nearly five-fold increase since FY 1992. The combined budgets of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grew from $9.1 billion in FY 2003 to $17.2 billion in FY 2010. In August, President Obama signed another new border bill which will pump $600 million into border enforcement, including funds for 1,500 new border patrol agents and 1,200 National Guard troops.CLAIM: The DREAM Act has not been properly vetted.
FACT: The basic contours of the DREAM Act have not changed in 10 years.
The DREAM Act has been debated and introduced every session since 2001. This is not a new idea or piece of legislation that the Senate is unfamiliar with.
Any debate worth having should be an honest one. If a Congressional member intends to vote against a piece of legislation, fine, but at least have the courage to be honest about why. Distorting the facts in order to avoid political controversy is not a good enough reason and these DREAM Act students certainly deserve better.
Photo by AVAVA.
How to Talk Turkey on Immigration
01 year ago
My daughter had a knock-down drag out fight on the playground a few weeks ago over immigration. She was preaching immigration reform and another little girl said that immigrants steal American jobs. They reached no resolution and walked away furious. A couple of days ago, Rebecca told me how nice this girl was and that she had “decided to put political differences aside for the sake of friendship.”
A lot of us will be sharing the Thanksgiving dinner table with people whose political and philosophical views differ. Like the kids, we may need to put political differences aside for the sake of family, friends, and pumpkin pie. But when you work in immigration, people inevitably bring the topic up and say things you feel compelled to rebut.
In that spirit, here are a few tips for talking turkey about immigration:
- Be prepared. The Immigration Policy Center’s website, www.immigrationpolicy.org, contains numerous short fact sheets on immigrants and the economy, crime, unemployment, immigration reform and more. At a minimum, download your state fact sheet. And since the DREAM Act is in the news, make sure to read our latest fact sheet rebutting DREAM Act myths.
- Be sympathetic. Most people who profess to be anti-immigration are really worried about something else. Whether it is the sour economy, concerns about public safety, or the much more insidious fear that the America they know is changing too rapidly, there’s usually a reason that has nothing to do with immigrants. Probe a bit and find out what that reason is.
- Know your audience. While this is a follow-on to item two, it also requires a bit of personal research. If your Uncle Joe watches Fox News 24/7, you can pretty much predict what he’s going to say about securing the border first and Phoenix being the kidnapping capitol of America. These arguments ignore the facts and logistics of border security (the amount of money and resources poured into the border is greater than ever, violent crimes are going down in Arizona, the real issues along the border have more to do with drug and gun smuggling than immigration, and economics, not enforcement is a better predictor of illegal immigration). But as much as I believe in the facts, the perception of safety is what is really in play here. So, make sure to mention that polls of border residents show that they feel safe in their communities—in other words, if people on the border aren’t feeling threatened, why are people in Iowa feeling threatened by the border? Help your uncle see that facts and perceptions are two different things.
- Be practical. You are not necessarily going to win your loved ones over with one brilliant analysis. But you can ask questions that get them thinking differently. Ask them what the solution is from their perspective? Can we really afford to deport 12 million people? How can legalization be an amnesty when it requires people to register, pay taxes, stay right with the law and “earn” citizenship? Wouldn’t you rather have folks paying taxes at their full potential than being paid under the table and not paying their full share? These kinds of questions really do start the dialogue.
- Find common ground. It may sound hokey, but most of us want the same things for ourselves and our families. Go back to your own immigrant roots—how was Grandma or even Great-Grandpa treated when they came over from Italy? What did they want for their future? Where would we be today without those immigrants who took a risk? The more people realize that they have a personal stake in getting immigration right, the more likely they are to move from opposed to open to suggestion.
- Remember, everyone has a friend who defies the stereotype. I’ve had plenty of conversations that start out so badly, but then I hear, “well, I do have this friend that taught himself English, put himself through school and now employs fifteen people” Seriously. Immigration, like all social issues is neither black nor white but many shades of grey.
- Have another piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Food is a universal facilitator of conversation. It’s much harder to yell at someone with pumpkin pie in your mouth.
I’m really heartened by my daughter’s willingness to put politics aside to be friends with someone who disagrees with her. This doesn’t mean that she will stop believing in immigration reform or that she will stop trying to persuade her friend. It does mean, however, that she is beginning to understand that the bonds of friendship allow us to talk to one another. Cultivate those bonds and we cultivate a richer, more tolerant society. Ignore our differences and we just ignore our problems.
Photo by simplysharpe.
Pollsters Still Underestimating the Latino Vote
01 year ago
An interesting post-election thread is the issue of why so many polls underestimated voter turnout, specifically in races where the Democratic candidate won. The starkest example comes from the state of Nevada where the Democratic candidate for Senate, Harry Reid, beat his Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, by 5 points. Polls published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal had Angle leading by 4 points just days before—a 9 point gap. The New York Times’ Nate Silver had Angle ahead by 2.3 points, with Reid eventually winning by 5.6 points—nearly an 8 point gap. Why the disparity?
The Las Vegas Review-Journal writes today that its own polls “wound up having about as much predictive power as the Old Farmer’s Almanac in forecasting the winter snowfall.” Nate Silver wrote in the New York Times that “It’s fairly unusual, however, to have the consensus of polls off by 7 or 8 points in an extremely competitive Senate or gubernatorial general election.” Silver then went on to speculate why numbers were so off in the Silver State:
“I speculated, for instance, that the fact that Mr. Reid is the sort of candidate whom one votes for unenthusiastically might have skewed the turnout models…There is another theory, however, which was proposed to me last night by Matt Barreto of the polling firm Latino Decisions…that Latino voters—somewhat against the conventional wisdom—were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish—about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me—are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don’t conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters.”
LatinoDecisions, the polling group which focuses on states in which the Latino vote will play an important role in elections, and who brought this to Nate Silver’s attention, writes in great detail about the challenge and ongoing undercount of minority voters on their blog:
“The problem of faulty exit poll data for Latinos is not new, yet very few in the media have expertise in polling Latinos and analyzing Latino vote data, and as a result are not in a position to assess on election night the veracity of the Latino results…the National Exit Pool surveys, systematically underestimate Latino and African-American Democratic vote share by over-representing higher income, higher education, and more socially integrated minority voters than their share of the electorate warrants.”
The Las Vegas Review Journal is beginning to agree and in taking a look at its own polling wrote:
“R-J critics think they know exactly where the breakdown occurred: Its pollster, relying on old-fashioned random dialing to land lines, doesn’t account for voters who only have cell phones, and undercounts Hispanic voters who may be reluctant to participate in surveys. Both groups are heavily Democratic.”
And they note the bottom line problem:
“They’re not drawing a population that looks like the electorate,” said Dave Damore, a UNLV political scientist who studies public opinion data.
At the end of the day, pollsters and the politicians who depend on them are at great political peril if they willfully ignore huge gaps in their poll samples. Undercounting Latinos, cell phone users, or any other group that has clearly emerged as undercounted and who are continuing to grow in size and importance each election day, is clearly political and reputation suicide.
Photo by barackobamadotcom.