Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Fewer Blacks Perceive Bias In Jobs, Income, and Housing

Single-study alert
But big if true.
If it's false, give me about a week before crushing my hopes.

posted by Winston Smith at 11:24 AM

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry, buzz kill time: that study is from July 19, 2013. Someone was picking a cherry.

The timing on that cherry is really interesting, since the not-guilty verdict against Zimmerman in his shooting of Trayvon Martin was also in July of 2013. That verdict, you will recall, was presented as the moment when all the apparent progress of the last 20 years was exposed as a lie. It's not surprising that anyone looking for a poll that catches the peak of optimism in the black communities would find it right then.

4:07 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Thanks for nothing, Anon.

8:05 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Though...none of what you say constitutes much of an objection...just an additional reason to look for other, more recent polls.

8:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's the link to the the polling series that came from. The updated version of the particular data set you originally link to I don't see pulled out, but you will see, sure enough, most every indicator falls off a cliff in 2014 and 2015.

The question is why then? Current conventional answer is that all the old white people were behaving worse because they were so mad Obama was president, but its weird that such a backlash would occur 6 years into his two terms. There's no reason to expect a reversal in the broad-based, long term trend against racial discrimination in everyday life.

Looking back at the polling over the long term, you can see other moments of seemingly anomalous answers. Look at the question of whether "race relations will always be a problem", and there's a big spike in yes's in October 1995. This is, of course, when OJ Simpson was acquitted. There's also a big spike in the number of positive black responses to the question of whether "blacks stand as good a chance to get jobs for which they are qualified." It's pretty clear that these responses are as reflective of major media events as they are of people's everyday experience. And that shouldn't be surprising, since so many many social interactions are fundamentally ambiguous, especially if you have unambiguously experienced discrimination in the past. These polls are likely to be as much a reflection of media driven mood as of real changes.

And the mood of media as regards race turned sour in a big way starting in late 2013.

6:32 PM  

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