“You Have to Face It to Fix It, Year Seven”
Opening Address
Joel E. Anderson, Chancellor
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Conversation on Race
and release of the
Seventh Annual Survey of Racial Attitudes in Pulaski County
UALR Institute of Government
March 11, 2010
Introduction
United States Attorney General Eric Holder is right. The Attorney General recently said, “Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”
Today we will talk about things racial.
Welcome to UALR’s seventh annual conversation on race, a mini-conference at which we release the results of our annual survey of racial attitudes in Pulaski County.
A number of you have been here every year. Some of you have been here most years. For some of you this is your first year. Thank you for coming, everyone of you. I believe you will find it time well spent because we are going to talk about a very important community issue—and an issue of national significance because it is present in community after community all across the land.
I. Acknowledge Various Guests
II. Acknowledge University Personnel
Dr. Angi Brenton, Dean, College of Professional Studies
Dr. Roby Robertson, Director IOG; Cindy Bennett; Ruth Craw; IOG researchers and staff
–construct surveys
–conduct interviews
–prepare the report
–arrange the conference
Provost David Belcher
Vice Chancellor Robert Adams
Dean Angela Brenton
Dean Wanda Dole
Dean Angela Sewall
Vice Chancellor Charles Donaldson
I want to take this opportunity to praise Dr. Donaldson as well as Dr. Logan Hampton, Darryl McGee, and Harvell Howard for their leadership in establishing a new UALR program they implemented on campus last fall. The “African American Male Initiative” for first-time entering freshmen males is an intrusive mentoring/advising program aimed specifically at academic achievement. African-American men have the lowest retention rates on college campuses. With AAMI, 44 of 58 of the AAMI new student participants ended their first semester at UALR in good academic standing. Fifty-five percent of the participants earned 3.0 GPA or higher. Lastly, 91% of AAMI participants returned this spring.
I also want to acknowledge those in the audience who participate in the Chancellor’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity. A group of about 20 faculty and staff members voluntarily meet with me most Monday afternoons for 1 ½ to 2 hours to discuss issues related to race and ethnicity. This group has frank and sometimes emotional conversations about events, about language, about history, and about how to move our community forward with regard to race.
III. Why a University Survey and Conference on Race?
Those of you who are veterans of these annual mini-conferences know what we do and why. But a word of explanation for the first-timers.
One of our purposes is to break the code of silence and promote discussion of an uncomfortable subject. Race is a four-letter word, taboo in polite gatherings.
Before any progress can be made on the issue of race in our community, we must first gather the facts. We must agree on the facts. We must face the facts. We must talk to each other about the facts because we are all in this boat together.
We are here today to continue the conversation with fresh data on attitudes and perceptions related to crime, a persistent area of controversy and concern.
One powerful tool for getting at the facts is a survey. A survey of community attitudes and perceptions provides a community mirror, a mirror that enables us to see ourselves—our similarities and our differences—more clearly.
If we would look into that mirror, the UALR survey data over seven years, we will see evidence all around that our community still struggles with race. We need to respond to what the mirror tells us because we all pay a price when anyone suffers prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity. We all benefit when the doors to opportunity are wide open to all.
In a few moments, we will learn the results of our seventh annual survey of racial attitudes in Pulaski County. Through these seven surveys, UALR has collected a wealth of local data and analysis that we make available to the public, local government, churches, businesses, and non-profit organizations. While we can be pleased and encouraged by a number of survey findings through these seven years, the surveys make abundantly clear that our community, which for a time, 1957-1959, was Ground Zero in the civil rights movement, still has a long path ahead.
It is our hope that people throughout the community will utilize this powerful local survey data to speak to the issue of race in our daily lives, in educational institutions, in government, in places of worship, in businesses, in non-profit organizations, in social service agencies, and in our families.
IV. Crime and Race—This Year’s Survey Topic
Crime is a problem for everyone, from infants to the aged.
There are people who are victims. In the UALR Criminal Justice Department, faculty members operate a number of centers including the Juvenile Justice Center and the Senior Justice Center—giving attention to victims at both ends of the spectrum.
Crime is committed by people—perpetrators—who need to be brought to justice, and then reclaimed whenever possible. Professor of Criminal Justice Charles Chastain has led a program in the prisons in Pine Bluff and Wrightsville to reduce recidivism. In that program in Wrightsville this spring, eight UALR faculty members from departments of Criminal Justice, Social Work, Psychology, and Rhetoric and Writing – along with professionals in corrections, banking, and non-profit organizations – will participate in a 12-week program for inmates addressing topics like what families of incarcerated persons are going through, post-prison financial and employment issues, and conflict resolution.
Crime is a problem for everyone. Crime is also racialized.
I want to take a moment and explain why the issue of crime is a big issue, a gut issue, why it is so fundamental, in every society.
When I have taught the introductory course in American National Government, in my first lecture of the semester I have asked the question, “Why government?” Then I have explained that there are three basic functions of government—protection, order, justice.
People have a most basic need for personal, physical safety, i.e., protection from fellow citizens who would do them harm (which is why we have police) and protection from other hostile tribes or countries (which is why we have soldiers). Government provides protection.
Protection only assures life, not a good life. A good life requires order. There need to be rules and regulations that all members of the community are expected to obey—such as regulations for automobile traffic. It would be a chaotic and nerve-wracking life if when you got up each morning you had no idea what the yellow lines and white lines on the streets were going to mean that day. Traffic signals (which are mechanical traffic cops) with red, yellow, and green lights impose order. What if when you got up each morning the system was randomized, and some days, unannounced, red would mean go, green stop, with yellow continued to mean speed up. Order is very important. Government establishes and enforces order.
But order does not assure a good community, a just community, which can be realized only if there is a referee—the government, specifically the judicial system—that not only assures that every one plays by the rules of the game but also that the rules are applied fairly to everyone. German society under Adolf Hitler was very orderly but, to engage in gross understatement, it was not fair and evenhanded. It was not a just society. The same could be said of life in the South, pre-Civil War. It was orderly but not just. We have in America, from the local to the national level, elaborate processes and institutions to achieve justice, a fundamental purpose of government stated in the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution.
The point I am working toward is this: Crime—from corruption in law enforcement and the courts to murder of a neighbor—represents a failure of government across the spectrum of government’s most basic functions. Crime results in physical harm, in disruption of community order, and in distrust and cynicism from unfair application of the rules.
Therefore, a survey on crime touches nerves related to three basic human needs.
Crime offends and worries everyone.
I said earlier, crime is also racialized. Let me illustrate:
(Hurricane Katrina photos on screen.)
(First photo: two whites)
The photo caption reads: Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans.
(Second photo: African American young man)
The second photo caption reads: A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30, 2005.
It is a reality to be faced: Persons of different race and ethnicity perceive crime, law enforcement, and the judicial system differently – and the media reflect it. They also have different levels of trust in the system.
V. Conclusion and Transition
I would like to place what we are about here today into a larger perspective. I am confident that virtually every citizen would agree that our city is not yet what it can be and should be in regard to race.
Aren’t we looking for a city where a person—whether red, yellow, brown, black, or white—can look in a mirror and say, I am welcome here, I fit in here, all the doors of opportunity are open to me, no less and no more than anyone else?
Yes, we are looking for a city where a person—whether red, yellow, brown, black, or white—can say that quality education, the paths to wealth, the positions of community leadership, the places of worship and service – they are all open to me, no less and no more than anyone else.
Frankly, I don’t think that city is yet in sight. Maybe we can dimly see it in the distance.
But we still have a long way to go. Persons who believe racial inequality is an issue of the past need to open their eyes—to television, to the newspapers, to the schools. There is evidence all around that our community still struggles with race. None is so blind as he who will not see!
While we have made progress, let us not assume that forward movement is inevitable. Nations rise and fall. Sometimes they regress in awful ways, as the genocide in Rawanda showed. In our community have we not slipped backwards in our schools in recent decades?
You have to face it to fix it.
Would anyone argue that the magnitude of the prison population in the United States is evidence of progress toward a better society?
You have to face it to fix it.
Recognizing that race is a foremost issue of our metropolitan community and that progress on it is inhibited by the code of silence found in community after community, in our strategic plan the university pledged to be a “keeper of the flame on the subject of race”…for the community. But let me say that the university does this not purely out of altruism – this is self-interested on our part. Working to eliminate prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity is for the betterment of us all. If our community advances and prospers, so will the university.
Race is a social issue and an economic issue, and you can put other adjectives in front of the word that would also fit. But at the end of the day, race is a moral issue, a matter of the heart.
Several of my UALR colleagues and I recently went to an event at Philander Smith College where we had the pleasure of hearing Reverend C. T. Vivian speak at the L.C. and Daisy Bates Leadership Forum annual Daisy Bates Day celebration.
C. T. Vivian was a close friend and lieutenant to Dr. Martin Luther King, a fellow warrior with Dr. King in the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s. (He called him “Martin” in his speech.) He told us of a line that Dr. King would write on the wall in the strategy room: “To redeem the soul of America.”
Race is not an African American issue.—It is an American issue. It is an Arkansas issue. It is a human issue. It is a moral issue, a responsibility of us all.
We all pay a price when anyone suffers prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity. We all benefit when the doors to opportunity are wide open to all, when the whole world can benefit from the full development of the talents…and the achievement of the dreams…of some little boy or little girl.
Let’s keep marching toward that city. Along the way we will have to grapple with the nitty-gritty community issues that are intermingled and fused and complicated by racial prejudice and discrimination.
Let’s now hear the findings from the seventh year survey that can shed light on one of the nitty-gritty community issues—crime—which is intermingled and fused and complicated by the larger issue of race.
