There is a conversation happening across the country about race, and it is forcing us to confront an uncomfortable truth: To this day, across the country and even here in Maine, people face different treatment based on the color of their skin. Those who wish to shut down this dialogue by claiming we have moved beyond racism are deaf to the legitimate concerns of millions of Americans.
In recent months, several unarmed black people — men, women and even a child — have been killed by white police officers, so the spotlight has been focused on law enforcement. People want to know why so many police interactions result in death and why it seems the officers involved rarely face discipline for their actions — even in the most egregious cases. This is not anti-police rhetoric; it is a real and honest plea to restore trust among communities and the police officers meant to keep them safe.
This is a discussion we must be having, and it can’t stop with the police. We no longer can deny that black people and white people experience all of our systems differently — not just in the criminal justice system but pre-school through employment.
Take a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, in which researchers sent out nearly 5,000 job applications in response to 1,300 help wanted ads. Half the resumes were randomly assigned white-sounding names, and the other half had black-sounding names. For anyone who believes in equal opportunity, the results were discouraging: The applications with white-sounding names received 50 percent more call-backs from employers than those with black-sounding names, despite equal qualifications. The disparity was consistent across industries, from cashier-level jobs to management.
Some Mainers claim this kind of thing only happens in other places, but they are wrong. The data show that unequal treatment happens all the time right here in Maine.
Last year, data collected by the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights revealed that black students in Maine are disciplined at far higher rates than their white counterparts, making up a disproportionate percentage of in-school and out-of-school suspensions, as well as school referrals to law enforcement. Similar data across the nation show that black students often face harsher penalties than white students for similar behavior.
We also know black people in Maine are arrested at higher rates than white people across the board, even though they don’t necessarily commit crimes at higher rates. For instance, research from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration consistently has shown that black people and white people use marijuana at similar rates. But black people in Maine are more than twice as likely as non-blacks to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to FBI data.
The data overwhelmingly show bias in our systems. It does us no good to pretend otherwise; in fact, it does us harm. As a nation that has always claimed to stand for liberty, justice and equality, we cannot be OK with a job market that favors people with certain names over others. We cannot be comfortable with an education system that makes it more difficult for black children to succeed. And we cannot consent to a criminal justice system that doles out punishment differently depending on the color of one’s skin.
Regardless of what is driving these outcomes — whether it is outright discomfort with people who are different from us or a form of unconscious bias — it is time to admit that our systems suffer from inequality and commit to fixing them.
We can start with policy changes. Maine should end the punitive “war on drugs,” which targets people of color and fills our jails and prisons with people who don’t need to be there. And we should treat every student as worthy of an education and end harsh school discipline policies that push children out of the classroom and make it difficult for them to come back.
But we must also make personal commitments to acknowledge our own biases — the ones that cause us, as employers, to pay closer attention to some applicants than others, even though their qualifications are the same, and the ones that allow us, as citizens, to look the other way when our fellow citizens are mistreated by people in power.
The question no longer can be “do we have biases?” but rather “what can we do about them?” There is no shame in recognizing our own biases and working to fix them. And until we do, we willfully are maintaining a flawed and unfair system.
Bob Talbot is a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Maine, vice president of the Greater Bangor Area NAACP and a former executive director of the Maine Human Rights Commission.