| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
C-SPANSHOP.org is C-SPAN's online store. | |
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan. | ||
| And every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at C-SPANShop.org. | ||
| Joining us now is Andre Perry. | ||
| He's a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow and author of this book, Black Power Scorecard, Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It. | ||
| Mr. Perry, what is the racial gap? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I measured power, my attempt to measure power in years of life. | |
| What this book does is look at the most significant factors on life expectancy. | ||
| And what we find is that there are several factors that are very significant. | ||
| The goal, the title scorecard suggests that we should have metrics that we can hold people accountable to so that they can achieve certain goals. | ||
| And longevity and well-being is the ultimate goal. | ||
| And so for me, it was my attempt to give politicians, community members, activists, clear goals that clearly impact the most important things, and that's life. | ||
| So what are those metrics you use? | ||
| What are those tools that you can give to politicians as they seek to address this matter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my colleague and I, Jonathan Rothwell Gallup, used a machine learning algorithm, lasso regression, for those who are interested in statistics. | |
| We ran dozens of databases, everything from IRS data, Federal Reserve data, health data, and it allowed us to find the most important factors, and some of them are common sense issues. | ||
| Income, education, home ownership, business owner, ownership were all positive correlates. | ||
| And this is a correlational study. | ||
| And I want to emphasize that we compared black cities to other black cities. | ||
| The reason being, if you compare black to white, it often masks the very real differences that are occurring at the local level. | ||
| And there were some negative correlates. | ||
| One surprising one, religious affiliation. | ||
| The places that had higher levels of religious membership, they also had lower life expectancy. | ||
| Now, before people jump to conclusions, going to church doesn't make you sick, what it says is it's probably people are going into church suffering, that church communities have less assets, less home ownership, less income in those neighborhoods. | ||
| And it appears in the data. | ||
| Air pollution was another correlate, the negative correlate. | ||
| Places with high air pollution, lower life expectancy. | ||
| And so there were several factors where we could see places where black people are thriving. | ||
| Montgomery County, Maryland, the average life expectancy is 83. | ||
| Right up the road in Baltimore City, it's around 67. | ||
| And so what we want to do is point activists and politicians to the areas where there's strength in these cities. | ||
| For instance, Baltimore has one of the highest rates of business ownership. | ||
| So you can build upon those high rates of business ownership to address other lower performing metrics. | ||
| You talk about life expectancy in specific areas. | ||
| What is it overall for African Americans in this country and how does that compare to other racial groups right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, African Americans are about 74. | |
| The average life expectancy is about six years less than whites. | ||
| Asians are to have the highest life expectancy. | ||
| Latinos are between African Americans and whites. | ||
| Actually, Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy, but that varies from tribe to tribe. | ||
| So there is that range, but I want to emphasize what we did. | ||
| We did not compare a lot between black and other races because there's a different historical context. | ||
| We know that wealth is a strong predictor of health outcomes. | ||
| And so that historic prohibition of not being able to have wealth transfers through homeownership, business ownership, and the like really shifted the conversation in life expectancy. | ||
| So we don't compare. | ||
| And what we found is when you don't compare, you can see the strength in different cities that some cities are doing well combating or addressing racism and others are struggling. | ||
| I want to stay on this point for a second. | ||
| This is from the first few pages of your book. | ||
| The quest to secure black power is not and should not be understood as a mission to emulate white power or simply to gain access to white institutions. | ||
| In their attempt to spotlight inequality, people often cite comparisons to white society in ways that tacitly reinforce white norms and standards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, whenever you hear things about gaining power, you say, well, let's do what white people do. | |
| And some of that may not be savory. | ||
| The gains in terms of white growth in many times came at the exclusion of other groups. | ||
| We don't want to emulate that. | ||
| And white power in general is based on a hierarchy of norms and values based on race. | ||
| And so what you don't want to replicate that, what you do want to do is really enforce what black power has always been about, is about gaining equal access under the law since the fight for reparations to MLK, Fannie Lou Hamer. | ||
| It is to say that policy should work for us. | ||
| And one of the things I do say in the book, and this is in the current context, I say that DEI and affirmative action have never been the goals. | ||
| They have been intermediary steps to the goal. | ||
| That was the hope. | ||
| They were tactics to get to the goal. | ||
| Black Americans always sought mainstream access to capital markets, to home ownership, to job creation, all these different things. | ||
| And these other tactics have been used sometimes not to our success. | ||
| And so we should always keep the focus on legislation and policy. | ||
| There's a lot of back and forth around executive order and its use. | ||
| In the meantime, Congress has not done its job in enacting policy that works for all Americans. | ||
| So this book basically says, hey, here are the criteria that we should have policies around. | ||
| And we have to be disciplined in saying, hey, we still need policy around home ownership, clean air, higher incomes. | ||
| And we must work on safety, strong families, and the like. | ||
| This book is titled Black Power Scorecard, Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It. | ||
| The author Andre Perry with us for about the next 35 minutes this morning for you to call in. | ||
| It's 202748-8000 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| 202-748-8001, we'll put the lines on the screen, split by political parties, so you can dial in on the lines that best fit you. | ||
| You're talking about comparing apples to apples here. | ||
| How would you describe the state of black power today in America compared to just a few years ago before the Black Lives Matter movement? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's interesting. | |
| I'll pick one sector, and that's business development. | ||
| In 2017, when we started looking at the share of employer firms, that's the share of businesses with more than one employee, it was about 2.3%. |