92000 hours of programming on the latest discussions on history, politics and biography. You can watch book tv every sunday on cspan2. Or online at booktv. Org. Book tv 25 years of television for serious readers. In Elementary School teacher. Lets try that again. Good afternoon. Okay now we have to saying. This is how it goes. Good afternoon, good afternoon. Then im going to say how are you and then you have a simple response. I am fine, im fine, i hope that you are to. I want you to sound like a choir. Good afternoon i am mc how are you . Im fine im fine i hope that you are too. Good afternoon and welcome to the report lunch. We are so excited to be here. I am doctor brown and i have the privilege of serving as the executive director Grant Research scientist of the doctor and joyce payne center for social justice, housed in the Thurgood Marshall college fund. After nearly two years of research and collaboration with the center for black voices headed by doctor Camille Lloyd we have some shocking and reinforcing data to share with you today. We are making a 100 year commitment to bring the data once a year and a system and form thats a dashboard much like tao or nasdaq where you can track the movement of racial progress in this country. We were struck by an interesting conversation in black america and that was the difference in the nexus between social justice and civil rights. Much of our language in the country is focused on civil rights, and it dates back to a series of litigations, lawsuits, movements and activations regarding racial progress. But in the seventh pamphlet of hamiltons federalist papers, and everyone seemed hamilton i hope, in pamphlet seven, hamilton introduces the concept called social justice and social justice for all of the fancy terms means fairness in society. So, while weve discussed racism, its hard to quantify racism because racism is a behavioral and phenomenological event. We can combine race prejudice and race bigotry and so we use this model in collaboration with gallup to bring to you a dashboard on social justice for black america. We will walk you through that data in just a moment. The pain the center has won the onefunction and that is to infom Public Policy related to social justice. We have six pillars and as we went through the six pillars we were checking the landscape to make sure that no one else had the same pillars we had and lo and behold, there was a center in the very building with pillars not identical but extremely similar. So we began meeting team to team almost weekly in parallel with our pillars to identify what are the Life Experiences of black americans that we should quantify and bring to the public. So that we would be able to answer your questions about reliability and trustworthiness returned to gallup because gallup has the worlds most trustworthy polling and behavioral science question database now over 80 years. So we use the world pole and key questions about Life Experiences for black americans that all americans and people all over the world have answered. We will not discuss it today but we can share with you how thriving looks across countries around the world and some populations around the world. Today we will focus on black americans, White Americans and hispanic americans because for the latino and hispanic populations are strong but the asian populations and our Indian American populations were too small to meet the 95. 95 of statistical reliability rating. So, thank you for joining us for the conversation. I want to welcome to the panel someone very important not just because hes my boss but because hes diana mike individual and the doctor. Williams the president of the Thurgood Marshall college fund. [applause] thank you doctor brown. I just want to take a minute to say welcome to the Thurgood Marshall college fund we are housed here in this building and weve been here for over 15 years. The organization was created 36 years ago when the founder, who you will meet today, had a meeting with doctor marshall in his office and when asked if he would lend his name. The historically black colleges and universities in the six hbcus Historic Community colleges, 53 institutions which represent about over 300,000 students. The Thurgood Marshall college fund is the largest in the nation representing the black college community. Doctor brown referenced earlier equality making sure leveling the playing field, and thats what by creating this organization and creating an opportunity to raise scholarships and support students. Africanamericans still have the highest amount of debt when it comes to going to college. They also have the highest challenges when its put in terms of affording to go to college, so when the founders had this vision, she was thinking about disrupting the whole entire system of how you provide scholarships and by creating the Thurgood Marshall college fund shes been able to do that. We have given out more than annually 20 million a year to support black students attending historically black colleges and universities. [applause] being a disruptor is very important. The center is a dream come true for me. When i started a six years ago as president , one of the things i was looking at is not only do we provide scholarships, but we also get up every single day focusing on continuing the legacy of Justice Marshall. One of the greatest Supreme Court justices that walked the planet. And Justice Marshall as you know he got up every day focusing on how to tear down a system that created barriers that block people from advancing and one a system he ripped apart was jim crow and when he went into that plessy versus ferguson separate but equal doctrine which was so significant, to ripped apart and brown v board of education, he argued and preparing for that argument on the campus of the universities that is less than a mile from here, Justice Marshall went into the Historic Library and prepared for that brief, for that particular argument that changed the world, that changed america. And the justice the Thurgood Marshall college fund and the social justice continue to that legacy today. Today you will hear as you heard from our executive director doctor brown from very Interesting Data that youve never seen before and that is what is so historic about that today. So im excited about it because it continues the legacy of justice Thurgood Marshall. Welcome. [applause] [inaudible] thank you and thank you for all you do and for taking on this important job. That was great. Thank you for all you do. The Thurgood Marshall college fund and thank you for involving me and all the stuff youve done. This isnt a specialty of mine that i was concerned about the measurement. We promised to do this for a hundred years and when i look at the research challenges, i start thinking about problems and solutions. The dream was we could put some kind of metric on racism so we would say how racist is america, a little racist, of course theres a few around and is it 3 , 30 , 60 . But the next problem is hard for the respondent to unpack racism. One of the problems we have dealing with it and theres so many smart people in this room is how racism is doing is an argument. There is a real important black american leader here in town, supersmart. Hes been a College President of some universities, columbia trained lawyer and all that. He says black experience in america is the worst its ever been. Very smart, important american leader, worst its ever been. A good friend of ours is ambassador andrew young, one of the most amazing people ive ever met or known. He says no its the best its ever been. Thats a different answer. I said i know hes ambassador. I said what do you say to all the important black leaders that say its the worst its ever been and you know what he said, they were into their were not there. If we dont have some kind of measurement with carrying americans of sorts with the same thing, the argument. If we can put some kind of measurement and math to this, just the measurement itself will change everything. I looked through all our data. I did a whole bunch of research on information for academia. Its not real good. Most of them are not a very practiced researchers and they will do what i call spot poles. So once on how much racism have you experienced in your life, and i cant tell you the worst researcher is better than that. Its very tricky because you have to do two things. One is you have to write to the question and carve it and test it and if youre really good youll run it for ten minutes and run analytics and line it up. Youve got to wonder about the question and this is too serious to be wrong. I found two questions and all the work. One is would you vote for a qualified candidate for president. The question was written if he i laughed so i dont go nuts. Weve been asking that question for 60 years. Im 72 so i would have been 12yearsold when that started into the answer was no, we wouldnt do that. I said of course not. But you know what, we evolved. It went from about 20 to 94 but now you might say other people were socially acceptable. The only good thing about being old as you are there. Up to 94 . There is a lot to think about. If you said what racism ever go away you can kind of see a solution and that. If it gets mixed enough, we dont have a problem anymore. What about when it gets to 50 and then the 70 a lot of you here know my son he came home with a young woman thats about a third black, about 50 indigenous and there will be a new mix in my family. It really we didnt think that much about it we would have 50 or 60 years ago. But you get the point about the validation of those items. With a single item we have the most confidence in, and im trying to do this as fast as i can is a question invented about 60 years ago. Heres the item and theres two nobel prizes. On a scale of zero to ten with zero being the worst life imaginable and ten being the best life imaginable, where are you on that scale it gets about 98 . So we have benchmarks and millions of interviews. What we want to do is unpack racism as much as we can. We found three categories. Thriving, struggling and suffering. But if you saw things Getting Better i think i would go to that item as my third most favorite because the more black americans that keep moving into thriving you would have to Say Something is working. But then all the smart people that we have here can start looking at all the other derivatives from income and i think that we can get a lot of discoveries. We have a lot of confidence in thriving. When you have wellbeing it starts with your job. Theres some behavioral activities if anybody is in a job the single best question we are not asking about her racism or anything else. What are you in the presence of the single most respectful act that a management or corporation or group of people can have, just yes or no. Of the other one is fear the actual racism and humiliation or the disrespect its actually having fear in your body. We are going to do a good job measuring fear. A close relationship with police and then finally as you know, we are paying for this ourselves. A problem that we made to the family a long time ago when we got the organization and it was so important to me as the sole chairman this is the best work that we do. No special Interest Groups and we are going to work as hard as we can to get this right. The best people working on it, but we need you to join this and to be part of this Research Group and for reporters you might say to them rather than pride this angle orbis why dont you put some data in it and see if we can get it right. What are you really trying to do here. The mission is to get this right. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible] we want to show you the numbers and research. We know you are all here for the data. You are going to get some data. We want to get some background on the study that led to the data that we are going to be sharing a little bit about. Jim mentioned about the objective to quantify peoples experience to take the debate out of it. Part of the work at the center what we are doing is we are tracking and measuring experiences on a quarterly basis. So, since july of 2020, we surveyed over 150,000 americans on these measures and weve been tracking that quarterly since july of 2020. For the most recent measures included in the report, this survey is over 10,000 adults and it was conducted in february, 2023. It was an english only survey and webbased survey. We utilized the panel as well as sample panels from a thirdparty vendor to make sure it was fully representative of the population that we were trying to measure. Part of the goal was to not just assume the experience is a monolith but to do largescale research that allows for us to unpack the nuance experience that we know black americans have. To tell you the validity, the data is the result based on the sample the 95 confidence interval, so it is a really solid research. Jim mentioned this one of the things we want to understand is how is your life going so we have this measure of the selfreport, self evaluation measure where we ask black americans on a scale from zero to ten and if you imagine that to be the latter, what would you rate the current life . Where would you be on this particular latter ramp locale black americans rate to the current Life Experience and the hope they have for the future. What this allows us to do is categorize peoples self evaluation of their lives into one of three buckets. So, start with suffering, struggling in thriving. What that means is that for someone to be thriving, you essentially have to rate your current as a seven or higher so youre pretty satisfied with how the life is going and then when you look at your life five years from now, rating that at an eight or higher so very satisfied or rating the current life highly and then optimistic about what your life will be five years from now. What we see about individuals that are falling within this thriving bucket is that the well wellbeing is strong, consistent and progressing. For those that are in the struggling bucket what we see as moderate or inconsistent so you might have moderate life evaluations for the current life evaluation and how you rate your life and then when you think about five years from now, could be moderate or negative, so theres inconsistencies in terms of overall wellbeing. Then what we see in terms of those that are in that suffering bucket is the wellbeing of high risk so you are rating the current life evaluation and future life evaluation is similarly low. This is a very important piece. Over the title of the report, this report could be black suffering and struggling in america or it could be black thriving in america and i think its important as we get to the next data slide that africanamericans are moving into the thriving category at a consistent rate but i caution all of us as we unpack the data that even while half of us plus two or thriving theres still half of us struggling in the country. In addition to the thriving measures, we look at important areas and have measures that are touching around dignity in public so this is the experience with mistreatment going about your everyday life and we see that 57 black americans say they have been treated fairly in the last 30 days. We will unpack that to see what it is we are measuring with of this dignity in public. We also spent about 90,000 hours of our lives at work and time spent on the workplace, so we have this measure about what are our experiences at work and see 42 can say at work im treated with respect. We have a measure about interactions with police. A lot of conversations are had in terms of how it impacts our lives in negative and life altering ways. So we have a measure around interactions with the police. In the last 12 months we have to asked if they failed an introduction with the police and then asked whether we thought they were treated fairly among those that had an interaction and they say they were treated fairly in the introduction theyfound in the last 12 months. The last thing jim mentioned something about having fear in your body and how that affects your overall wellbeing and quality of life and we have this measure around safety in the neighborhood. We are asking people if whether or not they feel safe walking alone at night where they live and we see this 56 of black americans saying they feel safe walking alone at night. This is one of the two slides that you will see consistently for the next hundred years. I will be retired but you will be here watching this and this is the dashboard. You will be able to track every year whether we are at 52 , 50 , 36 and you think im making these numbers that you will see it in just a moment and aware we are with these discrete interactions. This is going to allow us to track racial progress or recession. I would add it also has the ability to oversample so many years, cities, states can oversample their population and you can hold your mayor accountable than to say how are we making progress on social justice in the district of columbia, how are we doing in baltimore city, or you could do it statewide. And i will say this one last thing. Executive director of the pain center, maybe i just got a raise. I just got a bonus. Its a great day. I am feeling really good. In my car driving home from nine into maryland i have an account for the Police Officer that is racially biased, disrespectful, stressful, and im feeling great. My body. Was that a good day or a bad day for me . Thats what the data has to unpack. This is something that we share so we do see when we look at black americans in terms of the percent that are thriving we see just over half. Comparably what we see from White Americans as well and slightly higher than what we hear from hispanic americans. So, for that comparison across racial and ethnic groups. This is my last one and then i will be quiet because we want to hear the panel. Whats important is that they are measuring selfreported perceptions of the lived behav