We made a few new additions to our resources today that we think you should take a look at:

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

• Site Summary: The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s “ultimate goal is to stimulate and facilitate transformative change to bring about a society that is fair and just for all people.” It approaches this goal “with the understanding that all communities of people are interconnected and that by fostering positive relationships through research, scholarship and collaboration, we will deepen the possibility for change.” The Kirwan Institute is a true pioneer in the fight to achieve equitable results for communities of color and its research and advocacy, particularly around opportunity mapping, represents some of the most innovative and effective advocacy currently being undertaken by advocates for race equity. The Institute also posts all of their PowerPoint presentations on their site. Available presentations cover topics ranging from GIS to framing to structural racism.

HealthyCity

• Site Summary: HealthyCity offers perhaps the most comprehensive access to community resources, demographic/health data, and cutting edge online GIS mapping technology that the REP has ever seen. For the time being, the site only offers geographic coverage for Los Angeles county. We hope that HealthyCity will be going statewide soon but until that time we will have to stew in our jealousy of the wonderful online mapping and data analysis tools that residents of the city of angels have access to.

• Suggested Uses: If you have any mapping or data analysis needs related to Los Angeles county and you are not adverse to free, powerful, user-friendly online mapping and data analysis tools than HealthyCity is for you.

The Frameworks Institute recently completed a five year survey of default frames used by the public to understand matters of race in America. These dominant frames rise from deeply held American values but they are also reinforced/primed by the limited analytical framework used by the media. The FrameWorks staff thoughtfully suggest ways in which our advocacy can apply reframing principles to move the public towards more equitable policies on race in America. The FrameWorks message brief, Framing Race, summarizes their research on framing and provides practical pointers for facilitating transformative discussions of race in our communities. The full report, The Architecture of a New Racial Discourse, is also worth reading as it provides fascinating insight into the reactions of focus groups held throughout the United States on which frames work and which don’t.

The Harvard Law & Policy Review Online, published a note, entitled End Residential Racial Segregation: Build Communities that Look Like America, by long time housing advocate and Indiana University law professor Florence Wagman Roisman. After detailing the history of federal policies that have resegregated American cities along racial lines, the author suggests seven common sense initiatives to address the problem. We join Florence in her hope that we soon find leaders with the power, vision and courage to implement these needed changes.

As with any promising new science, implicit bias has its critics. Two of the most vocal critics of implicit bias in the last few years have been Gregory Mitchell and Philip Tetlock.

The current issue of Harvard Law & Policy Review includes a compelling response by Professor Bagenstos, Washington University School of Law, to Mitchell’s and Tetlock’s most recent attempt to attack implict bias and its relevance to law.

Samuel R. Bagenstos, Implicit Bias, “Science” and Antidiscrimination Law, 1 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 477 (2008).

• Summary: Bagenstos argues that “Mitchell and Tetlock’s argument does not at all undermine the case for taking account of implicit bias in antidiscrimination policy. Even if one accepts every “scientific” critique they offer of the implicit bias literature–and there is substantial dispute within psychology on some of those critiques–the case for using the law to respond to the problem of implicit bias remains strong. In the end, many of Mitchell and Tetlock’s critiques of implicit bias research rest, not on any scientific ground, but on normative assumptions about what kinds of discrimination the law should seek to prevent and punish. In particular, they rest on a very narrow view, based on notions of individual fault, that the law should prohibit only discrimination that results from self-conscious, irrational animus. That narrow view may resonate politically, but antidiscrimination doctrine and theory have consistently rejected it.”

Justin D. Levinson, assistant Professor of Law, University of Hawai‘i, William S. Richardson School of Law, recently published a significant addition to the ever growing body of scholarship on implicit bias and the Law. His article, Forgotten Racial Equality: Implicit Bias, Decisionmaking, and Misremembering, 57 DUKE L.J. 345 (2007), explores how decisionmakers (i.e judges and jurys) “implicitly make stereotype driven memory errors” when deciding a case. Professor Levinson’s use of empirical research methods and his in-depth discussion of debiasing techniques make this article a “must read” for implicit bias, social cognition, and behavioral realism aficionados.

There have been several promising law review articles pertaining to social cognition and race equity. Although we are still in the process of reading and reviewing them, we decided not to wait any longer before we told you about them. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts on the article. Why not write a review or summary of one for the REP? Although we can’t promise you cookies or cake for your contribution, we might be able to cook-up a map for you.

• Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, 93 Cornell L. Rev. 1 (2007).
• A Comparative Analysis of Unconscious and Institutional Discrimination in the United States and Britain, 36 Ga. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 89 (2007).
• Can Science Help Solomon? Child Maltreatment Cased and the Potential for Racial and Ethnic Bias in Decision Making, 81 St. John’s L. Rev. 533 (2007).
• Courts are Warming to Claims of ‘Unconscious Bias’ as a result, Employers Face Bigger Class Actions and Costlier Litigation, 10/1/2007 Nat’l L.J. S2, col. 1 (2007).

In the newly published Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws, its author Kevin R. Johnson provides a reality check for current U.S. immigration laws and policies asserting that a nativist approach works against a globalized economy. In addition to the economic benefits that would flow to the U.S. and its trade partners with the removal of antiquated border controls, Johnson writes that such reform “would end the sheer brutality inherent in current immigration enforcement, which results in physical abuse, promotes racial discrimination and relegates certain groups of U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants to second-class status, both inside and outside and United States.” Kevin R. Johnson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Davis and is also President of the Board of Directors of Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC). For more on this new publication and to read an excerpt, see Putting Immigration in perspective, LSNC Advocate Feed, November 18, 2007.

Part of the American dream is to achieve economic mobility, which should lead to more choice and opportunity. Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution reviewed longitudinal data to review the transfer of intergenerational wealth between Black and White families to determine if Black and White families have the same chance at economic success in the U.S.. In “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” Ms. Isaacs found that in the past thirty years, personal income has increased for Black and White women in their 30’s. In the same period of time, personal income fell for Black and White men. In 2004, the family income of Blacks ages 30-39 was $35,000, while similarly aged White families earned $60,000. In terms of intergenerational wealth, the study found that Black children grow up in families with lower incomes than White children. Since parental income influences childhood economic success, the study concluded that Black and White children do not have an equal chance to achieve economic success. The study attributed lower upward mobility for Black men to a difference in full time wages for Black and White full time employees and lower employment rates for Blacks.

The Brookings Institution reports that though incomes have increased among white and African American families over the last 30 years, the income gap between black and white has grown due to declining incomes of black men. In 1974, the average African American family’s income was 63 percent of the average white family’s. As of 2004 that figure has dropped to 58 percent, in large part due to declining income among black men. The Brookings reports are based on a longitudinal study (30 years) of 2,300 families. “Too many Americans, whites and even some blacks, think that the playing field has indeed leveled,” says Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, as quoted by the Associated Press.

The Equal Justice Society and UCLA School of Law hosted a Symposium on the labor and employment impact of California’s anti-affirmative action law — Prop. 209. Several research papers were presented, including:

A Vision Fulfilled? The Impact of Proposition 209 on Equal Opportunity for Women Business Enterprises
Monique W. Morris, Michael D. Sumner, Jessica Z. Borja

Affirmative Action Programs and Business Ownership among Minorities and Women
Robert Fairlie, Justin Marion

Diversity Management in America and the Affirmative Action Debate in France
Christine Pauwels

The Effectiveness of Affirmative Action in Highway Procurement
Justin Marion

Free to Compete? Measuring the Impact of Proposition 209 on Minority Business Enterprises
Monique W. Morris, Sirithon Thanasombat, Michael D. Sumner, Sara Pierre, Jessica Z. Borja

The Impact of State Affirmative Procurement Policies on Minority- and Women- Owned Businesses in Five States
Tim Lohrentz

Minority Preferences In Public Contracts
Christopher M. Westhoff, Jess J. Gonzalez

Using Race or Ethnicity as Factors in Employee and Contractor Outreach
David Benjamin Oppenheimer

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In related news, UCLA Professors Cheryl Harris and Walter Allen wrote an Op-Ed in the National Law Journal highlighting the flaws in the “mismatch thesis”, which purports to demonstrate empirically that “affirmative action in law schools hurts black law students because it puts them in schools where their credentials are below the median; consequently, they cannot academically compete.” Professors Harris and Allen note that the “mismatch thesis” has not been subject to peer review and numerous questions remain about the accuracy of the thesis.
The Equal Justice Society published a point-by-point response to Pr. Sander’s 2004 article, which appeared in the Stanford Law Review. Other responses can be found at http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/research.html.