Quality of Life/Right Direction, or

Quality of Life/Right Direction, or Merely Who’s In The Driver’s Seat? – The Sunday Washington Post ran a front page article under the headline, “Pr. George’s Perspectives Split Along Color Lines: Blacks More Satisfied With County, Poll Finds.”

Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington suburb, is “one of the few majority-black suburban counties in the country,” the Post noted, and it “has long been viewed as a national model of racial diversity and a testing ground for relations between the black and white middle class.” Over the past decade blacks have grown to more than 60% of the population.

Excerpts from the Post‘s poll findings:

Blacks were twice as likely to be satisfied with the public schools and to view the police force as being overly aggressive…. 53 percent of whites have talked in the past year about leaving Prince George’s, compared with 39 percent of blacks.

The Post’s survey found that blacks are far more satisfied than whites with the county, with more than eight in 10 ranking it as a good or excellent place to live, 22 percentage points higher than whites. Twice as many blacks as whites gave public schools and schools chief Iris T. Metts favorable marks. And more than six in 10 blacks said they approved of the job performance of Curry [County Executive], compared with about four in 10 whites.

The poll suggests that whites’ views of the county were significantly more pessimistic than blacks. Nearly six in 10 whites said Prince George’s had “gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track.” A small majority of blacks, on the other hand, said the county was moving in the right direction.

Not surprisingly, the Post found that “the attitude of blacks’ [sic] have [sic] changed” since blacks have become politically dominant in the county. (However, the Post‘s grammar, or lack of it, is surprising.)

An interesting question, unmentioned in the article, is whether these poll findings have any implications for the myriad national polls asking about “quality of life” and whether we’re “heading in the right direction.” Alvin Thornton, a prominent political science professor at Howard University, did say of the polling results showing white dissatisfaction that “This is the way a minority feels, that it’s part of something that is changing and that it cannot control. It reflects a sense of marginalization….”

But if that is true, do we then need to revise how we interpret national polls that compare racial attitudes? To pick just one example, a 1997 Gallup survey found “a sharp decline in optimism since 1980; only 33 percent of blacks (versus 58 percent of whites) thought both the quality of life for blacks and race relations had gotten better.” (quoted in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, “Black America: Progress & Prospects,” Brookings Review 16, No. 2, March 22, 1998). Maybe the decline in optimism reflects dissatisfaction with minority status more than any change in objective circumstances.

If polling always reflects minorities’ dissatisfaction because of their perceived marginalization, maybe we need to re-evaluate their pessimism as expressed in polls, whatever the color of the minority in question.

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