Please give this recent survey from the Pew Research Center you careful attention.  I have linked you to the full report instead of summary articles because the document deserves to be read in full. 

It is easy to pontificate about “perception gaps” between white and black Americans (I do it all the time), but sometimes we need to wrestle with objective statistical surveys.  Do black and white Americans differ in their perceptions?  It all depends on the question.

For the most part, blacks and whites like each other just fine.  There is little evidence of widespread bigotry in the Pew numbers.  But ask whether African Americans experience prejudice on a day-to-day basis and an enormous perception gap is immediately apparent.  Whites don’t think prejudice is a big deal; blacks disagree.  Respondents, regardless of race, tend to think integrated schools are a good thing.  But whites are far more likely than blacks to value neighborhood schools over integrated schools.  This, I suspect, is because black parents know the quality of education rises with the percentage of white students, while white parents know that the presence of black students does not correlate positively with good teachers or state of the art facilities.

On the other hand, the numbers suggest that a slim majority of African Americans believe that if black workers are having trouble getting ahead it is their own damn fault.  Black support for Bill Cosby is twenty percentage points higher than support for Al Sharpton (Although Sharpton’s approval ratings among African American respondents are respectable). 

For some reason, the survey didn’t think to ask white respondents what they think of black notables.  My guess is that Sharpton’s approval ratings would have been dramatically lower among whites than blacks–but that must remain a gut feeling because the folks at Pew didn’t ask the question.

 The most dramatic perception gap of all appears when black and white respondents are asked about their confidence in the criminal justice system.  Forty-two percent of whites (hardly an encouraging figure) believe the police can be trusted to treat the races equally; among blacks, that figure drops to fourteen percent.

Curiously, the criminal justice questions are restricted to attitudes toward police officers–a clear sign that the folks asking the questions (a) were tied to questions originally formulated in the 1970s, and (b) have precious little first-hand experience with the criminal justice system.  Ask blacks and whites how much confidence they place in the courts, or how they perceive the credibility of all-white juries, and you would really see a gap open up. 

Nonetheless, the statistics provided validate the perception gap I have been blathering on about.

By the way, negative attitudes toward police officers are highly correlated with income level.  Poor respondents, black, white and Latino, hold the police in low regard.  This is largely because law enforcement has a tendency to treat the residents of poor neighborhoods like potential criminals.  People get tired of the suspicion.

The Pew report reveals some trends that should give criminal justice reform advocates more than a moment’s pause.  For one thing, black people are just as likely to have a low view of black people as white people do.  This is particularly true of high-income, Republican-leaning, African Americans.  Most black respondents take a dim view of the Hip Hop industry (naughty lyrics seem to be the big problem here), and concern over issues like low marriage rates and high birthrates among unmarried mothers are extraordinarily high in the black community. 

In other words, trendy white liberal skepticism about “family values” doesn’t resonate in black America.  The poorer black respondents are, the more likely they are to express concerns about the social disintegration of the neighborhoods they live in. 

The numbers indicate a large and growing “values gap” between the black middle class and low-income black people.  Most black respondents feel that the black middle class is becoming more like the white middle class even as the gap between low and high-income blacks widens.  

In other words, the black middle class distrusts low income blacks almost as much as it distrusts the criminal justice system. 

The Pew survey suggests that black families are almost three times as likely to live in poverty as are white families.   Poverty, as everyone knows, is highly associated with incarceration.  This helps explain why white America (66% of the general population) accounts for only 36% of the prison population while black Americans (a scant 12% of the population) comprise 40% of the prison population.

The incarceration gap between middle class and poor blacks is almost as great as the incarceration gap between whites and blacks generally.   Social influence rises with income and social class.  The more prominent the citizen, the less likely they are to have first-hand experience with the inequities of the criminal justice system.  This explains why it can be so difficult to get black opinion leaders on the right side of criminal justice reform issues.

These trends help explain the steadily falling popularity of black preachers and the NAACP.  The civil rights crisis used to impact all black Americans; now the poor are affected far more profoundly than the affluent.  Black Americans are much more aware of the minequities within the criminal justice system than are white Americans; but awareness doesn’t always translate into advocacy. 

We have seen that a slim majority of black respondents believe that black workers should blame themselves for their failure to get ahead.  I suspect there is a similar tendency for the black middle class to blame young black males who run afoul of the law for their plight: “do the crime, do the time.”

This doesn’t mean that black America is deaf to the cry for justice; it just means the issues must be spelled out with prisine clarity if you want the support of mainstream black America. 

Take Jena, for example.  The 20,000 people who came to the central Louisiana town on September 20th were overwhelmingly middle class.  They rode the buses because they identified with the Jena 6.  Support cooled, however, when one of the defendants made the mistake of emulating his Hip Hop heroes by stuffing large denomination bills into his mouth on MySpace.  Days later, when two Jena 6 defendants showed up at the Hip Hop awards “thugin'” for the cameras in trendy Hip Hop attire, support for the defendants declined further.

The Jena 6 still enjoy widespread support within the black community, but that support cannot be taken for granted.  I don’t blame the kids for their missteps; I blame civil rights celebrities who “market” the defendants and their families. 

The Jena 6 are normal kids caught up in a toxic situation–nothing more, nothing less.  They are not heroes, nor are they commodities to be hawked in the public square.  They are human beings who need to be protected from the American celebrity machine.  We need to humanize the victims of the New Jim Crow–we do not need to glamorize them.

The Pew survey makes one thing clear: white America represents the ultimate challenge for criminal justice reformers.  Most white folks believe that life is getting better for black people, that the police treat all people equally, and that black Americans face little prejudice in their daily lives.  We won’t get anywhere until we start to change these perceptions.  Public policy is shaped by popular perception.

If the Pew survey is anything to go by (and I think it is) we’ve got our work cut out for us.