美国国家公共电台 NPR How Black Americans See Discrimination

 

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

People of all races in the United States see racial discrimination regularly, but black Americans report it at the highest rates. This is according to a new survey from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Gene¹ Demby of NPR's Code Switch team has been reporting on this data, and he spoke² to our co-host Rachel Martin about this statistic³. Ninety-two percent of African-Americans surveyed say they have felt discrimination themselves or they've seen it happen to others like them.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE⁴: So that statistic - in some ways, that's not really that surprising, right?

GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: No, not surprising at all.

MARTIN: What's your take on this?

DEMBY: Well, you can see discrimination against African-Americans everywhere. It's backed up by the data. You can see it in housing and policing. Black people, for example, live in areas with more concentrated poverty, even when they are higher earners. Black Americans are more likely to go to segregated⁵ and underfunded schools, more likely to be stopped by the police and more likely to be searched once they are stopped.

MARTIN: So their responses to the survey are - they're a reflection of that reality that they're living.

DEMBY: That's right.

MARTIN: There are, though, some really interesting details in the data. What did you find?

DEMBY: Yeah. Within that 92 percent, which is near unanimous, there's a range of experiences. First of all, where you lived mattered in how you answer these questions. People who lived in cities were more likely to see discrimination as driven by institutional factors like policy and laws as opposed to, like, individual bias⁶ and racism⁷. Gender⁸ matters here a lot, too. Men were more likely than women to say that they'd personally experienced discrimination in encounters with the police. And on policing, younger people were more likely to say that they or a family member had been unfairly stopped by the police because they were black. People who live in the suburbs and people who lived in the South and Midwest, interestingly, were more likely to report that people in their communities were discriminated⁹ against by the police.

MARTIN: Why would that be the case, thinking about the difference in policing in the perception of that between suburbanites and city-dwellers? I mean, what do you make of that?

DEMBY: Yeah, it made our antenna¹⁰ twitch¹¹, too. And one of the things that could explain what's going on here is cars. Right? So...

MARTIN: Cars.

DEMBY: The most common reason that anyone has contact with the police is by a traffic stop, right?

MARTIN: Traffic stops, yeah.

DEMBY: And that's according to the BJS, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So it could just mean that black people who live in places where cars are more essential to everyday life are just having more contact with the police than people who live in denser¹², pre-car cities like the Northeast.

MARTIN: So you wrote about this for Code Switch. And you said that the survey results might actually be underestimating discrimination in some way. How so?

DEMBY: Yeah, yeah. So this study is about perceptions of discrimination. And one of the things that we've seen in other studies is that there are so many ways that, when discrimination happens to you, it's often invisible. Like, it's hard to see up close. Even when you're, like, in it or even when this - you're having...

MARTIN: Even if you're the one who's being discriminated against.

DEMBY: Absolutely. One great example of this is this study by the Urban Institute that came out a few years ago. What they did is they took testers - they were actors - and they sent them to real estate offices and rental¹³ offices to inquire about homes or renting apartments.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DEMBY: Some of them were white. Some of them were people of color. And what they found, no matter where they sent these testers, was that, routinely, the people of color were being shown fewer homes and were less likely to get discounts on their rent. But what was extra interesting about this was that many of those actors said that they were treated politely, even warmly, by the same people they found out later...

MARTIN: Oh, fascinating.

DEMBY: ...Were telling them that there weren't apartments available.

MARTIN: So maybe the endgame of the interaction was that you didn't get the apartment. But somehow, they were like - oh, but that person was so nice.

DEMBY: That person was so nice to me. And that's one of the really fascinating - and I guess, disheartening - things about the way discrimination works is that even when it's, like, right up in your face, sometimes you can't even see it unless it's in the aggregate¹⁴.

MARTIN: NPR's Gene Demby - thanks so much, Gene.

DEMBY: Thank you, Rachel.

(SOUNDBITE OF GABRIEL GARZON-MONTANO'S "THE GAME (INSTRUMENTAL)")

1 gene   

n.遗传因子，基因

参考例句：

• A single gene may have many effects.单一基因可能具有很多种效应。
• The targeting of gene therapy has been paid close attention.其中基因治疗的靶向性是值得密切关注的问题之一。

2 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

3 statistic   

n.统计量；adj.统计的，统计学的

参考例句：

• Official statistics show real wages declining by 24%.官方统计数字表明实际工资下降了24%。
• There are no reliable statistics for the number of deaths in the battle.关于阵亡人数没有可靠的统计数字。

4 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

5 segregated   

分开的； 被隔离的

参考例句：

• a culture in which women are segregated from men 妇女受到隔离歧视的文化
• The doctor segregated the child sick with scarlet fever. 大夫把患猩红热的孩子隔离起来。

6 bias   

n.偏见，偏心，偏袒；vt.使有偏见

参考例句：

• They are accusing the teacher of political bias in his marking.他们在指控那名教师打分数有政治偏见。
• He had a bias toward the plan.他对这项计划有偏见。

7 racism   

n.民族主义；种族歧视(意识)

参考例句：

• He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
• Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。

8 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

9 discriminated   

分别，辨别，区分( discriminate的过去式和过去分词 )； 歧视，有差别地对待

参考例句：

• His great size discriminated him from his followers. 他的宽广身材使他不同于他的部下。
• Should be a person that has second liver virus discriminated against? 一个患有乙肝病毒的人是不是就应该被人歧视？

10 antenna   

n.触角，触须；天线

参考例句：

• The workman fixed the antenna to the roof of the house.工人把天线固定在房顶上。
• In our village, there is an antenna on every roof for receiving TV signals.在我们村里，每家房顶上都有天线接收电视信号。

11 twitch   

v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛

参考例句：

• The smell made my dog's nose twitch.那股气味使我的狗的鼻子抽动着。
• I felt a twitch at my sleeve.我觉得有人扯了一下我的袖子。

12 denser   

adj. 不易看透的, 密集的, 浓厚的, 愚钝的

参考例句：

• The denser population necessitates closer consolidation both for internal and external action. 住得日益稠密的居民，对内和对外都不得不更紧密地团结起来。 来自英汉非文学 - 家庭、私有制和国家的起源
• As Tito entered the neighbourhood of San Martino, he found the throng rather denser. 蒂托走近圣马丁教堂附近一带时，发现人群相当密集。

13 rental   

n.租赁，出租，出租业

参考例句：

• The yearly rental of her house is 2400 yuan.她这房子年租金是2400元。
• We can organise car rental from Chicago O'Hare Airport.我们可以安排提供从芝加哥奥黑尔机场出发的租车服务。

14 aggregate   

adj.总计的，集合的；n.总数；v.合计；集合

参考例句：

• The football team had a low goal aggregate last season.这支足球队上个赛季的进球总数很少。
• The money collected will aggregate a thousand dollars.进帐总额将达一千美元。