Evaluation and Race

November 13, 2015

Evaluation and Race

Ernest R. House

When we first started talking about social justice in evaluation in 1976, some of us lamented the lack of a sizable group of minority evaluators. We now have such a group. The field was already turning from mostly male to female. At that time I suggested that we apply Rawls two principles of social justice to evaluation. One principle dealt with civil rights and the other with inequality.

Over the next few decades, feminist and minority scholars argued that Rawls might be all right for the majority, but there should be special considerations for women and minorities. One important outcome of such discussions has been culturally responsive evaluation, developed by Stafford Hood and his colleagues (Hood, Hopson, Frierson, 2005, 2015). This approach combines social justice with Stake’s responsive evaluation. It’s a valuable contribution to evaluation. Furthermore, the American Evaluation Association has been more receptive to ideas such as cultural competence than I would have anticipated 40 years ago.

That’s the good news. Now, Ferguson, Missouri.

To understand some events, you have to consider the majority culture, as well as that of minorities. Ferguson is in my home territory, about 15 miles from Alton, Ill., where I was born. The area has a long history of racial violence. James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King’s assassin, was born there a decade before me. I’ve recently published a childhood memoir called Cherry Street Alley detailing what it was like growing up in this culture from the viewpoint of a child. Violence was a childhood companion (House, 2015).

Here are three ideas.

Supposition 1: If a society sees itself as democratic, and in many ways is democratic, and yet is racist and does not recognize the extent or nature of the racism, that society will promulgate programs and policies that purport to help the affected minorities, but many programs and policies will damage those minorities significantly. Supposition 2: Racism in America is not a simple vestige of the past. Rather American racism is created and recreated in the present. Several definable social mechanisms, processes, and structures generate racist beliefs and behaviors. Supposition 3: Evaluation plays an important role in these processes. It’s not a cause of racism, but for racist processes to have their effects, the evaluation function has to be distorted, coopted, or corrupted.

We have many suspect programs and policies, among them the operations of the Ferguson police and city government, the subprime mortgage program that led to the Great Financial Crisis, and the so-called War on Drugs.

In Ferguson, the city has been trying to fund itself by fining its citizens, especially African Americans, who constitute 67% of the population and incur more than 90% of the fines. The 50 white and 4 black police officers are evaluated by how many citations they issue. When black citizens step out the door, they are targets. If they complain, they’re arrested and levied heavy fines. If they don’t pay, they’re put in jail. Violations of the 4th and 14th amendments are frequent (US Department of Justice, 2015). It was in this grinding environment that Michael Brown was killed. When citizens protested in the streets, whites nearby were terrified, thus regenerating racism among the whites. Surely, small children absorb the fear and attitudes of their parents.

Perhaps the most egregious program is the War on Drugs, as analyzed by Michelle Alexander, a Stanford law professor (Alexander, 2015).

• In 1982 Reagan declared the War on Drugs as part of his campaign against crime and welfare. Every president since then has accepted and augmented the program.
• At the beginning the US prison population was 300 thousand. It’s now over 2 million.
• Before the program began, US incarceration rates were the same as those in Germany. Our rates are now 8 times greater than Germany’s (and 6 to 10 times those of other developed countries).
• Most of the increase in the prison population has been from drug arrests. In 2005, 4 out of 5 arrests were for possession of marijuana.
• In some states 90% of those admitted to prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.
• In some cities 80% of young black males have prison records. As convicted felons, they cannot get jobs or vote when they are released. They are stigmatized for life. Many end up back in prison. The effects on their families are devastating.
• Studies show that people of all colors and social classes use and sell drugs at similar rates. Yet in some places black men have been admitted to prison at 20 to 50 times the rate of whites.
• Let me put the issue another way. If the same arrest and sentencing protocols were applied to the majority population, a large number of people in this audience would be in prison, along with the last 3 presidents of the US and Rush Limbaugh.
• The US has a larger percentage of blacks in prison than South Africa did during Apartheid.

What can evaluators do?

1. When programs and policies affect minorities, evaluators should look for side effects and long-term outcomes not expected by the rhetoric of the program or policy. We should examine how programs and policies actually function rather than their rhetoric. We must look for possible negative outcomes (House, 1999).
2. Programs and policies based on what one sociologist calls the “white racial frame” are highly suspect. This framework incorporates the stereotypical views most whites have of minorities (Feagin, 2013). Many programs and policies are based on and reinforce this perspective.
3. As evaluators we should discover and reveal the social mechanisms, processes, and structures that generate racism. These findings could generalize to other settings. Knowing about Ferguson would help in conducting evaluations of other programs.
4. We should check our own predispositions. No white growing up in this country can be entirely free of the white racial frame. Where this framework prevails, racist activities are likely to be invisible and taken for granted.
5. We should also check the work of our colleagues for such dispositions and for help. We need help from peers on this issue. This is a professional responsibility, not only an individual one.

Where are we now? We have over 520 years of racism in America and still counting, since the inception of the society. This latest phase is not yet named, but it includes “push back” against the civil rights gains of prior decades. In his book Between the World and Me, the African American journalist T. Coates says minorities can and should protest against racism, but they cannot solve the problem (Coates, 2015). Only the majority can solve it. I agree with that.

References

Alexander, M. (2012) The new Jim Crow. New York: New Press.

Coates, T. N. (2015) Between the world and me. New York: Random House.

Feagin, J. R. (2013) The white racial frame. (2nd Ed.) New York: Routledge.

Hood, S., Hopson, R., Frierson, H. (Eds.) (2013) The role of culture and cultural context. Greenwich CN: Information Age Publishing.

Hood, S., Hopson, R., Frierson, H. (Eds.) (2015). Continuing the journey to reposition culture and cultural context in evaluation theory and practice. Charlotte, N C: Information Age Publishing.

House, E. R. (2015) Cherry Street Alley South. Charleston SC: Create Space Publishing.

House, E. R. (1999) Policy and Race Education, Policy Analysis, 7:16.

United States Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, March 4, 2015.