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The Daily Cardinal Est. 1892
Friday, March 29, 2024
Dane County disparity

Dane County experiences above average racial disparities

A report by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families released Wednesday at the 2013 Racial Justice Summit shows dramatic differences between the quality of life blacks and whites experience in Dane County.

The report, prepared by the WCCF’s Race to Equity project team and the Madison YWCA, said it is “not unexpected” that the county’s black community leads a collectively more disadvantaged life than its white counterpart because “the hard truth is that African Americans fare worse than whites on virtually all state indicators in virtually every part of the nation,” according to the report.

However, the “sheer magnitude” of racial inequalities in the areas of unemployment, adult and child poverty levels, juvenile and adult arrest rates as well as several educational factors in Dane County is striking when placed on a national scale.

For instance, 25 percent of the county’s black community was unemployed in 2011, compared to 4.8 percent of the non-hispanic white community. In other words, the unemployment rate for blacks in Dane County was 5.5 times higher than for white people living in the area, while the unemployment rate for the national black community sat just over two times that of the white population nationwide.

Similarly, of the 9 percent of the total youth population in Dane County, black children account for nearly 60 percent of the foster care population, and approximately 50 percent of black students in the Madison Metropolitan District do not graduate with a regular diploma in four years compared to 16 percent of their white classmates.

The report focuses on the abnormally high correlation between poverty and skin color in Dane County, and says that although calculated prejudices may not have primarily caused the inequities, the “extent to which economic depravity has become profoundly racialized” threatens to continue fostering damaging stereotypes, creating a cyclical effect.

The report said blacks do not make up a majority in any one of the 20 city districts, which disallows a united voice to emerge. According to the report, increasing the political visibility of the black community, in addition to adding interactive, community-building centers to predominantly black neighborhoods would improve their quality of living.

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