Racial gaps in California get a county-by-county look in a new online tool.
While California is often regarded as one large, liberal utopia, the Golden State does not always shine when it comes to racial equity, according to Advancement Project California, a civil rights group. The group has created Race Counts, an interactive web tool that analyzes the unequal burdens shouldered throughout the state. This project looks at seven key quality-of-life measures—economic opportunity, healthcare access, education, housing, democracy, crime and justice, and healthy built environments—and shows how minority communities fare on each.
Race Counts maps out these variables in each of California's 58 counties. Click into Monterey County, for example, and you will learn that African American youth who live there are three times more likely to face truancy arrests than their white counterparts. In Fresno County, white residents are employed in managerial positions at double the rate of black and Asian residents and triple the rate of Latinos and Native Americans. Black residents are 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than white residents in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.
John Kim, the executive director of Advancement Project California, came up with the idea to map inequality by race after seeing the results of the organization's previous mapping project, healthycity.org, which focused on neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Using the map, Kim could see how certain communities were disparately affected by issues like gun violence.
So the group collected data from various sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Education, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the University of California, Los Angeles, that show how ethnic groups were impacted differently by housing policies or policing.
Pacific Islanders are people whom the census defines as having origins "in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands." According to 2013 census data, the community has a poverty rate of roughly 20 percent, which is nearly 7 percent higher than the poverty rate of Asian Americans.
The map shows how systemic injustices take a long time to heal. As Richard Rothstein described in the Los Angeles Times, after World War II, the federal government destroyed diverse neighborhoods in Southern California only to build segregated housing, and used tactics like redlining to block African Americans from buying homes with federal loans. Similar practices were put in place in the rest of the state—and the nation.
This set the state up for the deep disparities evident today. Across California, Asian and white homeowners have almost $25,000 more of their income left after paying for housing than African Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latinos. In San Mateo County, only 37 percent of the black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander populations own the homes they live in, compared to the white population's 67 percent home ownership rate. "Housing is one of those spaces where racial segregation is kept alive, and it's an echo from the past but we still keep renewing it," said Kim.
The project does not always paint a full picture—Santa Clara County is deemed "low disparity" although homes are notoriously unaffordable in the region. Kim acknowledges this, noting that no data project can tell the whole story of an area. "Data is only half the picture," he said. "We're clear that what we have is a powerful tool, but we have to get this on the ground. At the county level, a lot of sub-county issues get masked." Los Angeles County, for example, encompasses both Beverly Hills as well as poorer South L.A. In the project's next iteration, Advancement Project California hopes to narrow down to the city level.