A half century after the battles to integrate Virginia’s schools, racism remains a significant problem in the state, a new survey by the student pollsters at Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center found.
Some three-quarters of Virginia voters said so, in polling questions commissioned by the Daily Press. The questions were added to a Wason Center survey launched in the wake of the blackface scandal that brought calls for the resignation of Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.
Among the poll’s findings: One in every eight Virginians admitted to having worn blackface or said they know someone who has.
Nearly half of those surveyed said they strongly agreed that racism is still a major issue here.
That sense cut across partisan divisions and differences of race, gender, age and region, although some groups did not feel quite as strongly as others.
Some 65% of Virginians agreed that minorities are treated differently than whites by police, while 57% believed courts treat minorities differently, and 55% said minorities are treated differently at work.
“At the front end of criminal justice, you have 65% saying police treat people with brown skin differently … at the back end, in the courts, it’s 57% — that’s astounding,” said Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Wason Center.
The party loyalties, race, gender and age of voters surveyed made a difference, however.
Only a minority of those identifying themselves as Republican or conservative believe police and courts treat minorities differently.
White Virginians and men split evenly, while large majorities of women, African Americans, Latinos and young people agreed when asked if courts treat minorities differently. The same differences emerged when members of the different groups were asked about how minorities are treated in the workplace and in stores and restaurants.
“There’s a lot of polarization here,” Bitecofer said.
That’s no surprise, said Olusoji Akomolafe, head of the political science department at Norfolk State University.
“This poll accurately depicts a long-standing difference of opinions between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to race,” he said in an email. “Having said that, what it does is to underscore the hypocrisy that is trademark of this issue. The conviction of those who believe that racism is still a problem in America but then turn around to deny almost everything that makes it so, is not only hypocritical but also defies logic. This is precisely where the danger lies.”
“To say that African Americans suffer no bias compared to their white counterparts especially with the police and in the workplace is at best laughable and at worst disingenuous,” Akomolafe added.
Virginians on the whole do not think minorities are treated differently when voting — although a majority of African Americans and younger people do.
While roughly half of Virginians think minorities have a harder time getting loans and mortgages, nearly one in five said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.
Respondents split more evenly when asked if it is still alright for officials to praise Confederate leaders, or when asked if the main cause of the Civil War was slavery or states’ rights.
The CNU students surveyed 1,067 registered voters, as part of a statewide poll last month that showed Northam’s popularity has plunged after the revelation of a racist photo on his medical school yearbook page.
That poll found wide differences in voters’ views about which political party cares about African Americans. It also found fewer African Americans than whites — 31% vs. 43% — thought Northam should resign because of the blackface scandal.
The statewide results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, which reflects an adjustment for the poll’s design effect of 1.1 points. The subgroups have wider margins of error.
