We Don’t Feel Welcome Here: African Americans and Hispanics in Metro Boston
Executive Summary
Racial discrimination is an ongoing reality in the lives of African Americans and Hispanics in Metro Boston. Although the region has experienced significant growth in racial and ethnic diversity over the past several decades, racial minority groups continue to struggle for full acceptance and equal opportunity. African Americans and Hispanics report persistent discrimination in the workplace, in seeking housing, and in their day-to-day encounters with other metro area residents. Large shares of African Americans and Hispanics say they feel unwelcome in marketplaces and residential communities throughout the region. Substantial shares believe that racial discrimination in Metro Boston is a serious problem.These sentiments arise within a region whose majority population may believe that racial discrimination is no longer a serious issue. In the mid-1970s, the city of Boston erupted in racial violence over the desegregation of its public schools. Since those turbulent times, thousands of racial and ethnic minorities have settled in the city and region. Growing diversity and the passage of time may have led to a sense among some area residents that the city of Boston’s racial divisiveness is a relic of the past, and that the area’s wells of racial intolerance have subsided.
Although racial strife is nowhere near the levels of the 1970s, racial intolerance and racial inequality have not fully subsided. Instead, they have taken new forms and have moved across the region. As greater numbers of racial minorities have come to reside in the region’s central and satellite cities, Whites have continued their decades-long migration to the farthest reaches of the outer suburbs. Metro Boston today is thus a deeply segregated region, and such segregation has had the effect of isolating many racial minorities in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and severe social and economic distress.
Within this context of significant racial inequality, perceptions of racial discrimination among the region’s most disadvantaged groups—African Americans and Hispanics—remain very high. This finding emerges from a poll of over 400 African American and Hispanic adults in Metro Boston. Our major findings:
- Eighty percent of African Americans and half of Hispanics in our poll say that racial discrimination in Metro Boston is a somewhat or very serious problem.
- Extremely high shares of minorities—especially African Americans—believe that fear of resident antipathy prevents members of their group from moving into communities around the region. Almost 70 percent of Hispanics and an overwhelming 85 percent of African Americans believe that members of their group miss out on good housing because they fear they will not be welcome in a particular community.
- Racial discrimination in ordinary, day-to-day encounters is a pervasive feature in the lives of African Americans and Hispanics in Metro Boston. Over half of African Americans and almost four out of ten Hispanics say they are treated with less respect, offered worse service, called names or insulted, or confronted with another form of day-to-day discrimination at least a few times a month.
- Among respondents in our poll who have attended a professional sports venue or museum in Metro Boston, a third and a fifth (respectively) say they have at least occasionally felt out of place or unwelcome in each setting because of their race. Even more troubling, close to half of African Americans and a third of Hispanics say they have felt unwelcome in Metro Boston shopping areas and restaurants.
- Minorities of higher socioeconomic status are equally as likely, and in some cases more likely, than their lower status counterparts to say they have experienced different forms of racial discrimination in Metro Boston.
- Women in our sample are more likely to perceive that major forms of discrimination are a problem in the region, while men are more likely to report personal experiences with some forms of day-to-day discrimination.
- African Americans and Hispanics in Metro Boston report personal discrimination in employment more often than in housing. One out of four total respondents say they have been denied a job because of their race or ethnicity in the past ten years, and one in five say they have experienced racial discrimination during their last year at work. In contrast, one out of eight say they had a personal experience of discrimination the last time they looked for housing in Metro Boston.
- Two out of three total respondents believe that discrimination by White owners and realtors continues to hinder African Americans’ and Hispanics’ access to good housing, although lower shares believe they have experienced housing discrimination themselves.
- More than three out of four respondents believe that the lack of affordable housing in the region hinders African Americans’ and Hispanics’ access to good housing. Respondents thus cite affordability more often than discrimination as a barrier to good housing in Metro Boston.
- A vast majority—over eighty percent—of African Americans and Hispanics in Metro Boston believe that more should be done to integrate the region’s schools. Support for this position is especially strong among respondents who are young, male, never married, and with lower incomes.
High levels of perceived discrimination among minority groups have serious implications for the region. Perceptions of discrimination and sentiments of fear—even if inaccurate—are real forces that affect where people choose to live and conduct their daily lives. Perceptions of racial discrimination can affect the decisions of talented minorities within the region to stay or to leave; perceptions can also travel and affect the decisions of minorities outside the region to settle in the area. Such decisions have important social and economic consequences for a state that is currently losing population.
Research evidence also suggests that perceptions of discrimination lead to higher levels of psychological stress and negative emotional outcomes. Beliefs among minority groups that racial discrimination is a persistent phenomenon can therefore add to the public health costs of the region. In addition, social trust and positive civic interactions among majority and minority communities are likely to diminish when large numbers of minorities believe that they cannot gain full social acceptance or access to a full range of economic opportunities, even if they work hard and achieve middle class status. Inter-group tensions only worsen when Whites do not recognize the serious social and economic barriers that minority groups face, and when they do little to remedy the broader social conditions and specific behaviors that underlie minorities’ claims of unequal treatment.
To lower perceptions of discrimination within the region, community leaders and individual citizens must make concerted efforts to understand the actions and behaviors within the majority community that fuel minorities’ perceptions, and to end ongoing patterns of discrimination. They must take significant steps to end the racial isolation that underlies interracial ignorance, misunderstanding, and fear. Policy measures the region should take include rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in employment and housing; increased recruitment of racial minorities in all segments of the workforce; and renewed commitment to increasing affordable housing and minority access to housing across the entire region. Educators and civic leaders should maintain efforts within public schools to help young people of diverse backgrounds come together to learn to understand each other and function harmoniously within a shared community. There should be sustained efforts through community and faith-based organizations to promote inter-group conversation and interracial acceptance.
Finally, researchers and journalists have an ongoing responsibility to report on the deep racial inequalities that exist in the region, and to help the public understand and discuss the broader social contexts that contribute to these inequalities. As the region continues to grow more racially and ethnically diverse, and as the White population continues to shrink, the future social, economic, and civic health of the region depend on the ability of all the people in Metro Boston to live and work alongside each other with interracial understanding and trust. Within a rapidly changing Metro Boston population, ignorance of persistent minority disadvantage across the region and passive acceptance of its multiple social causes may only heighten racial polarization.
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