Are there more black men in college or prison in the US?
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Hello, this is More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander and this week we're looking at this claim.
We still have more work to do. We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America.
That was Barack Obama in 2007, before he became US president, making the claim that there are more black men in prison than in college in the US. Wesley Stevenson's here with me, and Wesley, Barack Obama isn't the only person to have seen the power in this statement.
No, it's something you'll hear repeated again and again.
My last time hearing it was last Friday at Howard University's Charter Day program, and it was our keynote speaker.
What was your instant reaction when you heard those words come out of his mouth?
It wasn't necessarily a visceral reaction, more humor, you know, here we go again.
This is Ivory Tolson. He's an associate professor of psychology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And he's recently written about the use of this claim. It was a statistic that he himself has even used when he wrote a paper back in 2008 pushing for better educational success for black young men. But he's realised that while making this claim is good for rallying activists, it's also having a negative effect on young black men in the U.S.
When they heard things like there are more black men in prison than in college, it did something different to their spirit. These are young black males who are still trying to figure it out. They know that they could do better.
How widespread is the claim 'more black men in prison than college' and who uses it?
They want to do better. And so I started to feel like a lot of the statistics that we were using was more of a burden to them than a motivation.
It was this that made him begin to wonder, was this fact that there are more black men in prison than in college in the US actually true? He started looking at the numbers and found an interesting trend.
I found that year after year, we were gaining lots of black males in college. However, the prison population had remained relatively static and the college population among young black males is about 600,000 more than the prison population, yet that myth is still very pervasive out there.
So it isn't true now. But what about when it was first published? The original claim came from a report by the campaign group the Justice Policy Institute. It was based on figures from the year 2000. So Ivory re-examined the numbers that we used and compared them to the current numbers of black men in college. And something struck him as odd.
What I found strange was how did we get a 108% jump in the black male college population? It didn't seem feasible for us to achieve that. in only 10 years. I looked at the colleges that had significant black male populations today, but had either no or very little black males reported 10 years ago. And what I found was a lot of historically black universities was on that list. My own alma mater was on that list and I was enrolled as a graduate student there at the time. And so what appears to have happened was back when they pulled the numbers, there were just a lot of colleges that weren't reporting their numbers.
So there were many black college students missing from the numbers that the Justice Policy Institute used back in the early 2000s. And even Ivory himself was missing from the college attendance figures. It's not often that we actually get to meet a missing statistic.
I mean, he says that when he looked at the census data from the early 2000s, this shows there were more black men in college than in prison at that time.
So not only is it not true now, this claim, it probably wasn't true when it was first made 13 years ago.
And yet, in the face of the truth, this zombie statistic refuses to die. Now, you can see that when it was first written in the Justice Policy Institute report, it must have seemed like a really simple and grabby comparison.
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