Prompting voters to think about racism makes some more likely to see school segregation, FDU Poll finds

Asking New Jersey voters to think about systemic racism before evaluating their local schools can make some residents of overwhelmingly white communities more likely to recognize segregation — and more willing to support policies intended to reduce it — according to a new Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll experiment.

Among white voters living in heavily white municipalities who believe racism can occur without racist intent, just 6% described their local schools as segregated when they were first asked unrelated questions.

But when voters were first asked whether racism can result from systems rather than deliberate acts, 17% of that same group subsequently acknowledged that their schools were segregated.

“People are able to recognize the disconnect between their own principles and what they’re seeing around them,” said Dan Cassino, the FDU poll director. “The problem is that they’re just not being asked to do so.”

The findings follow an FDU Poll released earlier this week that exposed a substantial divide between the racial makeup of New Jersey communities and how residents perceive their schools.

Among voters living in municipalities that are at least 90% white, only 9% called their schools segregated, while 73% said they had “a good mix” of students.  In communities where Black residents make up no more than 1% of the population, just 11% described their schools as segregated, and 68% said they had a good racial mix.

For its experiment, FDU randomly divided respondents into three groups and changed the order in which they received identical questions.

A control group answered questions about unrelated, nonpartisan issues before discussing segregation.  A second group was asked about racism before evaluating its local schools, while a third was asked about political views first.

The political questions had no consistent effect on voters’ perceptions.  But raising the issue of racism first produced meaningful movement among white voters in the state’s whitest communities who already accepted that racism could occur without anyone intending a racist outcome.

The same prompt also increased support for several potential remedies.

Among those voters, support for building regional magnet schools increased from 53% to 72%. Support for making it easier for students to transfer between districts rose from 58% to 74%, while backing for inter-district busing climbed from 31% to 43%.

It did not increase support for forcing school districts to merge.

“In the long term, merging districts is probably the best way to reduce school segregation,” Cassino said.  “But it seems like no degree of pointing out ideological inconsistencies is going to get New Jersey voters to agree to that.”

Overall, 52% of New Jersey voters said racism can occur systemically without anyone having racist intent, while 39% said something can be racist only if it results from deliberate intent.

There was no significant difference on that question based on race or ethnicity, but there was a wide partisan divide.  Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said racist outcomes can occur without racist intent, compared with 35% of Republicans.

“Basically, every argument about racism in America comes down to the question of whether racism requires intent,” said Peter Woolley, the FDU Poll’s director emeritus.  “This is the fault line of racial politics in America.”

FDU researchers cautioned that the experiment’s effect was limited.  It was strongest among white voters living in municipalities in the top quarter for white population and largely disappeared when researchers expanded the analysis to include municipalities in the top half.

Still, the findings suggest that some voters can be persuaded to reconsider whether segregation exists in their communities — and to support measures addressing it — if the question is framed around principles they already accept.

“We can fix school segregation, and it isn’t like we don’t know what can be done,” Woolley said. “But we can’t do anything to fix it unless people can agree that there’s something that needs to be fixed.”

The FDU Poll surveyed 1,211 registered New Jersey voters from June 23-30 with a margin of error of +/ 4.2%.