Editor’s note: From time to time, The Conversation asks leaders in America’s colleges and universities to address some of the most pressing issues in our nation. Here we ask Earl Lewis, director and founder of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions, and Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark, a diverse, urban public research university, about how numbers and statistics matter when examining institutional racism, the Capitol riot and Black Lives Matter.
How has media reporting on numbers and statistics affected the public’s view of race?
Nancy Cantor: Society’s accounting of the summer of 2020 through Inauguration Day 2021 demonstrates the hard way numbers play into a long-standing history of racism and white privilege. Some national leaders equated a crowd of mostly white Capitol Hill rioters to largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. Yet analyses show that the overall levels of violence and property destruction during BLM protests were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters. When it is convenient for media or leaders to compare the crowd to the few, they can also evoke long-standing racist tropes, such as “the violent Black.”