How do we bridge the divide among Americans over race and justice? – Part 2

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• GWEN IFILL:

  The decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown has once again inflamed one of America's great sensitivities about race, justice and how it is applied.

  Joining us now to discuss these issues, we have Pulitzer Prize-winning and author Isabel Wilkerson, Judith Browne-Dianis with The Advancement Project, which focuses on issues around inequality, and Carroll Doherty with the Pew Research Center.

  Carroll Doherty, I want to start by looking at some of the numbers that you have accumulated over the years about confidence in police and the difference between how white people see it and how black people see it.

  If you look at this chart that we have put together based on your numbers, you can see that over time, people basically see the same — have the same gap. Whites trust the police more or think that it's more equal treatment and blacks don't. This hasn't changed.

• CARROLL DOHERTY, Pew Research Center:

  It really hasn't.

  Our most recent polling was done a couple of weeks after the Ferguson incident, but the gap had been there for 20 years prior. You see around 70 percent of whites saying they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in the local police to treat the races equally. Only about half as many blacks say that.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Well, we have been through many of the incidents. Start with — think about Rodney King and think about Trayvon Martin and now this one.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Right. Right.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Do the numbers ever shift?

• CARROLL DOHERTY:

  They do — the blacks — blacks were a little bit more negative, a little bit less confidence in the wake of Ferguson. The very negative numbers were up, but the overall gap has been pretty steady and consistent for the past two decades.

• GWEN IFILL:

  And, yet, Judith Browne-Dianis, when we look at the faces protesting not only in Ferguson, but around the country in the last couple of nights, not only is it an interesting and diverse crowd. It's also a very young crowd.

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS, Advancement Project:

  Very young.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Does that mean that they are more — less optimistic, more pessimistic?

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS:

  Well, I think that they are experiencing the overcriminalization at levels that older folks aren't and they really have — they're bringing energy to this movement.

  They see this not only as the fight of their lives, but the fight for their lives. And so, across the country, when you looked at all of those rallies yesterday, you saw young people — you know, this is — they are the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of our time.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Who were very young.

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS:

  That's right. Exactly.

  And so we're seeing the same kind of action of young people bringing energy to a movement and also having clarity of purpose around what they're doing.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Does it feel different to you?

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS:

  It feels different in that, first of all, this is the end of status quo for them, that they understand that they have to be disruptive, that nonviolent civil disobedience will be used like it was before.

  But I think that there's a level at which they feel like this is much — this is about their daily existence, whether or not they can survive, whether or not they can breathe, whether or not they can walk down the street without being harassed. And so there's a very personal thing about trying to survive and be black or be Latino. And so, in that way, it is different.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Isabel Wilkerson, in your book "The Warmth of Other Suns," you chronicle the great migration mostly from the South to the North, to the West of African-Americans post-slavery. Do you see any echoes of familiarity into what we see happening now and what it is that drove this migration?

  ISABEL WILKERSON, Author, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration": Well, the people who were part of this great migration, meaning the parents and the grandparents of many of the young people that we see throughout the country protesting and, of course, those who have died at the hands of the police are actually, in some ways, connected to the long history in our country.

  You know, I'm really — you realize, when you look at the history, that there's this haunting symmetry between the killings that occurred during the Jim Crow era, meaning the lynchings, and the — what's happening now. As it turns out, every four days in the Jim Crow South, an African-American was lynched for some perceived breach of the caste system that they ultimately were fleeing.

  And now, based upon whichever survey that you're looking at — and the numbers are not complete, but they're actually an undercount — that it appears that every two to three days an African-American is killed at the hands of a police officer in this year at this time. And so you see this connection across time of the history, the long history, which would speak to the level of distrust among African-Americans.

• GWEN IFILL:

  But, Isabel, I wonder why there's any connection — why there's such a difference in perception between older people and younger people about this schism and between white and black people about that? Is it that it's ahistorical?

• ISABEL WILKERSON:

  Well, I think the people have heard the stories of what happened in previous generations. We would all like to believe that these things were taken care of, were resolved in previous decades, during the civil rights movement, and also the effort to get to these Northern cities.

  One of the things that, you know, struck me in the first night, the night of the announcement, was that the protests occurred, the first, biggest protest occurred in places like Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Oakland. And all of those cities were the receiving stations, the places of refuge for the ancestors of the people that we're now seeing who are now protesting their treatment at the hands of the police.

  And so there's this connection across the generations, when people are recognizing that there have been the unmet promises of their ancestors' dreams and that they're living still with the aftereffect of the response to the arrival of all these people.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Carroll Doherty, you know as well as anyone how difficult and dangerous sometimes it is to try to track racial attitudes because people sometimes they don't say what they really feel.

• CARROLL DOHERTY:

  Right.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Is there any way, as you look at these numbers, in discerning what's a perception and what's reality?

• CARROLL DOHERTY:

  Well, I think what's interesting is that the blacks see discrimination in a lot of areas of life, but the number one area is police and criminal justice. And it's by a large margin, in other words, discrimination in the job — the workplace, discrimination in schools.

  It's there. But the — really, the most acute area is in this criminal justice police area, treatment by the police.

• GWEN IFILL:

  And so, Judith Browne-Dianis, give me a sense about whether you think there is — this can be get better, or it's getting worse or we're reaching a tipping point?

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS:

  Well, I think this is a tipping point.

  I think that young people have had enough, the status quo is intolerable, and that this is not only about the killings, but it's about the man who was told to get his driver's license out of the car and gets shot by the police, following the orders, a 12-year-old killed.

  And so I think what we're going to see is that this is going to be a long-term movement, that young people, you know, they have been protesting since August 9, and I think we are going to see this across the country, young people looking for a long-term fix.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Are you as optimistic, Isabel Wilkerson?

• ISABEL WILKERSON:

  In the long term, I'm optimistic. In the short term, I think that we're in for a great deal of soul-searching and needing to reach across boundaries to understand our differing perceived and lived experiences. I think that that is what we're looking at right now.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Isabel Wilkerson, the author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," Carroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center, and Judith Browne-Dianis of The Advancement Project, thank you all very much.

• JUDITH BROWNE-DIANIS:

  Thank you.

• ISABEL WILKERSON:

  Thank you.

• GWEN IFILL:

  We have more coverage of Ferguson online. Our data team analyzed more than 500 pages of witness accounts taken from police interviews in the Darren Wilson case and mapped the inconsistencies. You can find that on our home page at PBS.org/NewsHour.