Nine years later, we're still distrustful

Posted: Sunday, Jun. 07, 2009

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Taylor Batten

Taylor Batten is The Observer's editorial page editor.

Taylor Batten is the editor of The Charlotte Observer's editorial pages.

Just as President Obama was urging Americans and Muslims worldwide to drop their deep-seated suspicions of each other, local leaders were revealing that reservations among all types of people are equally entrenched in Charlotte.

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences,” Obama declared in his Cairo speech Thursday, “we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity.”

The exact sentiment applies locally. Mecklenburg residents don't trust each other, a new study finds, and they are especially wary of people who are different from them. By defining our relationships by our differences, we risk the Charlotte area's prosperity.

This might strike you as just so much psychobabble. But it matters because of this: A community in which people don't trust each other is sentenced to a weaker economy, more dangerous streets, less effective schools and unhealthier residents.

Little progress made

Almost nine years ago, 30,000 people in 40 communities across America were surveyed. It was an effort by Harvard professor Robert Putnam to measure “social capital,” the bonds between people in a community. Those connections, Putnam showed, largely determine a community's quality of life.

The Charlotte region blew the doors off measures of charity, volunteering and faith. But it ranked next to last on social and interracial trust.

No surprise, you might think, that a Southern city with a history of segregation would perform poorly on interracial trust. But Charlotte fared worse than other Southern cities. This was surprising, because Charlotte was more progressive on racial reconciliation than most Southern cities in the 1960s.

Local leaders responded with a program called Crossroads Charlotte, an effort to break down the barriers separating us and to prod us to act now to shape the Charlotte of 2015.

Guess what? We haven't budged. We're as distrustful today as we were nine years ago, despite Crossroads' fantastic work.

A new survey of 856 Mecklenburg residents, released last week, found that nearly 60 percent of respondents generally don't trust other people. Only about a third believe people can generally be trusted.

And consider these differences between the races: Whites were about evenly split on the question. But nearly four out of five African Americans said they generally don't trust people. More than three-quarters of respondents did not score high on interracial trust, the same number as nine years ago.

Steps big and small are needed

This all brings to mind Joe Martin. He'd be discouraged by these findings.

Martin, longtime Charlotteans know, was a bank executive who spent his final years suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease and pushing Charlotte to tackle the distance between races. Preparing to accept an Urban League award in 1997, an idea came to him: Charlotteans should have lunch every Thursday with someone of a different racial or ethnic background.

It was a small step, he reasoned, that could snowball. When you know someone personally, it's harder to cling to old stereotypes.

The idea caught fire, but eventually petered out. And while Mecklenburg Ministries still sponsors a successful similar effort, the new survey results show there's still much to be done.

We've come a long way. We're no longer divided by outright racism as much as a failure to find ways to connect. Our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches are all largely segregated. Our politics are polarized. We're separated by history, and custom, and socioeconomics. Today, we suffer from a passive mistrust. It is not the hateful racism of our past, but is still an anchor to our progress.

So let's keep rowing. Because without trust, what do we have?

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