In the era of culture wars and ideologically driven strife, belief in good faith communication has waned. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we share lessons learned from two years of collaborating on a research project at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy examining racial bias in jury selection processes, and jury composition as well as efforts to improve them.
Our shared identities bring similarities, some more obvious than others, which we viewed as a resource. We are both first-generation university graduates from humble beginnings and University of Michigan alums. We both teach graduate-level ethics courses, one addressing organizational challenges and the other identity stratification and social inequality. We have also shared brilliant students, and they brought us together to work on the project.
However, because we are distinct individuals with our own lived experiences, there were also differences. One of us is a mid-50s center left Black American career academician, while the other a late-70s center right White American semi-retired federal official with decades of public service. Importantly, we learned that those differences were also a resource and how we agreed to combine them proved our greatest asset. We both share a deep and abiding love for the country and the liberal democratic republic we know as the United States of America.
We both also appreciate social scientific “truth” as an accurate depiction of a sociological phenomenon considered in historical and contemporary context. This is distinct from individual, personal or ideologically informed experience, which is also an important type of truth — we call this “authenticity” instead. Commitment to rigorous scientific inquiry (truth) informed and guided our work from beginning to end. However, we also embraced the value of how different interpretive lenses (authenticity) highlighted different aspects of the very same studies and statistics we read and incorporated into our work. We leveraged shared commitments to truth and authenticity to engage and secure evidence informed public policy decision making.
We like and respect each other, and consequently never shared a disrespectful or dismissive word. Civil discourse naturally characterized our interaction. While our interpretive lenses gave us slightly different levels of optimism on what our project would reveal, we always stuck to the evidence. In short, social scientific truth and authentic self were essential components of our civil discourse. Untruths, outright lies, deception and inauthenticity would have effectively dismantled our civil discourse enterprise.
Substantively, we learned that we first had to agree on the truth. In this case, the social scientific truth, supported by both data and the literature, is that jury lists drawn from lists of licensed drivers and registered voters are not racially representative of the population of the jurisdiction. In racially minoritized communities of Black and Hispanic/Latino residents, those two groups are still disproportionately underrepresented in juries while white jurors were disproportionately overrepresented.
Such racially unrepresentative juries correlate with a disparately high likelihood of convictions and harsher sentencing for Black and Latino defendants when compared to more racially and ethnically representative juries. These truths presented a policy problem that we could agree on, without having to attribute any causal inference.
When we turned to addressing the problem, our respective authenticities came into play and remarkable synergies emerged. One of us attributed the unrepresentative source lists to historical structures and current systemic racism that manifests in fewer minority licensed drivers or registered voters. The other one of us attributed the unrepresentative jury lists to administrative evil, an undesirable result derived from uncritical application of commonly used processes by administrators.
Over time, we began to view systemic racism and administrative evil as two parallel streams leading to the same problem. We also began to acknowledge each other’s authenticity as a positive contribution to our research. This enabled us to seek a solution to the policy problem without denigrating or dismissing one another’s authentically reached perspective, while achieving actionable solutions that addressed both systemic racism and administrative evil.
Our material product was a set of suggested policy actions to mitigate challenges associated with racially non-representative jury selection processes. Also important, however, was our example of how to hold social scientific and authentic truths as core guiding principles when we worked collaboratively, respectfully and civilly across differences — and sometimes even mild disagreement — towards a common goal of improving the human condition.
Jay A. Pearson is McLain Foundation Associate Professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Douglas Brook is a Visiting Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. This piece is part of the "Virtues of Democracy" column, a series of op-eds by faculty and student contributors across Trinity College and the Sanford School of Public Policy. The column typically runs on Tuesdays or Thursdays.
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