“More whites believe in ghosts than believe in racism.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in comments Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”
Sunday’s news shows sought outside-the-Beltway perspective for talking about American race relations, booking stars from the basketball and music industries to analyze racist comments made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Guests included former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Abdul-Jabbar, who worked under Sterling for three months as a Los Angeles Clippers coach in 2000, offered his thoughts last week in a Time op-ed, saying Sterling’s racially disparaging remarks revealed in a leaked voicemail were not a surprise given other discrimination over recent years.
On the set of ABC’s “This Week”, the retired six-time NBA champ said racism remains part of American culture.
“This is a problem. I did a little bit of research,” he said. “More whites believe in ghosts than believe in racism.”
PunditFact, an affiliate of PolitiFact, set out to find whether his catchy comment is accurate. We tried to contact Abdul-Jabbar through Twitter and ABC’s media team but could not reach him by our deadline.
Polls on white Americans and ghosts
A number of polls over the years have examined Americans’ belief in the supernatural, including ghosts. The problem is the surveys are often not broken down by race, and the questions are not universally framed.
People are generally more likely to say they believe in ghosts than that they have interacted with one.
Nonwhite Americans are more likely than whites to say they believe in ghosts, and women are more likely to believe in paranormal activity than men, said Carson Mencken, a Baylor University sociology professor and director of the Baylor Religion Survey, a national random sample of U.S. households completed every three years with Gallup.
According to the most recent survey results, in 2010, about 56 percent of whites say ghosts either absolutely or probably exist, which is “pretty consistent over time,” Mencken said. (Within that rate, 22 percent said they absolutely exist, he said.)
That’s a bit higher than other surveys we found by Harris, the Huffington Post and YouGov.com, and The Economist and YouGov.com. But Baylor professors said results can skew widely depending on the way a question is framed. In those polls, the number of white Americans who say they believe in ghosts ranges from 36 percent to 62 percent, depending on the year, survey and question.
Polls on white Americans and racism
We were unable to find a poll that asked Americans whether they “believe” racism exists. Nor do pollsters ask, “Are you racist?”
“People are obviously unlikely to tell pollsters they are racists,” said Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “So I don’t know how to interpret what he said.”
Still, we found many polls examining white Americans’ attitudes on race relations, with a lot of recent polling conducted amid last summer’s Trayvon Martin trial.
Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport produced a July video analyzing highlights in polling research on U.S. race relations.
When asked whether new civil rights laws are needed to reduce discrimination against blacks, 53 percent of blacks said yes compared with 17 percent of whites. When asked whether the justice system is biased, 68 percent of blacks and 25 percent of whites said yes, “a huge racial gulf there,” Newport said.
One Gallup question that got at the issue a little more directly (but several years ago in 2009): “Do you think racism against blacks is or isn’t widespread in the U.S.?” Forty-nine percent of whites said it is widespread, while 48 percent said it was not widespread.
We looked at other surveys, too, recognizing there are probably so many that we could not have reviewed them all by our deadline. The ones we examined came from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, CNN, and the Harvard Business School and Tufts University.
The takeaway: The results, again, vary depending on the question — but none of them truly measure whether white Americans believe racism exists. In general, polls seem to suggest blacks are more likely to see racism as a problem than whites, but a plurality of whites acknowledge discrimination exists in some form in at least two polls we saw. But even these comparisons to Abdul-Jabbar’s claim are not perfect, as those polls measured whether discrimination was widespread or asked respondents to measure the amount of discrimination against blacks, not just acknowledge whether it was present.
“As a rhetorical flourish, I think it’s an effective one,” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, said of Abdul-Jabbar’s statement. But a serious look at empirical data shows it is “far too complex to just be captured in one kind of rhetorical comparison.”
Our ruling
Abdul-Jabbar said, “More whites believe in ghosts than believe in racism.”
While we don’t know what research he was citing to support his point, Abdul-Jabbar’s claim is a stretch based on the polls we found and the pollsters we consulted. Depending on the question, you could say that as many as about six in 10 white Americans believe in ghosts, though other polls present a smaller ratio.
Abdul-Jabbar, meanwhile, seems to have interpreted polling about white Americans’ views of discrimination as their belief in racism. We’ll be happy to revisit this fact check if someone points out a poll we missed.
Polling we found supports the theory that white Americans are less likely than black Americans to think that blacks are being discriminated against. But those polls don’t measure whether white Americans think racism exists in this country.
We rate Abdul-Jabbar’s claim Mostly False.
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