COLUMBUS – Young black males in Columbus feel less safe when they go into neighborhoods with a larger white population than they are used to, according to a new study at Ohio State.
The boys, ages 11 to 17, reported feeling less safe even in areas that were only modestly more white than where they usually spent time, said Christopher Browning, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at OSU.
“It doesn’t have to be a majority white neighborhood for African American boys to feel more threatened,” Browning said. “It just has to be more white than what they typically encounter.”
When outside their own neighborhoods, black teens in the study visited areas that were, on average, 13 percent more white, said Browning, who presented the research Aug. 13 in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
During the study, from 2014 to 2016, Browning and the researchers gave 506 black youths in Columbus smartphones with a GPS function that tracked their locations for a week and reported it every 30 seconds. Five times a day they were sent a mini-survey to answer on their phones, which asked them how safe they felt.
Browning says the findings support the hypothesis that young black males expect increased scrutiny, surveillance and even direct targeting when they are in white areas.
“We’ve seen a lot of stories in the media lately about the police being called on black people going about their business in white areas,” he said. “This may help explain why black youth felt more threatened in parts of town where they were exposed to more white people.”
Unlike boys, black girls did not report feeling significantly less safe in whiter areas.
The boys also felt less safe when they were in neighborhoods that were significantly poorer than ones they generally frequented, as well as in neighborhoods that were whiter.