Black Dane County residents face ‘profound’ racial disparity

In Dane County, unemployment and poverty rates have decreased for Black residents, but they still experience poverty at nearly three times the rate of white people. While 63% of white households live in homes they own, less than 15% of Black residents do.

Black parents who need care for infants on average spend 48% of their median income on child care, more than double the percentage of income that white parents spend. In Wisconsin public schools, Black students are far more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions, something the report says has more to do with decisions by administrators than student behavior.

And Black residents face challenges in birth outcomes, chronic diseases and mental health, and have higher rates of hospitalization for diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure, the report says.

The report also suggests that racism will continue to undermine the county’s cultural vitality, economic competitiveness and overall quality of life if decision makers and employers don’t stand firmly against it.

“The lack of shared prosperity that impacts Black Dane County children and families will continue to influence the amount of control, autonomy, and opportunity they have access to if racial inequity and systemic racism continues to be embedded into the fabric of the community,” said the report’s lead author, Carte’cia Lawrence.

But Dane County is heavily influenced by policies, laws and spending choices of the state. While many Black families are thriving in the county, it’s no oasis for many others, especially those with low and moderate incomes, it says.

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“While our city and our region have made progress in addressing some aspects of those racial disparities, it is not nearly enough and we must do better,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said of the report’s findings.

To make change, the report offers a host of recommendations at the city, county and state level. They include local employers raising the floor on hourly wages; expanding youth mental health services, boosting teacher wages; and providing at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to private and public employees while creating “health equity zones” with services such as cancer screenings. 

“We honestly believe that all of our recommendations are policies that decision makers can and should support,” Lawrence said. “Most have already been implemented in other states.”

The new “Race to Equity 10-year Report: Dane County” comes a decade after the initial, landmark “Race to Equity” report from the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, now called Kids Forward, which found that in nearly every category Black residents fared far worse than white residents.

In the new report, Kids Forward says the initial Race to Equity Initiative missed the mark in achieving many goals and that community voice was missing. Black and brown residents felt vindication by the report, not the shock experienced by white residents, it says.

In the past 10 years, Kids Forward has has evolved, consulting community members first and prioritizing their recommendations for change, it says.

“Based on our conversations with community members and leaders, many Black residents are not convinced that things have gotten better,” Kids Forward CEO Michele Mackey said.

The 10-year report focuses narrowly on economic well-being, education and health. Unlike the original report, it doesn’t offer data on youth justice, child welfare and adult justice, and doesn’t provide direct comparisons to the baseline data sets established 10 years ago.

“The original Baseline report includes primarily one-year data, while the new report is all five-year data,” which provides a more holistic picture, Lawrence said.

“It’s really important that they did this follow-up,” County Executive Joe Parisi said. “The initial Race to Equity report was really important for our community and it was a call to action. Not only is it important to have updated data, but it’s extremely important to keeping the conversation front and center.”

Racial equity has become far more prominent as an issue and goal over the past decade. 

Again this spring, the challenge of racial equity permeated the contest for Madison mayor, when incumbent Rhodes-Conway defeated Gloria Reyes in the general election, and it is increasingly woven into the policy-making fabric of Madison and Dane County.

The city has launched many initiatives, including funds for low-cost housing, a pilot guaranteed-income program that will soon become permanent, an alternative emergency response program to better serve patient needs and reduce police contacts, major investments in the South Side, and a coming north-south bus rapid transit line, Rhodes-Conway said.

Still, the new report underscores incessant discrimination, inequities and racism, especially laid bare during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Some Black residents have seen improvement in their economic well-being over the last decade, the report noted. Since 2011, unemployment and poverty rates have dropped and the median income for Black households has started to rise.

But many Black people in Dane County still earn less than half of their white counterparts. Poverty among Black children is more severe than the full population, and 7.1 times higher than among white children. The report blames longstanding policies at all levels of government that were designed to benefit wealthy, white residents.

The Great Recession hit Black residents first and for the longest amount of time, limiting economic growth. While the annual median household income for white residents in Dane County rebounded and grew to $80,063 from 2006 to 2020, the median income for Black residents has not made it back to the pre-recession median income of $38,347, when adjusted for inflation.

The Rev. David Hart, president of Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County, notes that these economic disparities can have an impact on the general quality of life for members of the county’s Black community. 

“This region that we live in is continually called the best place to date, to work, to live, to do just about anything,” Hart said. “Giving Black families and Black people a living wage will allow them that humanity to participate in some of those things that make this the greatest place.”

Income in large part dictates the ability to buy a home, which can help build generational wealth. While many residents in Dane County are struggling to afford a home, Black residents have been disproportionately affected, the report affirms.

The median home in Dane County in 2020 cost 8.3 times the median income of Black households, compared to 3.9 times higher for white households.

There are programs trying to help people of color buy homes. Own It uses private money to pay the down payment and provide classes for largely buyers of color. The Urban League of Greater Madison provides educational courses to residents interested in homeownership, and the city of Madison offers a down payment assistance program for first-time homebuyers.

Among the report’s recommendations is expanding Madison’s pilot program of a guaranteed income to Dane County. Parisi said that he has been following the city’s guaranteed income pilot program and could see the benefits to a countywide initiative.

“Funding is always the biggest challenge for the city and the county,” he said. “That’s why we would certainly need partners, from the federal government to the local businesses community, charitable organizations, etc.”

Quality early childhood education shapes future academic success, and there is a critical shortage of affordable child care options, the report found.

In 2019, an analysis estimated there were 27,830 Dane County children in need of child care and only 19,750 regulated slots. Family child care centers offered more diverse staff, but the number of family centers decreased by 68% in the last decade.

The report calls out low wages for child care workers, which in Madison averaged $11.48 an hour in 2021 and just $7.46 an hour for all of Wisconsin in 2020.

In the classroom, Black students still feel less safe, perform worse on standardized tests and change schools more often than their white peers, the report said.

Funding shortages in Dane County public schools have led to overcrowded classes, staff shortages and a lack of mental health services, the report found, and that means schools are “failing to meet the needs of their Black students.”

“In a place as highly educated as Dane County, education has not prevented Black residents from experiencing some of the most profound racial disparities in the nation,” Lawrence said.

One City Schools founder Kaleem Caire said these gaps are the result of problems in the county that have persisted for generations. One City Schools, a public charter school that opened in 2018, serves many students of color and is focused creating a new model for education.

“These things are generational now,” Caire said. “We punted a lot of problems down the road and tried to take easy routes to fix the problem before. Now we’re dealing with a big problem.”

Recruiting and retaining educators of color is one of the biggest barriers to meeting the needs of Black students, according to the report.

Just 4% of Dane County’s public school district employees are Black. Plus, inexperienced teachers most often work in schools that predominantly serve students of color.

For Caire, the solution to keeping educators in Dane County’s schools is making the Madison area more attractive to people of color and seeing more Black students choose to become educators in the first place.

“The racial dynamic is that we’re not graduating enough people of color from high school, let alone college, to be teachers in classrooms,” Caire said.

Among the recommendations, Kids Forward is calling for teacher wages to increase to at least $65,000 across Dane County school districts and recommending a partnership with local colleges and universities to develop a pipeline for new instructors.

Black residents face challenges in birth outcomes, chronic diseases and mental health, according to the report, which calls for paid family leave, Medicaid expansion and more investment in community health workers, among other recommendations.

The county’s infant mortality rate is more than twice as high among Black babies than white babies, a problem linked to higher rates of preterm and low birthweight births and delays in receiving prenatal care, the report said.

Connect Rx, a care coordination program started last year by the Dane County Health Council and the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, is linking high-risk pregnant Black women with birth coaches, or doulas, and services such as food, housing, employment, transportation and mental health counseling. Harambee Village Doulas has helped increase breastfeeding rates and lower high blood pressure rates among Black mothers, the report said.

But the state should cover doulas under Medicaid, expand postpartum Medicaid coverage up to a year, instead of three months.

Black residents in the county have higher rates of hospitalizations for diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure. The increased burden from the chronic diseases is “foundationally, a result of an inequitable food system, economic inequality, and toxic stress caused by experiencing racism and discrimination,” the report said.

Wisconsin has the nation’s highest rates of cancer and cancer deaths for Black people, according to the report, which cites an American Cancer Society document released last year. In Dane County, Black residents have higher rates of prostate, colorectal and lung cancer than whites but lower rates of breast cancer, the report said.

In the county, Black residents were four times more likely than whites to be hospitalized for opioid overdoses in 2016-2020, the report said.

“Without a commitment to the health of its residents through policies such as Medicaid expansion, coverage gaps will remain,” the report said. “Further, even with Medicaid expansion, it is likely that other social determinants of health such as chronic stress, economic insecurity, environmental toxins, and people’s capacity to engage in actions that impact their health will remain barriers to overall wellness.”

Democrats, including Gov. Tony Evers, have repeatedly pressed for paid family leave and Medicaid expansion, which have been rejected by the Republican-controlled state Legislature.

Wisconsin is among 10 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid as allowed under the Affordable Care Act, to people with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level. But it’s the only one of those states that covers people up to the poverty level, over which people can get subsidized private insurance on the federal exchange, leaving no coverage gap. Advocates say the exchange coverage can be unaffordable for people just above the poverty level.

State Journal reporters Abbey Machtig, Melissa Renee Perry and David Wahlberg contributed to this report.