- [Announcer] Financial support for this program provided by Sacramento County's Transit Occupancy tax grant program.

(upbeat music) - How do we define who we are?

And why does it matter in civic life?

In a county as diverse as Sacramento, identity isn't just personal, it shapes how we engage and how we are seen.

Today we are joined by Dr. Mindy Romero and Dr. Richard Pan to explore identity, belonging and representation in our diverse region.

Dr. Pan, given that our diversity and the individuals that make up the fabric of the region are so complex, how does diversity and identification show up in Sacramento differently than it does in other places?

- Well, Sacramento is a very special place, because we are one of the most diverse areas in the whole country.

We've seen this in several censuses.

In fact, we got on the cover of "Time Magazine" for having one of the most diverse metropolitan areas.

And when I say diversity, it's just not the number of people of different races, ethnicities, so forth.

It's also the level of integration as well.

So we don't- - Tell us more about that.

- Yeah, so in a lot of places, people sort of have well, it's assigned places where they're supposed to live, the expectation.

So you have one area that's one community and one group another.

And while I'm not saying that we don't see some of that in Sacramento, we are much more integrated.

So we tend to have a mix of people living together in different neighborhoods here in Sacramento.

And that does make us stand out amongst many other metropolitan areas in the United States.

- Dr. Romero, you spend your time looking at voting patterns and representation and things like that, because of what Dr. Pan just mentioned in terms of how we're not as balkanized as say, a city back east, where you've got this community here and it's very geographically compact and discreet, and another one over here, but people are kind of more mixed together.

How is that interesting when you're looking at voting and representation and how people show up in terms of their participation in civic life, like elections and things like that?

- So I think it depends on how you wanna look at it.

- Okay.

- So patterns still remain, we are still segregated, although less than many places around the country.

And we also are very much income segregated as well.

We do have integrated neighborhoods in terms of income, but we do have areas of our city and of the county, the larger metropolitan region that are lower income and higher income.

And if you look at patterns of participation, there's, you know, voting numbers where we do see communities of color, generally speaking, lower income communities having less of a voice, less representation amongst voters having lower turnout.

But then there's, aside from voting, which is a lot of what I spend my work on, but there's also, you know, community activism and meetings and lots of efforts in the region to bring people together to create opportunities for people to have a larger voice, to get a neighborhood park established or to raise economic mobility options, in a particular community or to bring business in, or whatever it might be.

We do have a lot of activism.

We have a lot of elected officials that are very well also integrated into their communities, working with their communities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Still lots of room for growth and more engagement and working together.

But there is a lot of, not just community level, but also a kind of cross-work that we see where organizations reach out to each other to share, to envision together, to try to draw people from different issues into one larger set of kind of activism.

And that's really exciting.

And we don't often see that, I think to that degree in other areas of the country.

- And actually, interesting enough, you know, I moved from the east coast to Sacramento.

You know, I came from Boston.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where frankly, you know, people were much more segregated in terms of race, ethnicity.

And when I came to Sacramento, one of the things that particularly struck me was that in Sacramento there was a lot of interest in community building.

And what I mean by that is, is that people really were thinking about how do we build these interconnections?

Now, you're right, we're not always entirely connecting everybody, but I think there was an investment in that effect.

Sierra Health Foundation at the time had- - Absolutely.

- ... community partnerships for healthy children.

They're trying to build stronger neighborhoods.

I was able to leverage that to help start a program at UC Davis, to get doctors out in the community and build those connections.

But I also make note, because I'm a former elected official as well, you're right, lower income, less resource communities generally tend to vote less.

But also I noticed campaigns tend to invest less in those communities.

And in fact, in one of my campaigns, I think, one of the reasons I believe I won was because we decided to invest in turning out people in some of those communities where normally most people would not, because it's a little more expensive, takes a bit more effort, because they tend to have lower voting rates.

But by doing so, we were able to engage them and get them to turn out a higher rate, and they did tend to vote for me, so I appreciated that.

(panel laughs) - Well, Senator, you know, one of the things that that brings up is that it seems to me, and I've been here since 1973, and that things have changed in that not only in how people identify themselves, which I would think is becoming much more challenging for people in your line of work, because people are with all of the intermingling in a place like Sacramento County, it's becoming more complicated as to what things someone is on what day- - Yeah.

- ... because they're both- - How you identify.

- ... and more.

But at the same time, but that's showing up in sort of the cultural fabric of how people express themselves.

As an example, when I got here in '73, we would not have had the Day of the Dead, which is a traditional Mexican American and Hispanic, a celebration, have so much prominence on all of the major stations with festivals and things like that.

It would've been more of a segregated community activity.

But today you've got, you know, everything from, you know, the Greek festival and the Italian festival and, you know- - New Year.

- New Year, you know, Chinese New Year, and all that.

- All that, yeah.

- But one of the things that people say when we talk about what makes this community sticky is someone says, "My child has grown up with a range of friends that I couldn't replicate anywhere else.

And my neighbors are not all like me, and we think that that's a wonderful thing."

And so that's kind of special about this region, even though not dispelling at all, the fact that, you know, income and some other indices show that we are still highly segregated.

So the question... Oh, I'm sorry, the question is, how does that challenge, for instance, the work that you previously did on the census, how does that challenge capturing the richness of that diversity while still making that data useful?

- Well, you know, I used to serve on the National Advisory Committee for the census.

Unfortunately, it was disbanded by this administration, but we were looking at how do we ensure that we count everyone.

So in the 2020 census at the state, I chaired the Select Committee on the 2020 census, we spent a lot of time and effort working with community groups to be sure people understood how important the census was, so that we could get accurate information about what's going on.

And what that data showed and is that basically, you know, not only do we have a diverse population, we talked about the integration level, but we think about that as opportunities for our communities, for our governments to really engage a, you know, broader swath of people that it's not that people recognize, it's not all about, well, I just need to cater to one group, and then that's all I need to do.

And one of the things that I think it's important, you know, unfortunately, it seems like DEI is quoted dirty word now, but when you stop and think about, let's not say DEI, let's say diversity, equity, inclusion.

And so you talked about when you came here, you know, and your kids growing up, and I've came here and my kids grew up in this neighborhood and they were, you know, their schools were much more diverse than when I grew up.

What happens is, is that the cultural diversity that we see, those backgrounds, like all those other festivals and so forth, they're not foreign things or objects of, you know, a fascination just because they're exotic, they're actually familiar, because, hey, I have a classmate or actually group of classmates who celebrated, and so forth.

It becomes- - Or their parents took you with them.

- Right, exactly.

- To the parents.

- In other words, it's normal to see all this stuff going on and to know that people celebrate different things in different ways and to celebrate it with them and for them to celebrate with you.

And I think that, you know, now the question is how does that show up in, you know, our larger, you know, political life, economic life and other types of things.

But, you know, that's an interesting question to me, is that this exposure to this diversity and integration, as people are growing up in Sacramento and moving to Sacramento, you know, how is that shaping the way that we make our decisions as a community, in terms of a variety of different decisions, whether where we invest, where we, you know, put the government resources, et cetera.

And I do think that it's making Sacramento a little different place than perhaps many other parts of the country.

- You have a wonderful data tool on your website.

And when I look at it as a person who, you know, does not have a lot of experience with it, it seems like that there are clusters of activity in terms of where there's low participation and higher participation.

How, what's the interplay between all of these ethnicities that we have and this intermixing and how ultimately people are elected and decisions get made?

- Yeah, well, first, I'll just, for those people that might want to check it out, it's called the Voting Location and Outreach Tool.

It's on our website, cid.usc.edu.

And it is a tool to, it's actually a national tool, but you can click on California, you can click on Sacramento County, and you'll see dozens and dozens of data indicators.

So you can look at voting patterns, but also economic patterns.

Data on poverty and income, population density, racial and ethnic groups broken out by subgroup, lots and lots data.

So to answer your question, you know, I think just to piggyback a little bit on something that Dr. Pan had a moment ago, you know, we still have patterns in terms of participation.

And it's very important that our elected officials, our decision makers hear from everyone, it's important for everyone.

It's not just the interest of the particular groups or groups that are increasing their voice, but elected officials need to know the full spectrum of wants, desires, needs from their community as they are figuring out how they're gonna distribute resources to actually meet the needs of the region or the city of the jurisdiction.

And right now, they're not actually fully hearing from everyone.

We have great elected officials as Dr. Pan was, that reached out to hear from everybody, but not everyone's participating, whether it's voting or in other forms of civic, like talking to your city council, your board of supervisors, and part of that, there's lots of reasons for that.

There are patterns that where we see, you know, there's predictors that are kinda have a compounding effect.

So lower income, of color, young, for instance, less likely to participate.

But also the system is much less likely as you were just noting to engage.

And so, even though we see integration in ways that are wonderful and important and are foundational and have real positive impacts, don't get me wrong, but we're talking about decision makers and how it impacts them.

Campaigns and candidates who still do the overwhelming amount of kind of political outreach in our society.

They're the ones that have the money, the budgets are on an election cycle.

They're reaching out to try to get those voters, but they're not trying to get everybody engaged.

They're just, understandably so perhaps, they're just trying to get the people that they think are gonna vote for them.

And they generally, with wonderful exceptions, youth likely voter modeling, looking at those predictors.

And they reach out to the voters that are already very likely to vote for them, very likely to vote for period.

And maybe they trickle down, depending how competitive the election is.

If it's not competitive at all, they're probably not doing much outreach.

But if it is very competitive, then they're more likely to maybe go for those kind of intermediate voters or maybe some low propensity voters to try to flip them.

But really in any given election, at any time, whole swaths of our potential eligible electorate, even those that are registered to vote, get very little outreach.

If you're a young person of color registered to vote, but you don't have a voting history yet, you are probably not gonna hear from candidates and the campaigns.

Where I assume we're all voters here, you know, many of your viewers get tons of mail and too much, they don't want the emails, they don't want the text.

- I'm one of those, too much.

- They don't want the calls.

But maybe perhaps we don't all realize that, and when we see these numbers, we think, "Oh, what's wrong with these community?

Why aren't these voters participating?

Why don't they care?"

No, it's not a about apathy.

They care, they care about their communities.

They want to have a voice, but they're not being asked to vote.

They're not getting the outreach and mobilization that we know from research.

The campaigns know actually does make a difference, it is needed.

So it helps to create those patterns as voting.

But we could also have a whole nother conversation about the likelihood of people, why they do and don't go to their city council, for instance.

- Well, someone who's a run for office, I will vouch for everything you said there about how campaigns work and so forth.

Yes, that exactly what happens.

- Well, in your experience, you know, what happens a lot of times is that people make assumptions.

Okay, overgeneralizations, that's a polite word for the stereotyping.

Well, these type of people, and sometimes it's an ethnic lens, sometimes it's a educational or economic lens, are going to do this thing or that.

In your own experience, how does one's ethnicity and sort of community that one comes from lend to how they express themselves and identify themselves in civic life?

- Sure, well, you know, we all come with a history.

My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and you know, they had their experience with how government worked back there, and they knew how important it was to engage, but also in their experience as immigrants.

First of all, when I grew up, I never saw anyone who looked like me, essentially in the elected office when I was in the East Coast.

A little different when I finally moved here.

But politics was not something that was considered a career option.

In fact, I never grew up, and my siblings never thought, "Oh, we'd become president of the United States.

I mean, that's like, forget about any other elected office.

So that was kind of out of the radar at all.

And in fact, when I first ran, you know, my mother was kinda like, "You mean someone would actually vote for you, because you know, you're not the typical policy..." - I hope, said, "Well, won't you mom?"

(panel laughs) - Yes, exactly.

But I mean, because her experience as someone who's, you know, who immigrated and lived in the United States was that you didn't really see, you know, she did not see people looking like her who got elected.

In fact, I'd like to point out that when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, I mean, certainly it was very important to the black community that we had a black president, but it was also important to the rest of us, because it finally showed us that, guess what, you didn't have to be white to become president of the United States.

I mean, that was a big game-changer, yeah.

- Well, it's interesting you mentioned him, Senator Pan, because in an interview that I saw with him, he talked about, you know, his multi-ethnic kind of background.

You know, father from Africa, Caucasian mother raised in part by his grandparents, but also by his stepfather.

And he referenced, he says, you know, "I'm as much Indonesian and Hawaiian API, as I am anything else."

And so this whole issue of ambiguity and for needs of things like, you know, research and census and all that, we're always trying to squeeze people into this box.

- So I guess one of the things I make mention is that, you know, there's some people who may be listening who say, you know, "Why do we have so much of a focus on race and ethnicity?

You know, why can't just we?

You know, just treat everyone the same."

And the reality unfortunately is, is that if you're of a different race and ethnicity, depending what you are, you are treated differently inherently.

And let's talk about some of the disparities that we see.

So for example, I think one of the more challenging one we talked about, you know, income and so forth, is actually the wealth disparity.

So where does the wealth disparity come from?

Well, certainly there's both the historic, you know, challenges of, you know, slavery for particularly the black community and other parts of history, you know, for Chinese Exclusion Act and so forth in the API community.

But also, I'd make note that the history of red lining meant that any property you owned, most of us, you know, don't own extensive pieces of property, we own a house, was gonna be lower, it was basically gonna be lower income neighborhoods.

But even today, what we do know is that if you happen to be black, or your house looks black in terms of your cultural preferences, they will praise your house lower.

So therefore, when you buy a house and you try to sell it, you'll have less money coming out to buy your next house than someone who's not that, you know, so we can, so yes, ideally, you know, we don't like, "Oh, well why should we talk so much about race?"

But unfortunately for people who are of different races, we can't escape that reality.

You know, that, and that's why we have to have those conversations.

- Dr. Romero, does that show up for you?

How does that manifest in your work?

- Yeah, and I agree with everything you just said, of course.

And so, not only are people treated differently, both by society, well by society, by your institutions, but your example, Barack Obama.

He's varied background that he talks about and has multiple identities himself as an individual.

How is he treated?

How is he labeled by society?

The first black president, he's black.

We have a long history of the one drop rule and so forth, in our country, dare I mention.

So that's not a surprise.

But when we think about, you know, kind of trying to move beyond that.

So people are treated differently.

The reality is, is often when we talk about that, and many people are very well-intentioned about why they're bringing that topic up.

They think, "Oh, it's dividing us and we need to be to, you know, come together as a country."

But often that kind of conversation actually leads to intentionally or otherwise, policies that take us back to not identifying or lifting up communities and addressing disparities, policies that are gonna end up actually perpetuating or increasing the achievement gap, for instance, or wealth inequality.

We have to understand through data, we have to understand those differences, because they were real in their consequences and have policies that explicitly address those.

Otherwise, we not only don't make progress, but we can feed the forces that end up wanting to potentially increase that.

- Well, let me play devil's advocate on that- - Please.

- ... and ask you a question.

There are those who believe that so much of our use of technology to drill down and identify every single micro indices related to people and splitting them into smaller and smaller cohorts actually works against essentially promoting equity and equality, because we're focusing on the things that make us different rather than the majority of things that make us the same and are a basis of collaboration.

How do you respond to that?

- And I see you probably wanna jump in too.

So I'll try to be quick.

I would say that again, they're real in its consequences.

And so I think depends on what you're using it for.

So if we're trying to understand it's medical research, sorry to jump into that area, but the detail matters in terms of subgroups, micro groups, if you will, that have particular risk factors.

I will say though, I absolutely agree with you when we talk about, you know, cutting us in or breaking us up into 120 different demographic groups for the purposes of targeting, we talk about political outreach.

We know for a very long time now in the United States, since we've had this ability and all this big data that where we used to be a broadcast world and a party or a candidate would outreach kind of to the masses, and everybody would see there's still some targeting, but everybody would kind of see what the message is.

Now we have the ability, and it's the norm in politics that everybody gets a sliced message that often if one group saw the message the other group got, they go, "Oh, wait a minute."

And it's really used for often manipulation, misinformation, disinformation.

There's a lot of negative from it.

But so I think it depends on what we're talking about.

And I'm sorry.

- All right, and quickly.

- Sure.

- I know that you wanted to jump in here, please, give us your thoughts.

- Sure, yeah, and one of the things to keep in mind is also that we have a lot of people who are, you know, two or three races.

There is reported in the census.

In fact, we've tried to change the census in a way to allow people to identify themselves the way that they truly wanna identify themselves, because before it used to be you had to pick one, like, "Well, wait a minute, you know, actually my parents, my father, my mother," you know, whatever is, you know, it's a mix.

And so, and what we noted in the last census was actually the number of people who reported they were two races or more actually increased significantly, so that's very important.

But I guess in terms of trying to get at, okay, well, you know, you just talked about the way people of different race ethnicities are treated and how do we overcome that?

And you're right, exactly.

We have to address it head on.

At the same time as we talk about Sacramento and our more, you know, integrated population, there's an opportunity to, for us to have those kind of conversations, I think here, that hopefully will strengthen our community and really lift everyone.

- And I think that that is the place that we will leave it.

- That is perfect.

- Thank you both so much for your insights and perspectives.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you.

- And that's our show.

Thanks to our guests and thanks to you for watching "STUDIO Sacramento".

I'm Scott Syphax, see you next time right here on KVIE.

(upbeat music) All episodes of "STUDIO Sacramento", along with other KVIE programs are available to watch online at kvie.org/video.

- [Announcer] Financial support for this program provided by Sacramento County's Transit Occupancy tax grant program.