With the advent of Black History Month, we want to revisit the results of two questions from our annual Metro Atlanta Speaks (MAS) survey that directly assess our residents’ opinions about racial issues. In response to a question about the importance of racial equity (asked for the first time in 2021), residents generally indicated that they agreed that racial equity is essential to maximizing economic growth. But there are significant differences in perceptions by race/ethnicity. To a question assessing perceptions about discrimination against the Black community (asked for the past two years), answers reveal a strong level of awareness about the prevalence of such bias but no real increase in that share from 2020 to 2021. And most importantly, persistent challenges appear to exist in extending the levels of awareness across all racial groups.

The first two charts below provide some more detail on opinions about discrimination against the Black population. Chart 1 shows that the share agreeing or strongly agreeing that this discrimination exists stayed fairly constant 2020-2021, with a very slight decline (within the survey margin of error). At the county level, it is notable that the greatest declines in agreement (that discrimination is a serious problem) occurred in core counties where more diversity exists, while awareness of the problem appeared to tick up the most in suburban counties. Chart 2 indicates that, by race across the 11 counties, there was a distinct decline in the share of Black respondents strongly agreeing that discrimination against the Black community is a serious problem. In both years, much larger shares of White respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that this discrimination is problematic.

Charts 3 and 4 provide more nuanced answers to a new question in 2021 about resident perceptions of the importance of racial equity to economic growth. Three-quarters of regional residents believe that racial equity is very important to maximizing economic prosperity. This share increases to over 8 in 10 of respondents from the core areas of Clayton, Fulton, DeKalb and the City of Atlanta, and is under 7 in 10 in only two areas. Chart 4 shows that higher shares of respondents of color (compared to the White cohort) rated racial equity as essential to economic growth. This is similar to the pattern shown in answers to the question on discrimination against the Black community.

To learn more about Metro Atlanta Speaks and to see more results, visit the following page:

• MAS web page on the Atlanta Regional Commission’s site with highlights, slide decks, the current year’s question list, and the methodology.
• An interactive data dashboard that allows self-exploration and custom querying of most of our dataset from 2016 to 2021.
• Our blog post about time trends in perceptions of the region’s biggest problem.