Is Madison a segregated city? Well, not in the Jim Crow sense of the word. Black and white children go to the same schools, learn in the same classes and play on the same sports teams. But despite the absence of overt segregation, it is not without reason Police Chief Noble Wray was quoted last year as saying, “There are two worlds in Madison.”

Socially and economically, our city is inescapably divided by race, particularly between white and black Madisonians.

This is old news for many people, yet it remains difficult to acknowledge and is too seldom discussed by community leaders or in the press. Considering how much energy and attention is given to issues of social justice, both on campus and in Madison at large, very little of it is directed toward our own homegrown struggles with race.

Looking at Madison’s statistics can help measure the extent of those divides. But focusing only on numbers creates a misleadingly stylized picture which does little to explain the reality of social inequity.

Obsessively measuring and cataloging disparities can also become a kind of false apology. It’s a way for the enfranchised to exorcise their guilt without having to give serious thought to social change. It is like an abusive sibling saying, “See, I said I’m sorry, what more do you want”?

But for all their faults, numbers can verify what we observe. So briefly: 41.4 percent of blacks in Madison are impoverished compared to 17.9 percent of whites.

The median household income for blacks in Madison was $28,103, which was $23,103 less than what whites earned; that income disparity was greater than that in Nashville, Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Tenn., and Columbia, S.C.

A black man residing in Dane county is 22 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white man. Dane County charges blacks with drug crimes at 97 times the rate it does whites, and there is only one county in the nation in which that disparity is higher.

While those numbers do not tell a complete story, they should convince you that something is not right.

To get a better understanding of Madison’s problems with race, I talked with Urban League president Kaleem Caire, a native Madisonian who recently returned to town after a decade of working in industry and for educational non-profits in and around Washington, D.C.

We talked briefly about the existence of income disparities, academic underachievement and outrageously skewed incarceration rates, but Caire was more concerned with the unmeasurable causes of social inequity. For example, he observed, there are few whites in Madison who choose to interact socially with blacks. There are very few businesses owned by blacks, limiting the community’s access to economic power and clout. There is virtually no black middle class in Madison, which presents both white and black Madisonians with a skewed impression of blacks’ potential.

Education, he told me, is the most important step in breaking cycles of underachievement. To improve the academic success of black students, he wants to start an all-boys charter school in the model of Chicago’s famed Urban Academy. The school, he hopes, will provide structure, mentorship and examples of excellence which young men might not be receiving in traditional public schools.

Racial inequality is not unique to our city, but it is uniquely pronounced here. It is a subject I want to continue talking about throughout the semester. What do you think about race in Madison? On campus? I’d like this to be a conversation about the issue, so I invite and encourage you to e-mail your opinions, experiences, stories etc. to the address below. As much as possible I will draw from them in future columns.

Geoff Jara-Almonte ([email protected]) is a fourth-year medical student going into emergency medicine.