Mildred Edwards

Topeka ? The head of the Kansas African-American Affairs Commission said she agrees in part with President Barack Obama, who recently said race relations in the United States are better now than they were a generation ago. But she said Kansas still has a long way to go to achieve the goal of equal opportunity for people of color.

“We haven’t made many gains in the area of improved equity for African-Americans in our state,” said Mildred Edwards, a former member of the Kansas Board of Regents who has headed the African-American Affairs Commission since 2009.

“I think by virtue of the history of the state of Kansas being a free state, we don’t have much of the overt practices of racism,” Edwards said. “We have covert practices, I think, and that’s really some of the subtleties that we’ve been trying to address through the commission.”

In a recent interview with NPR, Obama responded to questions about the state of race relations in light of violence and protests that erupted in Ferguson, Mo., New York and other cities in the wake of police violence against unarmed black men.

“It’s understandable that polls might say race relations have gotten worse because when it’s in the news, and you see something like Ferguson and the Garner case in New York, then it attracts attention,” Obama said. “But I assure you from the perspective of African Americans, or Latinos in poorer communities who have been dealing with this all their lives, they wouldn’t suggest that it’s worse now than it was 10, 15 or 20 years ago.”

Edwards said racial bias shows up in Kansas in forms that are often subtle – in the hiring practices of businesses, in the way students are treated and judged at school, and even in the way people choose where to live or what church to attend.

“We human beings would rather work and spend time with people that we know and understand and have similar likes and dislikes,” she said. “And it’s a stretch for us as human beings to then put ourselves in a position where we may have to change in order to improve a more diverse environment in the workplace, in the way that we worship, or the way that we live, or the way we purchase things.”

According to the Census Bureau, Kansas is not as racially segregated as many other communities still are. More than half of all blacks in Kansas, 57 percent, live in census tracts that are predominantly white. Only 17 percent of blacks live in census tracts that are more than 50 percent black.

But school district lines are drawn in such a way that most black students, nearly 55 percent, are clustered into just three districts: Wichita, Kansas City and Topeka.

Achievement gaps between white and black students have narrowed slightly since 2003. But black students are still three times more likely than whites to score below state standards in reading and math.

And data from the Kansas Department of Education show that while schools have made significant strides in raising the achievement level of minority students, blacks are still roughly three times more likely than whites to score below the state standards in reading and math.

Edwards said bias in policing is also still a significant problem in Kansas, but that the African-American Affairs Commission has been working for several years with Kansas law enforcement agencies to help them become more aware of the issue of racial profiling.

In 2011, she noted, Kansas lawmakers passed a bill requiring law enforcement agencies to adopt policies against bias-based policing and to work with local advisory groups to develop those policies. But she said that was an easier task in the state’s larger cities than it was in smaller cities that don’t have as many community resources.

“As a response, we developed the Fair and Impartial Policing Academy, and we have community advocates from all over the state that check into the dorms at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center (in Hutchinson) along with police chiefs from all over the state,” Edwards said.

In September, she said, that academy held its second training session with 42 police chiefs and county sheriffs from throughout the state, and community representatives from each of the state’s four congressional districts.

“So those plans are being implemented throughout the state, and we at the African-American Affairs Commission try to provide any capacity-building needs that they have, helping to facilitate community conversations around those issues, bringing unusual voices to the table, and just trying to build the bridge between law enforcement and community advocates,” she said.

A 2014 annual report submitted to the state attorney general’s office by the Lawrence Police Department said the department has a community advisory board on racial or bias-based policing and it has a racial or other biased-based policing comprehensive plan.