Woke Racial Activism Bears Fruit: Gallup Survey Shows Positive Views On Race Relations In Free Fall
Views of race relations fell off a cliff in 2013 correlating to the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement, and went into further freefall more recently with the rise of woke Critical Race politics.
Since the inception of this website, I have warned of the destructive impact on our society of racial politics engaged in by Democrats.
On October 15, 2008, just three days after launch, I wrote “Race” As Political Weapon:
The suppression of legitimate political expression through false accusations of racism by the Obama campaign and its supporters is the defining theme of the 2008 campaign. This tactic, while it may be successful, is shameful and has damaged our society in ways we may not understand for years.
It’s been downhill since then, but the politics fine-tuned by the Obama campaign and supporters really hit its stride with the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012-2013 based on the false racial narrative of the Trayvon Martin case, and the national growth of the movement after the fabricated narrative of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in the Michael Brown case in 2014.
While I understand that correlation does not prove causation, correlation can still be significant. And there’s a direct correlation between the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the deep racialization of everything and the decline of positive views on race relations.
Gallup just released it’s latest survey on the topic. I find Gallup surveys particularly useful because the same questions have been asked for decades on this and other topics, like American attitudes towards the Israel-Palestinian dispute. So even if the methodology and sampling is not perfect, it still provides a consistent survey that shows historical trends.
Here is the headline and talking point for the latest Gallup survey, Ratings of Black-White Relations at New Low:
For the second consecutive year, U.S. adults’ positive ratings of relations between Black and White Americans are at their lowest point in more than two decades of measurement. Currently, 42% of Americans say relations between the two groups are “very” or “somewhat” good, while 57% say they are “somewhat” or “very” bad.
The most recent rating of Black-White relations in the U.S. is not statistically different from last year’s 44%. However, the reading has eroded nine percentage points over the past two years as the nation has grappled with the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent nationwide protests and calls for racial justice.
“Nationwide protests” — nice softpedal.
Here are the two key Gallup charts, note the sharp drop in 2013.
Don’t blame Trump. The ratings fell off a cliff in 2013, two years before he arrived on the national political scene, both for the population as a whole and for blacks and whites as groups.
There also has been a precipitous second drop in the past two years, as Gallup noted in the intro quote above.
Zaid Jilini nailed it, in my view, when he tweeted:
The Great Awokening: mission accompished
The Great Awokening: mission accomplished. pic.twitter.com/MFM6xD2rhQ
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 22, 2021
He continued (emphasis added):
It’s one theory that social media created this situation but why are YouTube videos supposed to reflect reality? The majority of AAs and whites had a much more positive view just eight years ago. If the videos present reality, was reality different?
During other periods of high tension, like the civil war, great depression, 1960s, there were substantive issues impacting the reality for Americans. What sharply changed in 2013 besides media (traditional and social)?
Obama also was critical of some voting laws but I don’t remember him talking like this. This kind of racial fear tactic is so common now.
Matt Viser @mviser
“This is Jim Crow on steroids,” President Biden says of the GOP-led changes in voting laws.
Some people are putting a spin on these numbers suggesting they are just the result of friction of political change, like in the civil rights era. But optimism about the future is declining at least for AAs.
Yes, what changed in 2013? And again in the past two years?
We’re on a bad road, something I’ve noted more recently about the trajectory of Critical Race Theory in education and society:
What we are witnessing in real time is the wholesale turning of society against itself.
The implementation of Critical Race Theory in various forms is a part of it, turning society against itself through manufactured racial conflict. This racial self-flaggelation is epitomized by Ibram X. Kendi’s misleadingly titled “antiracism” formula, in which the world is divided into “antiracists” (engaged in a never-ending struggle to unravel ‘systemic’ racism by destroying norms) and “racists” (everyone else who does not agree with them or just wants to be left alone or advocates treating people without regard to skin color). CRT and its offshoots are societal dead ends of perpetual conflict and repression.
The fight against CRT is not a fight about textbooks, it’s a fight for national salvation from destructive racial politics.
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Comments
What a shock.
Right about the time the Democrats started accusing anybody that disagreed with their crap of being racists, race relations declined.
That was the goal! Those two Obama maggots were not put in place for any other reason.
It’s quite simple. Positive views on race relations are in a free fall because race relations are in a free fall.
cf. Rules for Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky
Is the survey revealing the true reality or the respondents perception of reality? IMO most of the what is happening isn’t organic, it’s an artificial construct. Are relations actually deteriorating or does it just appear so?
That’s not to say everything is peachy. However the barrage of media narratives and the revelations about the depth and breadth of CRT/Equity infiltration of k – 12 and other institutions is new.
I retired from AD Army in 2015. The current mantra about ‘white rage’ ECT wasn’t on the horizon much less in practice in the Army. The pace of this is disturbing. It has a frenzied aspect that seems rushed; as if the proponents feel they only have a limited time to convince people.
IMO that’s the scary part. It’s a rush job of a poorly constructed narrative that attracts grifters and malcontents as it’s advocates. Precisely because these malcontents desperately need an external other to blame for their choices or circumstances they run with it.
Anyone who wants to slow down the process to review and examine the underpinnings and think about secondary effects is …a racist. Unfortunately some will always fall for this blame the external other BS.
IMO, most of the deterioration is illusory outside of those desperate to blame others and those who seek atonement for confusing their economic or associational privilege with ‘white’ privilege. Of course, those are larger groups than I would have thought and they are growing.
“The pace of this is disturbing.”
You summed it up very well. Compare the speed of CRT with Amazon Blue Origin’s space ship and it would blow Jeff Bezos’ cowboy hat right off his bald head and leave him with his one good eye hanging droopy.
“IMO most of the what is happening isn’t organic, it’s an artificial construct. Are relations actually deteriorating or does it just appear so?”
If the MSM continually (artificially) hammers on the meme that everyone with white skin is racist, and nobody stands up to tell them they’re bonkers, does all the anger this libel generates in whites depress race relations artificially or actually?
“…hammers on the meme that everyone with white skin is racist,”
And conversely, fails to admit that any with black skin could possibly be racist, even when reporting racist black on white crime in the daily news
Not just race relations. Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment), including racism, sexism, ageism, breeds adversity.
IMO when you have racist preference for criminals you breed resentment. Just look at the other LI article on the St. Louis killer that had to be set free. Someone will die because of that. Look at the looters or shoplifters all over the country who are not prosecuted, that have been regularly on TV, including California today. When the color of your skin is what counts, not the content of your character, and it leads to people who are killed who should not be or something as simple as higher product prices, major increase in resentment is unavoidable. These racists do not give a hoot about dead black people or, increasingly, attacks on Asians.
I have two young, white grandchildren who are supposed to be ashamed of themselves, for nothing they did but for their ancestors’ actions, who either were not in the country at the time or fought in the Union Army. I call this child abuse and to avoid this garbage will likely cost a lot of education dollars.
Finally, I know situations where the anger also affects relationships with family members and friends who think the above is acceptable behavior to be promoted by a political party. IMO virtually everything has deteriorated, the apparent goal of the Left.
We are going to have to pull the plug on public schools.
I admit that I’ve become very aware of race
I came along way from the 50’s and really was pretty close to color blind
I think you have to be nuts right now NOT to see color
I always enjoy reading your comments. You have a way with words.
More to the point, you’d have to be in what gun owners call “Condition White” (not a racial term despite the tendency to see one).
I think this is true for most of us. And it breaks my heart to see our country deliberately torn apart like this, on these “grounds.” Skin color, of all things. It’s kind of surreal since we spent decades getting past that, focusing on merit and ability instead of race, and have a zillion laws ensuring we are not a “systemically racist” society. None of this can end well unless we can end this divisive disgusting racist cancer that is inflicting our great nation.
“focusing on merit and ability instead of race,”
I hate to suggest this, but the fact that the vast majority of the minority folks turned the clock back on all this progress and renewed their harping on race suggests that they are aware that they simply don’t have what it takes to succeed in a meritocracy, and need to change the rules.
That’s not really true. BLM was not started at the grassroots by blacks but by WHITE globalists like George Soros. Every time I see a BLM riot, I see mostly blue-haired soy white boys, angry white lesbians and creepy trannies on the front lines. After that it’s the vapid athletes, black and other, who simply take the big money to sell their “platforms”. Same with Hollywood, MSM and the rest. We whites are just as guilty of this process. How many of us have to deal with families and friendships that have divided along Hilary vs Trump?
It’s madness and we aren’t even strong enough to prevent our most inner circles from falling in the trap. It’s not “them”. It’s US.
You say it’s not true? Explain “equity.”
BLM was started by three black women. One of them, Patrisse Cullors, just bought a place in Topanga Canyon which she is putting security fencing around, to add to her collection of international real estate holdings.
Soros may have helped from a distance, that wouldn’t surprise me.
I am a big believer in judging people on merit. In the sixties that was what Affirmative Action was supposed to be about, based on the assertion that black problems were mostly about lack of opportunity. That turned out to not be the case, but rather than revisit that hypothesis, they just started dumbing down stuff to create the illusion that it was working. That is the root of creation of the current situation. Capitalism works in large part because it advances those who are the most competent.
And government fails to work in large part because once a mistake gets enacted into law, they never, ever repeal it. They just try to gild it, adjust its trim, and tailor its optics.
This is why we still have Obamacare, and we always will.
If the pro-rights lobby hadn’t wisely insisted on including a sunset clause in the “assault weapons” ban that has since been proven to have had absolutely no anti-crime benefits whatsoever, we would still be burdened with that, too.
Those laws are government property! And a record of their achievements! Of course they won’t give them up and become irrelevant.
I remember someone asked Bill Clinton how the country was doing, during his presidency. He gave an answer proudly showing how the government was growing in size and wealth — and nothing else occurred to him to say.
When AA was started, people didn’t forget to ask how long it would last. The answer was something like “5 years, 15 at the absolute max and it won’t last that long, that’s just the crazy upper limit!”
The only solution we have now is to include everyone including white males as protected classes. But even Republicans never talk about doing that. They may be worse than Democrats.
It doesn’t break my heart anymore. I don’t care so deeply. I just won’t be ripped off.
Whe I am traveling and need to stop for fuel, or to find a room or restaurant, I practice situational awareness.
If I am looking for fuel or food and see more than one or two blacks, or see tricked-out Escalades, I find another station or restaurant.
If I see “brown” (Mexican, central American), I assess things, but generally feel okay stopping.
If I see a whole bunch of Asians, I stop.
Am I a raaaacissstttt? Probably.
Blacks need whites voters to continue their perks, meanwhile they are alienating more whites. The nature of this, is that they are even alienating woke whites, this will not end well for them.
Alienating woke whites is like convincing an anorexic that she’s finally thin enough. It’s never gonna happen. The condition just doesn’t permit it.
The GREAT irony is how bad this is going to end for woke whites.
Racial conflict resembles a rash on the body politic, the body is healthy but the rash is both constantly annoying and very difficult to cure. Between 2012-2015, America watched as Trayvon Martin was shot and Zimmerman notoriously tried in 2013, the 2014 Ferguson riots in St. Louis and the 2014 Eric Garner “I can’t breathe” death in New York. Those three events, tied together, became a continuous theme during the time and a serious threat to race relations.
I think the idea is to push blacks into a race war. While on sheer numbers they can’t win, the minute whites open fire on rioting blacks (in self defense, as rioters spread into white neighborhoods), our present regime will suspend all civil liberties and use their newly woke military to place areas populated by “deplorables” under martial law.
I think the same…poking a Hornet’s nest or a sleeping Bear and blame “Whitey” when they get stung or mauled.
One name…McCloskey
Exactly this. And the fact that the whites have not yet shot back is a testament to belief in rule of law and civility. It seems to me that inner-city blacks see this as a position of weakness, allowing oneself to be “dissed.” But in reality, it is a position of strength, allowing others garbage to wash off because it doesn’t matter.
Surveys? We don’t need no stinking surveys!
I do love that photo up top, though. It’s the perfect visual for the only Unitarian joke I know… about some rednecks in the Bible Belt who were upset that a Unitarian minister had moved into their neighborhood, so they went out one night in sheets and hoods, and set fire to a question mark on his lawn.
It’s the 21st century version of the burning store, sign in the window with “soul broher” on it.
Unitarians pretend they don’t have a dogma, but they do. It’s just what you expect — liberal Dem politics. What it means is they don’t have any *other* dogma complicating things.
Divide and profit.
Time to revive an old bumper sticker from the 70s?
“I’m not prejudiced.
I hate everybody.”
Good race relations are bad for Democrats.
In fact, anything good for America tends to turn Democrats into Republicans.
They would rather rule in Hell.
Excellent analysis, professor. Keep up the good work.
Most people will not exercise liberal license to indulge diversity [dogma] (e.g. racism, sexism, ageism). However, its progress is a clear and critical concern for civilized society.
We give ground when the other side pushes the envelope on the “civilized” part. Just a couple days ago “the community” was trying to “take back” a storefront that was being remodeled inside, in lower Manhattan. Inconveniently of course, they didn’t own this storefront in, you know, the formal legal sense, and this detail didn’t seem to bother them. Fortunately the NYPD did care about this little detail, extracted the burglars and arrested a bunch of the miscreants.
This is different from what happened in Seattle where the cops were forced to let them have a block or more of prime city real estate which became the CHAZ — and others who did “build that” were pushed out.