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
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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