How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that “race relations” were either very or somewhat good.
Then, after the election and reelection of the first American president of African descent, in each case with majorities of popular as well as electoral votes, perceptions suddenly plunged.
Only around 50% of non-Hispanic whites rated race relations as good in 2015, 2019, and 2020. And the percentage of blacks taking that view fell to 51% in 2015, before Donald Trump’s election as president, and then 40% in 2019 and 36% in 2020.
The short explanation is that August 2014 saw the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement amid protests about the police killing in Ferguson, Missouri, of an 18-year-old black man who had just robbed a convenience store and attempted to seize a policeman’s gun.
Then May 2020 saw the death of 46-year-old George Floyd, which occurred as he was being restrained by officer Derek Chauvin after his arrest for allegedly using counterfeit money in Minneapolis. This week, a jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder.
How common are such deaths? The Washington Post’s database reports 402 people shot by police since 2015 — 374 of them men, 168 of them white and 136 black. That’s a higher share of black people than in the general population, but a lower percentage than that of black contacts with police. An unhappy fact of life in America is that black people are about seven to eight times more likely than whites to commit violent crimes (and also far more likely to be crime victims).
Floyd’s death generated enormous publicity and a sizable increase in support for the Black Lives Matter movement among whites (to 43% in Civius polling) as well as black people (to 69%). But that support was accompanied by widespread misperceptions of the magnitude of the problem of police shootings of black people. As Canadian political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out, a Quadratics survey in fall 2020 found that eight in 10 black people believe black men are more likely to be killed by police than die in an auto accident. So did 53% of white Biden voters. Only 15% of white Trump voters shared this illusion.
Actually, thousands of black men die in auto accidents annually, whereas far fewer than 100, according to the Washington Post, are killed by police. Similar questions showed similarly wide divergences from reality are apparent on other racially charged questions, and indeed ordinary people often have enormous misperceptions of many statistical relationships.
In any case, as Manhattan Institute scholar Coleman Hughes has argued, “The public perception of bigotry has surpassed the reality to such an extent that it has become a moral panic.” Hughes blames “critical race theory and intersectionality” for “the misperception that bigotry is everywhere, even as the data tell a different story: racism exists, but there has never been less racism than there is now.”
Those views might be as politically problematic as senior Rep. Maxine Waters’s unmistakable call for violent riots if Chauvin wasn’t convicted. By 46% to 37%, whites now oppose Black Lives Matter, and a similar number in a national poll support the Georgia election law.
Central cities, starting with Minneapolis, proceeded to “defund the police,” only to see murder rates zoom upward and many black lives ended as a consequence. The 50 largest cities cut their 2021 police budgets by 5%, but a USA Today poll found only 18% nationwide favoring defunding the police and 58% opposed.
National polls, by the way, may be understating opposition. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters reports that Republican voters may be especially unwilling to be polled, and a retrospective study of 2020 by five top Democratic pollsters reached a similar conclusion.
As Emerging Democratic Majority co-author Ruy Teixeira points out, Americans’ “belief that discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society” is “clearly at odds with causes and views” embraced currently by Democratic activists and “intellectual supporters."
The ebbing of their view, that the America that elected and reelected President Barack Obama is just as racist as it ever was, and perhaps more so, may be coinciding with (or caused by?) the emergence from lockdowns made possible by the nation's vaccination success, just as the spread of the Black Lives Matter view after the death of George Floyd coincided with (or was caused by?) lockdown fatigue. There's a sense that it’s time to emerge — into reality.