IT SEEMS TO MOSTLY EXIST IN AMERICA’S MOST ELITE INSTITUTIONS: Michael Barone: The ebbing of ‘the misperception that bigotry is everywhere.’
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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.
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.
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.
This misperception exists because people on the left want it to exist, and people in the press want to help.