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“We Are Not as Divided as We Seem”

[additional-authors]
July 18, 2016

The New York Times' “> found “Levels of racial discontent in America are high, and growing higher…..” Countless news channels  and“>national panel in New York to discuss the state of race relations and witnessed first-hand the passions that are permeating discussions of race today.

Clearly, the past week was a horrible one. The deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and the cold blooded murder of five Dallas policemen and yesterday's carnage in Baton Rouge has left the entire nation in shock. Was it any surprise then that a New York Times/CBS poll taken prior to yesterday's murders, would find 53% of Blacks and 62% of whites saying that race relations in the United States are getting worse? The unrelentingly bad news on the race front has penetrated virtually every corner of this country—even a recluse would have gotten the message.

The gloom and doom was partially countered by President Obama who said in his “>academic study issued this week by an African American professor at Harvard concluded that bias does NOT play a role in police involved shootings of African Americans. But, race does play a negative role in the touching, handcuffing, pushing to the ground and pepper-spraying of Black suspects—-non-lethal forms of harassment. The prof who did the study, Roland Fryer, says “it is the most surprising result of my career.”

Nevertheless, the media are very happy to be able to attract viewers and readers with proclamations that suggest that the gulf between groups is widening and that people should be alarmed, if not frightened. They do this as if there weren't enough issues to raise concerns about: such as the rising tide of xenophobia and white resentment (see The New York Times piece on the increase of white backlash “> 2013, 73% of Blacks thought race relations in America were good or pretty good. By April 2014 that number “>”good” remained at 66%.

By this week, the Times'“>Gallup Poll found that claims of mistreatment by the police within the “past thirty days” in the Black community hadn't appreciably changed (18%) since 1997 when 15% claimed they were mistreated by cops.

Invariably, what these polls are asking people to do is to give their assessment of the national state of race relations and, unless respondents are in the business of polling their friends and relatives across the country, they are going to parrot back what they have just seen on tv, read on the internet, or heard on radio—the prevailing narrative being that “things are bad and getting worse.”

Interestingly, when respondents are asked how things are going in their communities—that is, what are they experiencing—the results are far from discouraging. When asked about race relations “in your community”—even in the midst of the Ferguson, New York, etc. tragedies—66% of Blacks assessed their local race relations as “good.” Whites at that same time were at 80% in the “good” evaluation. In August, 2013—before Ferguson and subsequent events—Blacks assessed their local race relations as good at a 78% level, just 2% below whites.

The most recent NY Times' poll didn't ask the question about race relations in local communities (which frequently is posed in these polls) but they did ask “how would you rate the job your local police are doing in your community—excellent, good, fair or poor?” A passable surrogate for asking how race relations are in the respondent's community. Keep in mind that this question was posed after a series of questions about deadly force by cops, race relations in the country generally, etc.

When asked about “their” cops 77% of Blacks rated their communities' cops as “excellent, good or fair”, only 23% said they were poor. Whites rated them as “excellent, good or fair” at an 86% level.

That hardly suggests a crisis in “race relations” if the most fraught interaction—that between cops and the Black community—finds less than a quarter of the African American respondents saying relations are “poor”. Twenty three percent is not an insignificant number, yet it may be worth recalling a

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