A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that white Americans and African-Americans agree that race relations in the US are bad or worse.
White respondents said race relations were fairly bad (45%) or very bad (24%). African-American responses were 37% fairly bad, 40% very bad.
Who knew?
The bleak outlook is a far cry from the optimism about race relations expressed after President Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president. Shortly before Obama's inauguration in 2009, a record 77 percent of Americans offered a positive assessment of race relations, while just 21 percent disagreed.
While that confidence persisted during Obama's first term as president, it had eroded significantly to just 52 percent by July 2013, the same month that George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the fatal 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Fla.
Republicans and independents are less pessimistic about race relations than Democrats, although majorities of all three groups give a poor assessment of the current state of affairs. About two-thirds of both Republicans and independents call race relations bad, while eight in 10 Democrats say the same.
Men also have a slightly sunnier view; just 20 percent of women but 33 percent of men give a positive assessment of how the U.S. is grappling with race relations.
Good thing they've got Donald Trump and his band of Merry White Men in the White House. They're sure to restore racial harmony to the United States.
The stain left by the Original Sin never goes away, Mound.
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ReplyDeleteFrom the July riots in '67, Owen, I have hoped that the US would find its way through this and, for a while, I thought it was. The presidency of a black man, it seems, was all it took to re-ignite the worst in America. I recall hearing a comedian joke that the only way Obama could win support from the Republicans would be if he proposed to repeal the 13th Amendment.
I'm with the 40% of blacks who think it's very bad, Mound. Moreover I believe that racism toward the AA community never went away or lessened over the last 50 years, it just hid below the surface. Now that the hooded white robe brigade has taken over the White House, the racists are now more openly embolden.
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May I please use this image with your credit in my article?
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