A poll released a month before the election found that most Americans believe relations between whites and blacks worsened during Barack Obama’s presidency.
A poll released a month before the election found that most Americans believe relations between whites and blacks worsened during Barack Obama’s presidency.
The CNN/ORC poll found 54 percent held that view — 40 percent of blacks and 57 percent of whites. That’s a dramatic shift since May 2009, when a similar poll found just 6 percent believed race relations had gotten worse.
Why the change? Many reasons.
Reports of racial conflict often dominate the news. The murder of black worshippers in a Charleston, S.C., church. The police killings of black men in several cities, some recorded by onlookers’ cellphones. The black 20-year-olds who beat a handicapped white man in Pontiac, Mich., and posted a video of the assault on Facebook. Fights over the Confederate flag. The Black Lives Matter movement, and reaction to it. Election law changes to deter black voters.
Racial tension didn’t begin under Obama. Race has been America’s dilemma since the first black slaves were brought here in the 1600s.
Blacks today have legitimate grievances. Though laws have changed, racism and oppression persist.
The criminal justice system is biased in many ways. Inadequate access to good schools, housing, health care and jobs gives many blacks ample reason to feel the deck is stacked against them.
Whites have grievances, too. Poor whites suffer many of the same deprivations as poor blacks. Economic shifts may have devastated their standard of living. Joblessness gives rise to addiction, anxiety and suicide.
Health statistics are alarming. While the death rate has declined for other racial and ethnic groups, it has risen for white non-Hispanics. Why? Higher death rates from suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning and liver diseases, mostly among those with a high school diploma or less. Researchers cite financial insecurity as a contributing factor.
Our economic system contributes to the problem. Driven by competition, innovation, disruption and risk, our system creates winners and losers. Problems proliferate when this rich nation leaves many mired in unemployment or dead-end jobs.
In addition, many whites feel their country is slipping away from them. By 2043 America will no longer have a white majority. Our first black president put many blacks in prominent positions. Anti-discrimination laws opened more jobs for women and minorities.
The result: A retired police captain in McKeesport, Pa., told the New York Times, “The white man is a low person on the totem pole. Everybody else is above the white man.”
In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. addressed white clergymen’s complaints about tension generated by civil rights protests.
The tension, King wrote, “is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”
King was right. Today, not just blacks suffer under an “obnoxious negative peace.” The bumper sticker maxim remains true: “If You Want Peace, Work for Justice.”
— The Charlotte Observer