American race relations are in a bad place. Recent polling about how Black American perceive the state of racism paint a grim picture, and according to the Pew Research Center, things are only getting worse. Back in those halcyon days of 2012, only 30 percent of Black Americans thought contemporary racism was "a primary detriment to success." Yet by 2021, after eight years with a popular Black President and the entirety of the Black Lives Matter movement, fully 68 percent of Black Americans called racism a primary detriment.
Black people are not alone in this unexpected perception of a worsening America. A major recent poll of Asian Americans found that just 31 percent of Asian Americans between 35-54 feel they "belong and are accepted" in the U.S., and just 27 percent of those 25-34. An astonishing 81 percent of Asian Americans between 18 and 24 years of age do not feel they belong and are accepted in America.
It's remarkable. East and South Asians comprise the wealthiest and least disliked large group in the United States. But like with Black Americans, the huge majority of young members of this hyper-successful group feel rejected in their own country.
National data on race relations shows the same troubling trend. In 2001, the proportion of American adults describing relations between our large racial/ethnic groups as "good" was 70 percent among Blacks and 62 percent among whites; by 2021, it had fallen to just 33 percent of Blacks and 43 percent of whites. What could possibly have caused 37 percent of Black Americans to lose their faith in race relations?
Astoundingly, these massive increases in the perception of racism occurred while racism by any real standard steadily declined. In his comprehensive 2021 paper "The Social Construction of Racism," the Manhattan Institute's Eric Kaufmann makes the point that less than 10 percent of Americans currently score as bigots when tested via traditional techniques like anonymous questions about their feelings regarding inter-racial marriage. The percentages of Americans who believe "Blacks shouldn't push themsel(ves) where they're not wanted" or that it is acceptable to discriminate when selling a family home are similarly low.
My own analysis of data reveals similar patterns. Today, only 7-9 percent of white Americans would refuse to vote for a qualified same-party candidate who was Black or Hispanic (though a puzzling 19 percent would not work for a "practicing Mormon").
We have then, dear reader, a paradox: In what is by now almost certainly one of the least racist large societies in world history, why do most citizens of all colors think that race relations are bad and most minorities feel constantly oppressed?
The answer is that our society has for some navel-gazing reason begun talking obsessively about racism. Mentions of terms such as "racists" and "racism" have increased by hundreds of percent across virtually every major news outlet since the empirically more bigoted 1970s and 1980s. In The New York Times, that Gray Lady of record, these two words surged from 0.005 percent of all words used in 1970 to 0.02 percent in 2020. In The Washington Post, mentions grew to 0.03 percent of all words appearing in print today. In 2023, headlines like CNN's "There's Nothing More Frightening... Than an Angry White Man" and Salon's "White Men Must Be Stopped (the Very Future of the Planet Depends on It") are a daily occurrence.
As a result of this blanket coverage, Americans and especially "People of Color" now not only know more things about racism than we used to but also "know" many things about racism that simply are not true. The general assumption among our pragmatic population seems to be that anything discussed often and frantically must be a true existential crisis. As a result, citizens have begun to wildly over-estimate current levels of ethnic conflict.
That's how you arrive at a figure like one Kaufmann points to—that eight out of 10 American Blacks and six in 10 white liberals believe that Black men are more likely to be shot to death by police than to die in automobile wrecks. An even more comprehensive and astounding data survey, from the respected Skeptic Research Center, found that 53 percent of at least leftist or "very liberal" Americans think that 1,000 or more unarmed Black males are killed by U.S. police in a typical year.
The true numbers are rather different: Roughly 40,000 Americans die annually in car wrecks, with Blacks represented about proportionately, while the total number of unarmed Black men shot in a fairly typical year like 2022 was seven.
The same sort of nonsense is not always dramatically less prevalent on the political Right, by the way. In 2015, then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump drew some 6,000 re-tweets after sharing an absurd meme which claimed that 81 percent of all Caucasian murder victims are killed by Black people. In fact, if this even needs to be said, roughly 85 percent of Caucasian homicides and 90 percent of Black murders are intra-racial.
Per all data I have seen, the person most likely to kill a specific male appears to be his wife.
In short, Americans currently have a lot of bad takes and bad feelings when it comes to U.S. race relations, but not because race issues are actually worse today than in the past; rather, it's because we recently fell into a media driven cycle of fighting one another about what often are fairly petty problems.
Let's break that cycle now, and talk about something—anything—but "racism" for a while.
Wilfred Reilly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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