An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this week get a lot of attention for President Obama’s declining favorability rate especially as it pertains to his handling of the economy.
What the media seemed to largely miss is that since January 2009, people’s opinion of race relations in this country has plummeted by 25 percentage points.
Participants were asked, “In general, do you think race relations in the United States are very good, fairly good, fairly bad, or very bad?”
Here are the responses:
Notice that the number that said “very good” or “fairly good” was 77 percent when asked this question in January 2009. When asked the same question in July 2013, that total plummeted to 52 percent.
Not surprisingly, this decline cuts across all races with the white total dropping 27 points, African-Americans 26 points, and Hispanics 16 points.
It is worth noting however that Hispanics view race relations more favorably than either whites or African-Americans.
60 percent of Hispanics rated race relations as very good or fairly good. That compares to 52 percent for whites and only 38 percent for blacks.
Also of note was how participants responded to the question, “Please tell me whether you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statement -- America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”:
White and Hispanic views on this haven't changed very much since January 2009.
However, 41 percent of African-Americans strongly or somewhat agreed with this the month Obama was first inaugurated. In July 2013, that plummeted to 19 percent.
79 percent of blacks now don’t feel America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Of course, the left and their media minions would say this drop was caused by the George Zimmerman trial and verdict. That's certainly the conclusion the folks at the liberal Talking Points Memo came to.
But African-Americans' view of race relations has been on a steady decline since Obama took office.
Those calling it very good or fairly good totalled 64 percent in January 2009. That dropped to 50 percent by September of that year.
As such, it seems likely that the left and the media's constant racial finger-pointing since Obama's inauguration has continued to sour African-Americans' view of race relations.
With how the press have shamefully depicted the Zimmerman case and verdict, things have only gotten worse.
So much for the post-racial society we were promised if Obama was elected.
(HT Tony Lee)
