posted by Sam Richards
So one of the great mysteries has been solved, or so it seems. Having a (half) black president and a mostly black first family doesn’t have much of a long term impact on attitudes about race relations. Check out these Gallup poll numbers that just came in at the end of October 2009. (You can click on the graphs to make them larger.)
Be sure to note that these numbers are the same as they were in 1963. Yeah…1963! And in case you want to know what different groups think, here they’ve controlled for ancestry.
The following graph is actually a bit promising. I suppose the numbers have to play out in this way with Obama in the White House. I mean god help us if more, rather than fewer, people think black people have less of a chance to get a job for which they are qualified today than in the past.
These data are interesting because they point to the optimistic accessment of how things are unraveling.
And it appears as though the backlash against the “white man” has come to fruition. Sucks to be white.
Here is how the Gallup folks summarize the results:
Despite the election of the first black president in U.S. history, Americans’ optimism about a solution to the race problem in the U.S. and their views about the prevalence of racism against blacks are not substantially more positive now than they have been in previous years. In fact, optimism about race relations is now almost identical to where it was 46 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.
Blacks remain significantly more negative than whites about their status in society and about the potential for an eventual solution to the race problem. The data do not suggest that blacks have become disproportionately more positive than whites as a result of Obama’s election as president.
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