The Year It All Went Wrong

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 27, 2023

 

It’s not often that the polling industry provides us with data pinpointing the precise year in which American social cohesion began to erode. Gallup pollsters recently published statistics illustrating where it all went wrong — at least concerning race relations in the United States.

 

Every year since 2001, with some exceptions, Gallup has asked American adults to rate the state of relations between white and black residents. In 2015, the number of respondents who told pollsters they believed race relations were either “very” or “somewhat good” fell off a cliff. The public’s perception of race relations never returned to the status quo ante 2015. Indeed, its decline has accelerated in recent years.

 

Gallup declined to test this proposition in 2014, but we can identify it as the year in which the country took a wrong turn through Gallup’s other race-related questions.

 

In 2014, 55 percent of respondents said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the “state of race relations” in America. The following year, just 30 percent agreed. By the summer of 2015, the number of adults saying they were “very dissatisfied” with relations between white and black Americans spiked by ten points from the same time in 2013. Only 17 percent of adults polled by Gallup said they worried a “great deal” about race relations in March 2014, which was in line with prior years. A year later, that number increased by eleven points.

 

So, what the heck happened in the middle of 2014 that radically altered the consensus around race relations in America? The most compelling explanation for this seismic shift surrounds the events that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement. Or, more specifically, the commentary and pedagogy that followed the events that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Mo. Three weeks earlier, an officer in New York City was filmed incapacitating 43-year-old Eric Garner with a chokehold for the offense of selling loose cigarettes on the streets. He died in police custody as a result of his treatment. In both cases, grand juries decided not to pursue charges against the responding officers. Brown’s death was justified by the “physical evidence” presented to the jurors. Garner’s killing, however grotesque, did not violate New York statute (nor, the Justice Department later conceded, did the officer commit a prosecutable violation of Garner’s civil rights).

 

These events triggered months of sometimes violent demonstrations across the country — periodic episodes of looting and vandalism that, in 2014, were sights few had witnessed at such a scale since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. These two arrest-related killings are also responsible for mainstreaming the verbal ticks that have since become the price of admission into elite society. Among them, the notion that American race relations are, in fact, irreparable owing to America’s deep and abiding commitment to the repression of its minority population.

 

It was the year New York City mayor Bill de Blasio indicted the “centuries of racism that have brought us to this day” and revealed that he taught his biracial children to fear the police force under his control. It was the year President Barack Obama indicted racism as a “deeply rooted” feature of American society, even though he conceded that “things are better — not good, in some cases — but better” than they were in the civil-rights era. It was the year New York magazine reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells identified a “tidal shift in the attentions of the post-Occupy American left, away from the subject of economic inequality and towards the problem of race.” It was also the year a concerted effort was made in the press to educate the public out of the view that race relations were all right.

 

On December 30, 2014, NPR looked into not just Gallup’s polling but surveys from the New York Times, Pew Research Center, and CBS News, all of which showed either static or relatively positive trends in the general perception of race relations. This, according to the sources with whom NPR reporters spoke, was a problem that needed fixing. “From a privileged perspective, things are, yes, dramatically different,” Tufts University professor Peniel Joseph said of the difference between 2014 and 1964.

 

What followed was a nearly decade-long campaign to educate Americans out of the belief that racial disparities in America had improved or even could improve. To hold an optimistic view on the subject became, at best, an expression of ignorance. It is impossible to gauge the degree to which Gallup’s respondents honestly believe race relations have worsened since 2015, or whether they know what they’re expected to say. Regardless, at least we have a good idea of when it all started going downhill.