This is bad news for leftist progressives whose rhetoric and policies rely upon and promote the perception of racial resentments, but Riley provides the evidence to buttress his claim.
He begins with a critique of the claim that Donald Trump's election in 2016 is proof that the nation is racist:
[I]t’s worth clarifying (yet again) that former supporters of Barack Obama, not white nationalists, were the voters responsible for Mr. Trump’s election. Only occasionally did the establishment media acknowledge this in its reporting. “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump,” reads a New York Times dispatch from 2017. “He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side."Political scientist Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute cites data showing, Mr. Riley avers, that,
[R]acial attitudes have been trending toward more tolerance for well over half a century, even as black politicians (Mr. Obama, Kamala Harris ), professional polemicists (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi ) and major media organs (the New York Times’s '1619 Project') continue to insist otherwise.Riley goes on to cite some important statistics:
According to Mr. Kaufmann, “at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.” Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are increasingly common, but white racist views have been in steady decline, whether with regard to having black co-workers, classmates or neighbors.
Intermarriage trend lines also undermine the notion that racial bigotry in America is a growing problem. “Approval of black-white intermarriage rose among whites from around 4% in 1958 to 45% in 1995 and 84% in 2013,” Mr. Kaufmann writes. “In 2017, fewer than 10% of whites in a major Pew survey said that interracial marriage was a ‘bad thing,’ ” and the “actual share of intermarried newlyweds rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015.”But what about the "systemic racism" plaguing our police departments?
In fact, intermarriages involving Asians, Hispanics and Jews have all risen sharply over the decades, yet progressive intellectuals want to lecture the rest of us on how to be “antiracist.”
Fatal encounters between police officers and black suspects are always unfortunate and sometimes tragic, but they’re also exceedingly rare. Nor is it rational to conclude, without supporting evidence, that these encounters are driven by racial animus.So why aren't these statistics more widely known? Why is it that when police shoot an unarmed black person it's a national news story, but when they shoot an unarmed white person, which happens twice as often, we never hear about it?
As Mr. Kaufmann notes, “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” According to a Washington Post database, police shot and killed 999 people in 2019, including 424 whites and 252 blacks.
Twelve of the black victims were unarmed, versus 26 of the white victims. In a country where annual arrests number more than 10 million, if those black death totals constitute an “epidemic” of police use of lethal force against blacks, then the word has lost all meaning.
The reason, perhaps, is that the left, both black and white, has an ideological interest in keeping society divided. By presenting themselves as the only ones who can remedy our nation's racial ills the left manipulates our misperceptions to aggrandize their own power.
It's reprehensible, to be sure, but if the above statistics are correct what other explanation is there for the constant effort by the left to turn every incident, every disparity, into a confirmation of their narrative that we are a thoroughly racist people?