Sowing Division

Christopher Rufo, in his excellent new book America's Culture War, notes that the media has a highly polished ability to convince people of narratives that have no basis in fact. One such narrative that the progressive media seems intent on foisting upon us is that the United States is a deeply and inveterately racist country.

Rufo points out that among those who identify as Democrats only 32% believed that racism was a "big problem" in the U.S. in 2009, but by 2017 that number had more than doubled to 76%. The increase is due mostly to the amplification of that message by the media, but the message is in conflict with the empirical evidence.

Rufo writes,

Racism, by almost any measure, has declined in the United States [since the 1960s]. The laws have guaranteed equal treatment since the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Racist attitudes among whites dropped precipitously following that time period, with virtually no opposition to interracial marriage, integrated schools, and integrated neighborhoods by the mid-1990s.

Police killings of black men decreased by 72% between 1965 and 2005 - and...the vast majority of these incidents were in response to deadly threats [to the lives of the police or others].

Finally, in 2008 the United States elected its first black president, Barack Obama, which, at the time, was heralded as a racial watershed.

Part of the reason why so many people think the racial situation is so very much worse today, it must be said, is due to sheer ignorance of the facts. For example, one survey in 2021 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they believed were killed by police in 2019:

The majority of self-described "very liberal" respondents estimated that the number was at least 1000, with one-fifth of those respondents estimating that the number was at least 10,000.

Even among self-described "moderate" voters, more than a quarter believed that the police had killed at least 1000 unarmed black men over the course of the year.

The real number...was 14.

Why are so many people so uninformed that they would have such a profound misconception of the actual truth? It certainly seems as if our media has to shoulder the bulk of the blame. After all, where else do people get the news that forms the basis of their opinions?

They would probably deny it but it certainly seems that the left-wing media has an ideological interest in advancing racial discord in our society. One way to accomplish this is to promote the myth that we are a deeply racist country and to count on the masses of people to not bother to check to see if that myth is actually true.