In a recent Twitter post, comedian Chelsea Handler suggested that people of color have a “50-50” chance of being shot by police.
Time to really back the blue, and realize ideas like this are a complete distortion, and very dangerous. But they work themselves into a broader pattern. Eric Kaufman’s latest report for the Manhattan Institute, based on multiple surveys, shows that “being exposed to news and social media, having left-wing views on race, and being anxious or depressed explains a great deal of how much racism a person perceives”.
NEWS FLASH: racist attitudes and behaviors have been declining over the last 50 years.
The report report notes that exposing black survey respondents to repeated stories inspired by critical race theory “reduces their belief that they have control of their lives. This affects their trust, health, economic achievement and other aspects of well-being”.
Young black men are around 10 times more likely to die in a car accident than from a police bullet. Yet when I asked people which was the more common cause of death for young black males, 81 percent of black Biden voters in my survey, and 70 percent of whites who agreed that “white Republicans are racist” said police shootings claimed more young black men’s lives. This was the case even though people who didn’t know the right answer could have selected a “neither” option. By contrast, only 15 percent of white Trump voters believed this fallacy.
Eric Kaufman
The narrative created in the media shapes what we believe. Since 2014, major media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and Washington Post have pushed racism, sexism and other aspects of identity politics. This has produced what Matthew Yglesias terms “The Great Awokening,” a major leftward attitude shift among liberal, especially white liberal, Americans:
...the share of Americans saying race relations are good, which was stable at around 70 percent from 2002 to 2014, has plummeted to 40-50 percent since. The gap between Democrats and Republicans on how big a problem racism is, which was around 10 points between 1995 and 2014, stands at over 50 points, entirely because of the rise in the share of Democrats saying racism is a big problem.
Kaufman
In surveys, black people on social media report experiencing significantly more racism than those not on it. When asked whether people “acted suspicious of you” or “acted like you weren’t smart,” over 50 percent of blacks on social media said they had experienced this racism compared with barely 30 percent of those not on social media. This effect remained powerful even after controlling for age, income, ideology and education.
According to Kaufman’s surveys, Blacks prefer resilience and agency over protection and dependency. Leftist narratives based on critical race theory damages their belief in themselves. Just 68 percent of black respondents who read a short passage from radical writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, starting with “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage,” said they could make their plans work out compared with 83 percent of blacks who did not read that paragraph.
When Whites are killed by police, and they are, the stories, if reported at all, don’t create the outcries heard from the tragic deaths of Daunte Wright and George Floyd. rarely make the news. When the media instigates with images of racism, this dovetails and resonates with myths and symbols that cut deep in the liberal American psyche. These kinds of narratives and politics, like resisting arrest and not following police officers orders, never really end well.
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