Whenever I see a poll that says race relations have gotten worse under President Barack Obama, I want to respond: compared to what?
I don’t hear a decent answer to that question from the pollsters. All I hear is more polls.
The latest comes with the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s historic “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. The new poll by CNN/ORC finds four in 10 Americans say race relations in the United States have gotten worse under the nation’s first African-American president.
A Bloomberg Politics poll in December and a Pew Research Center/USA Today poll last August reported similarly gloomy turns to worse “race relations.”
To which I find myself responding, worse than what? Worse, I might ask, than the days when a black man’s chances of being elected president were even less imaginable than, say, the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series?
None of these polls say what they mean by “race relations,” why race relations seem to have gotten worse or what we might do to turn race relations around.
“Race relations” are in the eye of the beholder. For example, the CNN poll contrasts sharply with long-range Gallup polling over the past decade that has found the percentage of non-Hispanic whites who called race relations “good” or “very good” to be hovering at about 70 percent or more, a few points higher than blacks, whose answers hovered mostly in the high 60s.
Yet conservatives are touting the gloomier polls with a mix of alarm and barely suppressed glee over the dark shadow the numbers supposedly cast on the administration of the nation’s first African-American president.
But what really has changed? These polls have accompanied heightened attention to shootings by white police officers of unarmed black men or teens by police in Ferguson, Missouri, Staten Island, New York, Cleveland, Ohio, and Madison, Wis., among other cities.
Let’s face it: The truth about race in America hurts. It is painful, for example, to read the Justice Department’s recent report on how police and courts in Ferguson deliberately have targeted and squeezed black residents with citations, fines and court fees that provide more than 21 percent of the town’s operating revenue — largely from people who can ill afford to pay.
How many other small towns, we wonder, operate similarly elegant shakedown rackets in the name of law ‘n’ order? It hurts to hear about such realities after years of ignorance. That pain may well be reflected in the polls. But as Dr. King might say, such pain is a small price to pay in the pursuit of justice and fairness.
A few days before the anniversary of the Selma march, I was interviewing David Axelrod, President Obama’s former political advisor whom I have known since our days as young Chicago Tribune reporters in the 1970s.
His new autobiography, “Believer: My 40 Years in Politics,” took me back to a time in the 1980s that makes today’s racial clashes look like a picnic. The “Council Wars” that Harold Washington faced as Chicago’s first black mayor, whom Axelrod also counseled, previewed the backlash, polarization and legislative gridlock that Obama has faced as president from his conservative opposition.
Though Washington was renominated handily in 1987, he lamented his mere 21 percent of the vote in the city’s white precincts. Axelrod and other aides tried to cheer him up. After all, he won only 8 percent four years earlier.
Washington was unimpressed. He remembered how he “probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods,” trying to be “a good mayor.”
Washington then smiled, shook his head and remarked sarcastically, “Ain’t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
Yet a happy ending to this narrative came in 2004, Axelrod points out, when Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate carrying a majority of the white votes in wards that gave Washington his heaviest resistance. “I told Barack,” he recalled, “that Harold Washington is smiling down on us.”
I like to think so. Race relations really work in the long run. You can’t take a snapshot on just one day and think you have the whole picture.
Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com
