Obama's New Racial Reality, Still Divided
Similarly, white respondents who thought blacks and whites got along well increased three percentage points from 2007 to 2009 to 80 percent, but fell five percentage points from 2009 to 2014.
Significant as those differences may be, they does look modest compared to the dramatic differences between the races in their view of police.
Seventy percent of black respondents thought police did a poor job of treating racial and ethnic groups equally, compared to only 25 percent of whites.
That reminds me unfortunately of the dramatic racial gap that followed the not-guilty verdict in O.J. Simpson's double homicide trial.
Which also reminds me of the late Rodney King's famous plea during the Los Angeles riots: "Can we all get along?"
The possibility of a positive answer to that question fueled much of the euphoria surrounding Obama's election. But the Ferguson riots and other racial eruptions during Obama's terms reveal the limits that any single person, even one with Obama's eloquence, can do to heal this nation's historic racial divide.
He's learned that the hard way, as in the "beer gate" fiasco. By saying the Cambridge police behaved "stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard professor for breaking into his own home, he opened up an O.J.-like divide that led to a "beer summit" photo op at the White House to smooth ruffled feathers.
The president's My Brother's Keeper program, aimed mostly at connecting young black males to mentoring and support networks, is a worthwhile effort to join government help with conservative self-help values. But the urgency of such hot-button issues as crime and allegations of police misconduct continue to drive wedges between the races.
Democracy, wrote journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book "Public Opinion," "has never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside." We're still trying to face it.
A lot of voters may have had it in their heads that Obama's election would heal our racial divide and inaugurate a "post-racial" America. Instead it has only revealed our racial divide to be deeper than many, perhaps even Obama, thought it was. That's the new reality.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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