Obama's New Racial Reality, Still Divided

Whatever happened to "Obamamania?" Recent polls suggest that race relations have gotten worse since President Barack Obama's 2008 election -- or, at least, that more of us Americans think they have.

It didn't help anybody's feeling of sunny delight that the two latest polls were conducted in the wake of racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.

Either way, the polls add fuel to the conservative portrayal of Obama as more of a divider than a uniter, although when I listen to some of those conservative voices, I can't tell whether they're bragging or complaining.

For example, only 6 percent of voters in battleground election states this fall say race relations have improved under the first African-American president, according to a Politico poll. Almost half (46 percent) say they've gotten worse and 48 percent say the dynamic has have remained about the same.

One thing that we did share across racial lines is gloom, according to the poll, although more white voters, 49 percent, said relations are worse, compared to 38 percent of African-Americans who said so.

Almost half -- 47 percent -- of both white and African-American voters said race relations were about the same.

Among Hispanic voters, 14 percent say relations have improved, 30 percent say they have worsened and 56 percent say they have stayed the same.

That's disappointing, but it also may be the sign of a new realism setting in after the euphoria of Obama's landmark election.

The good news may be that, compared to five years ago, a long-range national survey taken by the Pew Research Center and USA Today after Ferguson found that "overall perceptions of relations between blacks and whites are only modestly changed."

Although the number of black respondents who said blacks and whites get along "very well" or "pretty well" increased seven percentage points between 2007 and 2009 to 76 percent, the share that held that positive view has since dropped 12 points to 64 percent.

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.

========

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.