ArcaMax

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.

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