Two Steps Forward
by digby
Despite America’s decades-long struggle to achieve racial equality and the election last year of the country’s first African-American president, Americans remain hopeful but highly skeptical that race relations will significantly improve in the near future, according to a new Gallup Poll.
In the survey, 56 percent said they believed that race relations would “eventually be worked out,” an almost identical result as the 55 percent who answered that way in 1963, Gallup reported.
“In short, despite all that has happened in the intervening decades, there is scarcely more hope now than there was those many years ago that the nation’s race-relations situation will be solved,” the company said.
Blacks remain much more pessimistic than whites that race relations will eventually improve, the survey found.
Last summer, during the presidential campaign, 50 percent of African-Americans said things ultimately would get better, but that number has fallen to 42 percent now.
The reason for this is simple. Black people, unlike well-meaning but sheltered liberals who have never dealt with racism, understand very well that it is a factor that’s fueling a hell of a lot of this anti-Obama teabag fervor.
They had high hopes that this post-racial society that everyone yammered about was upon them. And now they know that while progress has been made the seachange that Obama’s election represented probably only codified what had already happened. In fact, it may have ended up giving the racists a leg up because they can now claim that if the country can elect a black president it means that racism no longer exists. I’m sure that African Americas see that ploy for exactly what it is.
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