The New York Police Department suspended one of its officers after a bystander video showed him applying a suspected chokehold to a black man suspected of disorderly conduct. Four officers piled atop a man with a history of mental illness on a Rockaway Park boardwalk Sunday morning after reports of a man yelling at people.
By the end of the incident, 35-year-old Ricky Bellevue was unconscious with a bloody scalp, reports the Washington Post. Bellevue was also charged with “obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest” (being choked). The city and state of New York passed laws banning chokeholds after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis.
It is another in a chain of events allowing white America a view into what U.S. criminal justice is for their minority neighbors. If many whites seem panicked over a future with them having less than a controlling majority of the U.S. population, perhaps it is because they know too well how this country treats its minorities. White people, after all, have been the ones doing most of the treating for 400 years.
Slate’s William Saletan finds public opinion shifting rapidly in the wake of Floyd killing toward the view that racism is systemic and away from Donald Trump’s law-and-order message:
That’s good news for America. But it’s bad news for Trump and his party, because the GOP relies on white voters. In 2010, 2012, and 2014, about 60 percent of them voted Republican. In 2016, that number fell to 57 percent. In 2018, it fell to 54 percent. As this number has fallen, so has the GOP’s share of the overall vote. In 2016, Trump won enough states to take the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points. In 2018, Republicans lost the popular vote for the House of Representatives by more than 8 percentage points.
The GOP isn’t just losing white voters on issues such as health care and education. It’s also losing them on race. In this month’s polls, most white Americans say “the deaths of African Americans during encounters with police” are “signs of a broader problem,” not isolated incidents. They say police and the “criminal justice system” are treating “white people better than black people.” They acknowledge “a problem with systemic racism in America.” They classify racism as a “big problem,” a “very serious problem,” and “a major threat to the stability of the United States.” They endorse the statement, “Racism is built into American society. The assumption of white superiority pervades schools, business, housing, and government.”
Perhaps they are just telling pollsters what they want to hear, Saletan offers, but answers to identical questions have shifted dramatically in five years. Agreement that there is a broad pattern of police mistreatment of black suspects and a higher likeliness to use deadly force against them has increased roughly 20 points since 2015.
The public no longer buys police abuse as isolated incidents by a few “bad apples.”
In 2011, only 21 percent of white Americans said “racism in our society” was a big problem. By 2015, that number had climbed to 43. Now it’s 60. In 2016, only 26 percent of white respondents expressed a favorable opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement. Two years later, 36 percent did. Now 51 percent do. In 2015, 45 percent of white respondents said “racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States” was a big problem. By 2016, the number had risen to 64. Now it’s 71. Last fall, 42 percent of white respondents said white people were treated more fairly than black people in applying for jobs. Now that percentage has reached 50.
When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 made same-sex marriage a right in Obergefell v. Hodges, public opinion had already shifted. In a sense, the court simply ratified that. President Obama’s position on that subject shifted slowly over the course of 20 years. But when public opinion finally moved toward supporting LGBTQ rights. it moved quickly. What Saletan’s collection of polls suggests is public opinion may be shifting rapidly again.
Trump barely won the presidency in 2016 as an outsider stoking white racial fears. Four years later, his market for that message is shrinking fast. Sixty-three percent of white Americans (PDF pg. 13) say his response to the George Floyd demonstrations has increased tensions. His law-and-order, wedge messaging is falling as flat as his Tulsa rally. White respondents asked in Yahoo! News’ June 11 Race and Politics poll (PDF pg. 18) whether a “law and order” approach or “bringing people together” was more likely to “get things under control” chose “bringing people together” by 61 percent to 39 percent.
The public has now seen too many isolated incidents of police violence against unarmed black neighbors. Yet, Trump is still running on white resentment. As the incumbent, he is the one increasingly isolated.
“If he loses the election, one reason will be that he alienated nonwhite America,” Saletan writes. “Another reason will be that the GOP lost its grip on white America, too.”
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