Most black people in America believe the country needs to keep moving towards racial equality, but nearly half doubt the U.S. will get there, a new study has found.
A full 88 percent of black people believed that the nation needs to keep pushing towards that goal, but 43 percent said they were skeptical that would be achieved while 42 percent said blacks and whites will one day live as equals, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.
By contrast, 38 percent of whites are convinced they and black people have already achieved equality.
The telephone survey of 3,769 adults was done between Feb. 29 and May 8 and included 1,799 whites, 1,004 blacks, and 654 Hispanics.
It revealed there still remains a yawning divide between black and white Americans with how they perceive the U.S., how they view police profiling and brutality of black people, and how they view President Obama, the nation’s first black president.
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Many white people (32 percent) are convinced that racism has actually gotten worse under Obama.
Not surprisingly, white Republicans are the most critical of Obama, with 63 percent blaming the president for increasing black/white tensions compared with just five percent of white Democrats.
By contrast, just five percent of the black respondents in the Pew study said Obama has made race relations worse while some 51 percent said they’ve seen progress under the president.
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Another 34 percent of the blacks people polled gave Obama credit for trying to improve race relations but still say he has failed.
Meanwhile 65 percent of blacks support the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprung up in the wake of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Among white people, it’s just four in ten.
There are even stark differences in how blacks and whites talk about race. For whites, it was a topic of conversation for just 18 percent of the respondents. Among blacks, it was 41 percent.
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