I'm Sorry, Is This For Real?

The share of Americans saying race relations are bad has reached a high of 57%. This is entirely the result of misperception caused by media coverage. My latest @UnHerd https://t.co/4UWcKfJcbi

— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) July 26, 2021

But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behaviour of Americans — at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example — to see that racism has almost never been so absent.

Take interracial marriages. In 1958, 94% of whites opposed it — yet just 10% do today. Similarly, the long-running General Social Survey found that in the 1970s nearly 60% of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn’t “push themselves where they’re not wanted”. In 2002, that figure fell to 20% — and the question was discontinued.

You might as well say we elected Barack Obama, so racism died in 2008.  And it doesn't get better: 

It’s much the same story with police shootings of African-Americans. Despite the charged rhetoric of the past year, which culminated in calls for entire police forces to be disbanded, such shootings are 60-80% lower than they were in the 1960s.

Here is the link to that statistic, embedded in the original.  It starts with this graph:

 Yeah, no signs of racism here.  I mean, it is better than it was:

The rate of police killings of African Americans has fallen by 70 percent over the last 40-50 years, but their risk remains much higher than that of Whites, Latinos, and Asians.

But why does the risk remain higher?  Because blacks are more likely to be deadly and violent towards police?  Yeah, no racism here at all.

I couldn't go on after that.  I'm not inclined to dispute this argument because the author "is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities."  Which does, actually, sound like a very stupid book title.  So I am disinclined to give his article credence.  Instead, I'll just point out this is as stupid an argument as you're likely ever to see, and leave it at that.

At least he blames "the media" for engaging in "identity politics," without identifying the source of such "politics" as non-white Americans. Then again, I guess he doesn't have to be that explicit.  The dog whistles here are more like air raid sirens.

Honestly, the worst part is finding these tweets scattered among the Twitter accounts I regularly follow.  I expect such people to think better than this.  Funny how easily they decry Trump's racism, but...it's that beam in the eye again, isn't it?