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May 22, 2021
Editor’s Note: Twelve months after George Floyd’s murder, The Economist publishes a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualizations, and guest contributions on the topic of race in America. We begin our coverage with the publication of a special feature by our American publisher.
WHEN DEREK CHAUVIN knelt on George Floyd’s neck at the corner of 38th and Chicago on a hot, cloudy night in Minneapolis a year ago, the scene was nothing unusual. Not for Mr. Floyd, who had already been arrested. Not for Mr. Chauvin, who had been penalized twice for serious misconduct and had 17 complaints against him. And not for America, where the police kill over 1,000 people a year, three-quarters of whom, unlike Mr. Floyd, are armed. Sorted by race, more whites die like this than any other group. But black Americans (13% of the population) are more than twice as likely to be killed by police. In this, as in so many other ways, African American men who are poor are at the bottom of the heap. Finding someone else kneeling on the throat is unfortunately not surprising.
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The reaction to this murder was a shock, however. Mr. Floyd’s death, which was caught on video by a passer-by, sparked the largest civil rights protests in the history of the Americas. Some 20 million Americans participated, flouting covid-19 restrictions. There were 7,750 protests in more than 2,440 locations in every state. Beyond America, Black Lives Matter events have been held in Brazil, France, Japan and New Zealand, among others. Businesses around the world have grappled with whether, by hiring, buying and selling, they play a role in perpetuating racism. A year later, English Premier League footballers, who play in a country where only 3% of the population is black, still kneel before matches, a gesture broadcast in 188 countries. Thus, the Americas are struggling to overcome racism and also shaping other societies.
The image of a white-skinned man, dressed in a uniform that says Protect with Courage, Serve with Compassion, kneeling on the neck of a dark-skinned man so strongly evokes the worst of the Americas’ past that there seems little doubt as to what killed Mr. Floyd. Police violence was one of them, as was poverty. But the real culprit was racism. The jury which, on April 21, after a short deliberation, convicted Mr. Chauvin of murder, seemed to agree.
For many African Americans, watching a constant stream of death videos, combined with the country’s consistently racial politics, feels like they’re drowning in the news, according to Eddie Glaude of Princeton University. I never really had any faith in America in the strongest sense of the word, he writes in Begin Again, a book about James Baldwin published after the protests. I hoped that one day the whites here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when that glimmer of hope fades and you find yourself convinced that whites will never change, that the country, whatever we do, will remain basically the same?
Drowning in the news misses out on the profound improvements in racial attitudes in America that have taken place over the last generation, a shift reflected in the scale of outrage over Mr. Floyd’s murder ( and the rare conviction of a police officer for it). When Bill Clinton became president, a majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages. Cynthia Duncan, a sociologist who worked in the Mississippi Delta in the 1990s, observed that when black people describe a white man who doesn’t sound racist, they say, she treated me like a person, repeating the phrase for emphasize how rare and remarkable the meeting had been. summer. And that was 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Law and the Voting Rights Law.
Now that 30 years have passed, 90% of Americans approve of Métis marriage. Measuring changes in racial attitudes is difficult, because as people realize that the prejudices they harbor are no longer widely accepted, they may become more reluctant to admit them. Yet the changes in behavior suggest the change is real, not just what people think they should tell pollsters. More than 10% of babies born in America are now mixed race. Data-driven research from dating apps suggests that one in three couples who meet online are, too. It’s part of a demographic transformation. As of 2019, non-Hispanic white children have been in the minority in America.
African Americans, whose opinion on the matter must matter, believe that there is less racial discrimination than there was. In 1985, three-quarters of African Americans believed that white people had better jobs, better wages, and better homes was mainly due to discrimination. In 2012, less than half believed this to be the case (a share that increased after Donald Trump was elected). And yet, among the general population, racism is seen as a bigger issue in Gallup polls than healthcare, poverty, crime, the environment, or national security.
How has the country become both less racist and even more concerned that the prevalence of racism is increasing? And if racism is indeed on the decline, why do so many African Americans still seem so stuck?
Racism and awareness of racism are related but distinct. Sometimes they move in opposite directions. In the old South, where people were denied the right to vote for a century after slavery was abolished because of the color of their skin, it was a cliché for whites to not only claim that they weren’t racist but also that they understood Africa-Americans better than those progressives in the cities of the North. Likewise, many whites who may not have known about racism when it was much more prevalent are more aware of it now, as the protests after Mr Floyds’ murder have shown.
Guess who’s coming to dinner
Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, left-wing white Americans have undergone what Matt Yglesias, a journalist, has dubbed a Great Awakening on Race. RT Rybak, a former mayor of Minneapolis, calls it reality therapy. The Trump-propelled birth movement which claimed the country’s first black president was an alien, the high-profile police murders of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Eric Garner in New York, a mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina: All of this made people realize that racism was more prevalent than they had thought. And then Mr. Trump was elected president.
The share of whites who thought black Americans had worse jobs, lower incomes, and poorer homes due to discrimination skyrocketed. The share of whites who thought the government should not give special treatment to black Americans has fallen by a third in six years. In the year Mr. Obama was elected, half of white Americans believed racial differences in income and wealth were primarily due to unwillingness. In 2018, this share had fallen by 15 points. Black respondents are now slightly more likely to blame African Americans for their situation than whites.
Understanding race and racism in America means grasping a set of contradictions. Desperation in the face of slow improvement can be a sign of progress. Racial attitudes have changed, but black and white Americans are as separated as they were in the days of James Brown and John Denver. As a true multiracial democracy, America has been around for less than a lifetime. It is home to the largest black middle class in the world, but also a significant black underclass that has made little economic progress since the 1960s. Writing about race is normally a shortcut to writing about African Americans, Hispanics or Asians. . But as they become more and more aware, whites are also a race.
In a multiracial democracy, a focus on race can be a recipe for zero-sum competition for public resources. Partly for this reason, the French government largely prohibits the collection of breed data. But dodging the problem can mean that racial inequality persists. In 1967, in another era of desperation over racist violence, James Baldwin wrote that he wanted black Americans to do something new: create ourselves without needing to create an enemy. The task of the Americas now is to make multiracial politics work without pitting groups against each other. No other great and rich democracy is so multiracial, but many will one day be. America is therefore once again the testing ground for a great democratic experiment. For this to work, the first thing to understand is why it was Mr. Chauvin’s knee that was on Mr. Floyd’s throat, and not the other way around.
Full content of this special report
* Race in America: What It Means to Be an American African-Americans: Proof of Things Not Seen White Americans: White Souls Anti-Discrimination Policies: Black Powers Won’t Have Your Mum Racial Categories: The Game All-American skin Repairs: The Office Freedmen The Future: The Ticket Price
This article appeared in the Special Report section of the print edition under the headline “What it means to be an American”
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