One of the more interesting nuggets buried in the national exit polls from Tuesday's election comes in a question about the state of race relations in this country. Here's how the response broke down:
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As the chart demonstrates, just 20 percent of Americans believe that race relations have gotten better in the last few years, while 38 percent believe they've gotten worse. In other words, Americans are almost twice as likely to say that things are getting worse rather than better, which is startling. Yes, we still have incidents such as those involving Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, but those are nothing new. They have been standard if unfortunate fare in American culture for centuries. I know of no objective reason to believe that things have gotten worse other than polls such as that cited above.
Furthermore, that 38 percent that believes race relations are getting worse is overwhelmingly Republican. (I should stress that it's far from all Republicans, but still a substantial subset.)
Now, when Republicans say they think race relations have gotten worse, are they saying that prejudice against black Americans or other minorities has worsened in the last few years? I'm going to make a leap here and say no, I don't think that's what they're saying.
Instead, I think they're expressing their own increased insecurity, their own rising resentment and even hostility. They're expressing a sense that they're feeling more and more left out of a country that they love deeply. That resentment also sees expression in absurd statements like those of actor Ben Stein, who said this week on Fox News that Barack Obama "is the most racist president there has ever been in America." And rather than being hooted down as ridiculous, Stein's statement has seemed to strike a chord with some people.
Because nothing that Obama has ever said or done would ever support such a conclusion, you're left to look elsewhere for an explanation. We know that we're living through a period of great demographic change in this country, and it's occurring simultaneously with substantial economic uncertainty. People do not feel secure in their jobs, homes or social status, and when they look to the president for reassurance -- a man who throughout our history has served as something of a father figure -- white Americans for the first time see someone who does not look like them and certainly does not look like their father. Instead of reassurance, they get confirmation of their fears.
I don't think that those who feel that way are necessarily racist. Human nature is a sufficient explanation. We're all feeling a bit under siege these days, uncertain of the future. In those same exit polls, just 22 percent of Americans said they believe that their children will live better lives than they have; 48 percent believe their children's lives will be worse.
That's an extraordinary number for a country that has always been renowned for its unshakable optimism. And in tough times, the things that divide us one from the other begin to look a little larger and more important than they really are.
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