We Changed Our Minds

Everyone thinks we're in for more "racial disturbances" this summer, according to yesterday's WSJ survey.  At least 96% do--and for all practical purposes, that's everyone. Just for comparison purposes, it's more agreement that you get on the question of whether we're being governed by shape-shifting reptiles, or the existence of Bigfoot.

This isn't what we expected a few years ago--at the election of Barack Obama, the percentage of Americans who were optimistic that race relations in America would become a non-issue spiked to 67%.  People generally look for facts that will confirm their expectations, so the decline from general optimism over the past 7 to universal pessimism today is striking.  Something real is happening.

But what?  The current focus is on the police.  Have the police changed over the past 7 years?  There are statistics on police use of force, and here's a useful chart (from Mother Jones!) showing deaths of blacks and whites resulting from "legal intervention involving guns."  The chart shows black deaths declining steeply through the 1970s and then settling into a narrow range and basically flat from the mid-1980s to today.  None of this is enough to say one way or another whether more force is being used today than in days past--but it's enough to say that there's no dramatic jump in police gunning down black men.

There are other theories that focus on poverty, which hasn't changed recently and which was much worse decades and centuries ago, or on irrelevancies such as iPhones and Twitter.

Why did so many think race relations were on the way to resolution in 2009?  Because we'd elected a black President.  Our theory was that racial representation will lead to racial reconciliation.  We had a vague sense that it happened that way in South Africa, so the same should follow here.

It doesn't work that way.

If anyone needed the perfect test case, we have it in Baltimore.  If there was ever a situation in which racial tensions should have been eliminated by the implementation of liberal policies by black leadership, Baltimore is it.  The Police Commissioner is black; the first black police commissioner of Baltimore was appointed in 1984, and the position has been held by several black officers since then.  The Mayor is black (as were two of her three successors; Baltimore mayors have been Democrats since 1967).  The City Council is majority black, including its President.  The state prosecutor is black.  Of the six officers involved with the homicide of Freddie Gray, three are black, including the only one charged with murder.

And yet, somehow . . . somehow all of this moves us to be completely certain that more "racial disturbances" are coming soon.  This is the end of the idea that we can create racial harmony by ensuring that leadership has the same skin color as citizenry.  Ninety-six percent of us have declared ourselves certain that it does not.