Public's View of Race Relations at Lowest Point in Two Decades

And Obama was supposed to be the great uniter, a post-partisan leader for the ages. Boy, was that a load of crap.

At WSJ, "Americans’ View of Race Relations at Two-Decade Low — WSJ/NBC News Poll":

Americans’ view of race relations is as grim as it has been in 20 years, in the wake of a series of deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with police officers, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows.

This month, only 34% of Americans believe race relations in the U.S. are fairly good or very good, down from a high of 77% in January 2009, after the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president.

The figure is the lowest since 34% in October 1995, after the acquittal on murder charges of African-American former football star O.J. Simpson, a traumatic and racially polarizing event.

“This is a very sad chart,” Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that conducted the poll for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, said of the figures. “It’s a reminder… what a continued rupture point in our country race is.”

Just Wednesday afternoon, a judge declared a mistrial in the criminal trial of a Baltimore police officer charged in connection with the death of an African American man last April

Over the past two decades, blacks and Hispanics have always had slightly more negative views on race relations in the U.S. than whites. But for about four years following the election of Mr. Obama in November 2008, majorities of the three demographic groups viewed race relations in the U.S. as very or fairly good.

In February 2012, a white volunteer neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was black and unarmed, at an apartment complex in Florida, after reporting to police he had seen a “suspicious person” and was stepping from his vehicle to investigate. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in July 2013.

Since then, a series of police killings of unarmed black teenagers or men – in Missouri, New York City, South Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati and beyond, have sparked outraged protests and have significantly diminished views of race relations among all racial groups, the polls show.

“We know the march is not yet over.  We know the race is not yet won,” Mr. Obama said in March at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., a seminal moment in the history of the civil rights movement. “We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth… There’s nothing America can’t handle if we actually look squarely at the problem.”

Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which also conducts the WSJ/NBC poll, said Americans’ views on race relations began to decline in polls in 2013, after the Zimmerman/Martin episode and continuing with high profile police shootings of African Americans.

In an unhappy irony, the gloomy view on race relations is a rare point of agreement among blacks, whites and Hispanics who are divided on so many other issues.

In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 26% of African Americans, 33% of whites and 38% of Hispanics view race relations as very or fairly good.

The issue is not free from partisan divide, however...