From Washington to Whitefish, Montana, white America is reckoning with racism, publicly demonstrating its belief that black lives have been too long neglected and abused. There’s just one question: Why now?
According to a Civiqs poll, 53% of Americans support Black Lives Matter, and only 25% oppose it — a 12-point increase in support since mid-April. By a double-digit margin, BLM is more popular than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. As political scientist Drew Linzer noted: BLM “is the single most favorably viewed national political organization or politician in America right now.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly is driving the change. The brutal killing last month of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was surely a dramatic event. But there have been other harrowing racial alarms in recent years.
Actual Nazis marched by torchlight in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, earning a presidential imprimatur — “very fine people” — even after a counter-protester was murdered. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted and killed by two white men in Georgia in February, for an offense that all available evidence suggests entailed jogging while black. His death produced sufficient outrage to derail an official whitewash of the killing and provoke a genuine investigation. Neither tragedy ignited national protests.
This month’s widespread protests of police brutality have put racial reactionaries on the defensive. But they haven’t altered the operating manual of the Trump White House, which was in the midst of using Covid-19 to fan anti-Chinese sentiment when Floyd was killed. Trump’s overt racism has made complaints about racism more credible, and perhaps easier for whites outside the White House/Fox News propaganda sphere to grasp. In one survey taken in the first days of June, two-thirds of Americans, including 63% of whites, said Trump has mostly increased racial tensions.
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Article URL : https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-11/black-lives-matter-is-more-popular-than-trump-or-biden