Media and liberal distortion of race relations

 Eric Kaufman:

What this study finds is that people's perception of racism and the reality of racism has been diverging, especially the past five years or so. So for example, what you see in the major newspapers like "The New York Times" or "The Washington Post," there has been an explosion of the terms racist, white privilege, white supremacy, and so on, and that has been documented in terms of word counts.

That seems correlated with a big shift to the left in terms of, particularly white liberal attitudes on race. And what that seems to produce is a big, big distortion, again, of people's perception of the size of this problem.

To give you a concrete example rooted in indisputable fact, I asked the question in my survey to both black and white respondents, what is more, which is the more likely cause of death for a young black man in America? Is it a car accident or is it to be shot by the police? It is a clear fact that it is about 10-1 with car accidents over a police bullet, and yet eight-in-ten African-American Biden voters and seven-in-ten whites who believe... white Republicans are racist actually said it was police that were more likely to be the cause of death for young black men. So this is leading people to have a distorted picture of reality. And that feeds into a whole series of political attitudes.
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We've been tracking attitudes, for example, with interracial marriage. As recently as 1990, 50-60% of white Americans were opposed to interracial marriages and it's now 10%.

If you look at the shootings of African-Americans, 60-80% decline since the 1960s.

We don't hear about these facts. So the first thing is let's put the facts out there and get people to reason statistically and not emotionally. That is the first thing.

Secondly, if you look at what Biden says, he could have brought the nation together by talking about Tony Timpe, the white man whose life was pressed out of him in 2016 by Dallas police officers. You could talk about the fact that as many white people are killed as black people.

But no, instead, choosing to turn this into a conversation about systemic racism and racialize what is not clearly a racist issue. This is an issue of police brutality, perhaps, but it is not obviously a racist issue and racializing that fuels this diversion of perception away from statistical reality.
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... those cities that had BLM marches and protests, there was a 20% increase in the murder rate between 2014-2019. Some awareness of the downstream cost of this on the black community and on the United States as a whole surely is necessary to inject a bit of context and a bit more rationality into what has kind of become, what John McWhorter said, almost as a religion of anti-racism, as a symbolic crusade rather than one grounded in facts and logic.

Biden appears to be ignorant of these facts as he stirs the pot of racism for political purposes.  The systemic racism doctrine of the left is much slocer to systemic ignorance of the facts.