HARMONIC CONVERGENCE:

Media Ignores Good News About Race (Juan Williams 01/18/10, The DC)

The poll by the respected Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70 percent of white Americans and 60 percent of black Americans “believe values held by blacks and white have become more similar in the past decade.” Those numbers are unprecedented. Clear majorities of black and white Americans are saying that the divide born or racial, cultural and educational divisions is closing fast. The history of slavery, legal segregation and suspicion that comes with black anger and white guilt is amazingly close to being eclipsed by agreement across racial lines on common values.

And it is not just values that black and white are agreeing on. The poll also found that 65 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks believe the gap between standards of living for the two races has narrowed over the last ten years. Even as incomes between the races have slightly widened during those ten years there is the feeling among both races that the level of comfort – living standard – is increasingly similar.

And there is more good news about race in the Pew poll.

For example, 39 percent of black Americans in the Pew poll say the “situation for blacks in the U.S.” is better than it was five years earlier. That is nearly twice the 20 percent of blacks who told Pew in a 2007 poll that the racial climate for black people had improved over the prior five years. In this latest poll, a majority of black Americans, 53 percent, also said they expect life in the future to be even better for black people. In the 2007 poll only 41 percent of black Americans expressed such optimism.

And in what I think is the most amazing finding of the new poll 52 percent of blacks said that black people who are not getting ahead today are “responsible for their own situation.” Only one-third of black Americans said racism is keeping down the black poor.