Reading the @ManhattanInst report on U.S. race relations, from @epkaufm ( https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/social-construction-racism-united-states-EK.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2lKH0IlO1xMYcGT_LiK50IUjLW1gxaIn3ykbPsArGCHcVf5CLexnGEE6A) is fascinating- if depressing. As I've noted before, we don't seem to be facing any measurable increase in racism whatsoever, but instead a moral panic about it.

Some take-aways...

(2) First - while that troubling 6-8% core of bigots we see in housing rental, etc, remains a problem - racism empirically is WAY down. Per page 9, only about 10% of whites object to inter-race marriage on well-done anon surveys, and 17% of ALL marriages are inter-racial.

(3) But, people don't know this. Per "Key Findings," 8/10 Black Americans and 6/10 liberals whites believe Black men are more likely to be SHOT BY POLICE than killed in auto wrecks.

That's insane. For context: there are ~50K fatal and 600K disabling/injuring wrecks per year.

(4) Much of this seems due to the Great Awokening in left-wing media/academia. For all the flaws of the press on "our" side, white cons are FIFTY percentage points more likely to know the actual figures on cop shooting - ~60 unarmed men per year, 15 Black - than are liberals.

(5) This moral panic is of recent vintage. Per a fascinating and depressing chart on pg. 8, between 2-6% percent of Americans ranked racism as our "most important" problem for the entire period between 1975 and 2015 (with one spike for the LA riots). The figure's now 19%.

(6) The panic seems to be driven largely by social media . Per p.10, the % of Black social media users who report whites "acting suspicious" was 53%...as vs. 31% for identical (per age, education, income, partisanship, contact w whites) Black Americans who do NOT often use SM.

(7) Most importantly, race panic seems to affect Black Americans' sense of self-efficacy. In the worst finding of the report (p.22), reading one passage of Ta-Naheshi Coates before taking an attitudinal survey reduced 'Yes' answers about individual ability to succeed by 15%.

(8) In summary: actual racism has been declining sharply since the 1960s. However, perceptions of it as deadly serious surged from 2-4% across most of the 1980s and 1990s to 19% in 2019, driven by tech use.

My take: log off, go outside, and talk to people.