As reported by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, new public opinion research by the Remington Research Group has revealed that 62 percent of white St. Louis county residents believe that the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot multiple times while surrendering with his hands in the air, by a white police officer named Darren Wilson, was justified.
The support by white St. Louis county residents for the killing of Michael Brown is not just a simple matter of a difference in public opinion regarding how individuals locate matters of public concern within their own cognitive schema.
Instead, their attitudes are formed in relation to a given social and historical context. Consequently, the political attitudes of Darren Wilson's white supporters reflect a society that is organized around a racial hierarchy which privileges Whiteness.
Remington’s poll is part of a larger constellation of data on white racial attitudes in response to the Ferguson incident, specifically, and the realities of white on black racism in the post civil rights era, more generally.
In August, a poll by Pew Research found that:
...the public overall is divided over whether Brown’s shooting raises important issues about race or whether the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves: 44% think the case does raise important issues about race that require discussion, while 40% say the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.By about four-to-one (80% to 18%), African Americans say the shooting in Ferguson raises important issues about race that merit discussion. By contrast, whites, by 47% to 37%, say the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.
These results echo earlier polls that reveal how whites and people of color are starkly divided in their opinions about the permanence and power of racism in determining life chances.
we can have all the polls we can stand and it will not solve the issues at hand that will only happen when those who oppose and deny racial discrimination and lack of concern for that human American life it will continue more will die as long as it's Blacks that die the more the status quo solidifies.
federal involvement offers hope but thats's a i'll believe it when i see it thing.
These results echo earlier polls that reveal how whites and people of color are starkly divided in their opinions about the permanence and power of racism in determining life chances.
As a point of comparison, at the height of the civil rights movement, a moment when Jim and Jane Crow segregation and racial terrorism were still a de facto state of affairs in much of the United States, white folks reported to Gallup and other pollsters that black people had equal opportunities in America.
White America's willful denial and delusions about the twin realities of white supremacy and white privilege are a recurring feature of American cultural and political life.
Race is operative, both on a personal and institutional level, in Darren Wilson's decision to shoot and kill Michael Brown (for example, see the over policing of black and brown communities; the historic origins of modern American police departments in the American slaveocracy; racially disparate treatment by the American "criminal justice system"; and empirical research on implicit bias by white police towards black people).
The preponderance of the social scientific evidence on American social and political life demonstrates that the standing decision rule should be that racism is almost always a variable influencing interactions across the color line, as opposed to needing some extraordinary standard of evidence to demonstrate such a basic fact.
Ultimately, because America is a racist society, the attitudes and values of its citizens, to varying degrees, will reflect that trait.
all this has relevance but the average hater cannot understand the dynamic they understand they are White and entitled and we are Black and only entitled to the bones they throw at us, until the demographic changes and it will no matter how many of us they kill off will we have a chance at the America they advertise. DENIAL NOT ONLY HURTS THE ONE IT'S AIMED AT IT WILL RETURN AND BITE THE ONES THAT PRACTICE IT.
