Jennifer A. Richeson for The Atlantic explains how Americans’ views of racial progress are dramatically skewed, and even when studies bring them to believe things in the past were (somewhat) worse than they’d thought, they can’t seem to bring themselves to believe things are bad now.
For the past several years, I, along with my Yale colleague Michael W. Kraus and our students, have been examining perceptions of racial economic inequality—its extent and persistence, decade by decade. In a 2019 study, using a dozen specific moments between 1963 and 2016, we compared perceptions of racial wealth inequality over time with actual data on racial wealth inequality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the respondents in our study significantly overestimated the wealth of Black families relative to that of white families. In 1963, the median Black family had about 5 percent as much wealth as the median white family. Respondents said close to 50 percent. For 2016, the respondents estimated Black wealth to be 90 percent that of whites. The correct answer for that year was about 10 percent.
Pair with Robin Rendle’s thoughts on having read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which is on my list.