SALT LAKE CITY — By most measures, Luke Northam is living the American dream. At only 30, he is branch manager for a national bank and a homeowner who describes himself as solidly middle class. A year ago, he and his wife welcomed their first child — a little girl.
But as a Black man living in a predominantly white upper-middle-class neighborhood in Flagstaff, Arizona, Northam doesn’t go for a run without his daughter. “She’s my protection,” he says, explaining that he believes people are less likely to shoot him if he is jogging with a stroller and a baby, than if he was moving through the streets alone.
While this fear might seem irrational, Northam says his concerns are rooted in both historical and recent events that have galvanized Black Americans — including the February 2020 death of Ahmaud Arbery, who went for a jog in a suburban neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia, only to be chased and shot by two white men in a pickup.
Whether or not one can understand Northam’s experience could depend on their politics, according to data from the American Family Survey, released Tuesday in Washington, D.C., by the Deseret News and Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.
YouGov conducted the nationally representative survey of 3,000 respondents in July, in the wake of racial unrest around the country. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9% and reveals a tremendous gap between Democrats and Republicans on the perceived racial inequality in America.
When asked whether or not they agreed with the statement “Black families face obstacles that white families don’t,” 80% of Democrats agreed with the statement, while just 25% of Republicans concurred.
“This is a 55 point gap. It’s a canyon,” said Jeremy Pope, a political science professor at Brigham Young University and co-director of the center and a co-author of the study’s report.
Pope said that usually the partisan divide on issues is relatively small. But when it comes to race, a chasm opens up — suggesting that it’s one of the most divisive issues in the country. This holds true when the data is sorted according to the race of the respondents — and, in fact, the gap between white Democrats and white Republicans is even wider than it is between nonwhite Democrats and white Republicans: 85% of white Democrats agreed with the sentence “Black families face obstacles that white families don’t,” as compared to 74% of nonwhite Democrats and 23% of white Republicans.
The American Family survey report notes that “it is clear that partisanship is the key driver of the response to these questions. One-third of white and Black Democrats chose racial inequality as one of the most important issues facing American families... Among white Republicans, the number is only 3%.”
The data suggests that, when it comes to race, Pope remarks, “Democrats and Republicans frankly — in a very binary way — have very different perceptions.”
“In general, Democrats are much more open to seeing systemic problems,” says Chris Karpowitz, a political science professor and co-director of Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.
“It’s not that Republicans aren’t sensitive to potential inequalities,” he explains “but they see the causes of those inequalities and the remedies of those inequalities quite differently.”
To some extent, these differences are historical. In “the 1960s ... the Democrats become the party of civil rights and the Republicans become the party of white Southerners,” says Karpowitz.
However, Karpowitz adds, “For white Americans of either party, trying to come to grips with our fraught racial past and the complications of that and our present responsibility is a challenge.”
Is there progress?
How does one explain such different perceptions of Black people’s lives?
“In general, people like to think that the system they live in is fair,” reflects Jackie Chen, a social psychology professor at the University of Utah. System justification — the human tendency to accept or defend the status quo, even if it’s damaging — is at work.
However, Chen says, “Democrats — liberals — are more open to the idea of systemic unfairness. Republicans also care deeply about fairness but see it more like interpersonal fairness. I think if you asked the question, ‘Is it unfair to deny someone a job based on their race?’ you would have less of a partisan divide,” she said.
Chen said she believes that Americans, on the whole, want to accept what’s been described as the “mythology of racial progress” — an idea explained by Yale psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson as an “escalator” that starts with the horrors of slavery but moves steadily and forever upward toward equality.
While progress has indeed been made in the halls of government — from the 14th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act — the data shows that hasn’t always translated to equality on the ground: Black infant mortality rates are higher than those of whites and Hispanics. Black people are twice as likely to live in poverty than whites, they still face redlining that prevents them from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, and then the Black-majority neighborhoods they often live in suffer from a slew of problems such as food deserts that make healthy eating next to impossible and underfunded public schools.
When Black children get into trouble at those schools, they are more likely to be suspended or expelled than white children, feeding what critics call the “school to prison pipeline” that culminates in disproportionate levels of Black incarceration.
Those interviewed for this story showed that the Black Americans who break out of this spiral and climb into the middle class still struggle.
State of vigilance
Patrice Bullard is another young Black American who, by all signs, is upwardly mobile. She’s a high school English teacher who serves as her department’s team leader. She is also an adjunct professor at a local college and, at 30, is just a semester away from finishing her doctorate. Her husband is a police officer and the two have purchased a home in Palm Beach Gardens, a wealthy area of South Florida known, as the name suggests, for its proximity to Palm Beach, its golf courses and its gated communities.
Bullard said as a Black woman living in America in 2020, she still struggles. She describes a tense encounter at a post office in which a white woman in her 60s told her to “Go back” to where she came from. As Bullard tried to explain that she was born and raised in Florida, a young white man intervened, asking the older woman, “‘Ma’am, is she bothering you?’” Bullard recalls.
That moment “changed my friend groups, it changed how I interacted with my colleagues,” Bullard reflects, adding that it even made her rethink her teaching methods.
Today, Bullard describes having to “code-switch” constantly depending on where she is and who is around. As a child, she recalls, she wasn’t fully accepted in her predominantly white, upper middle class neighborhood in Boca Raton. But when she visited her grandparents who lived “in the hood,” Bullard says, the Black kids rejected her, too, telling her she “talked white.”
Black interviewees describe living in a state of hypervigilance and constantly having to mask their feelings. They said that the experience is both physically and emotionally exhausting. Their homes become their only safe space.
To see the full survey and look at previous years’ results, visit deseret.com/american-family-survey.