Five years after the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by Derek Chauvin, a European American police officer, in Minneapolis, a new Pew Research Center survey measures the American public’s opinion on race, policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s murder followed the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, sparking nationwide protests during a global pandemic.
Pew found the country’s attention to race is “virtually unchanged.” Less than half of respondents (41%) say “too much attention” is paid to the issues of race, while 35% say “too little attention” is given. Most African Americans surveyed (69%) say “too little attention” is given to the issue of race while nearly half of European Americans (49%) say “too much attention” is paid to race.
In 2020, most U.S. adults surveyed said police were only doing a “fair” or “poor job” of holding officers accountable for misconduct (69%), treating ethnic groups equally (65%) and using the right amount of force for each situation (64%). While Americans’ views of police have improved, not even half (44%) rate the work police are doing around the country as “excellent” or “good.”
That same year, most U.S. adults said they were following news reports of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd “very closely” (42%) or “fairly closely” (42%). This was coupled with public sentiment concerning the news media’s coverage of the demonstrations. Most U.S. adults surveyed said they approved of its coverage and described it as “good” (42%) or “excellent” (14%).
By September, the think tank reported “mixed views” with 52% of U.S. adults surveyed saying the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality would prompt social changes leading to improvement for African American life. Forty-six percent of respondents disagreed.
“Some called the summer of 2020 a time of racial reckoning in America,” Pew said. “But in the years since, Americans have expressed growing skepticism that the events of 2020 produced significant change.”
Five years later, most of the U.S. adults (72%) surveyed say the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s murder has not resulted in improved lives for African Americans. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement has also seen a sharp decline, from 67% to 52%. Pew also noted waning support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives before Trump took office.
Pessimism has also increased. When asked if African Americans would “eventually have equal rights” with European Americans and considering the country’s progress on racial equality, nearly half (49%) of African Americans express doubt. This is up from 39% in 2020.
Most European American adults (61%) surveyed disagree. Though the country still has work to do, many Hispanic (50%) and Asian adults (41%) polled see it as a likely future.
This project “draws mostly on surveys conducted in the weeks, months and years following Floyd’s killing. These surveys are part of our long-standing body of work on race and ethnicity, which includes research on the public’s attitudes about race and illuminates the breadth of experiences of and within different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.”
Read the full report here.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
