Poll: Most Americans support some goals of the 2020 racial reckoning
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Most Americans say they still support goals of the 2020 racial reckoning, including increasing diversity in the workplace and school curricula and recognizing the legacy of enslavement, per a recent survey.
The big picture: Five years after George Floyd's death led to global protests, many of the corporate and institutional pledges inspired by them have fizzled under Trump 2.0. But the survey found glimmers of support for the ideas the protests helped make more mainstream.
- Broadly, support for the Black Lives Matter movement is down, and President Trump made rolling back DEI and cracking down on immigration a second-term priority.
- While much of the 2020 protests focused on policing, they also targeted a lack of diversity in corporate boards, universities built on slave labor, Confederate monuments and stolen Indigenous lands.
By the numbers: A majority of Americans (54%) agree that "efforts to increase diversity almost always strengthen an organization's workforce," the survey published in April by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found.
- Eight in ten Americans (80%) say they prefer the U.S. be made up of people from all over the world. That group included 91% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 73% of Republicans.
- Just 15% said they prefer the country be primarily made up of people of Western European heritage.
- 51% are more likely to agree that "generations of slavery and discrimination against Black people and Native Americans have given white people unfair economic advantages."
- 86% agree that the nation's schools "should teach American history that includes both our best achievements and our worst mistakes."
Yes, but: Only around four in ten Americans (43%) hold favorable views of the Black Lives Matter Movement, while 49% had unfavorable views.
What they're saying: The success of BLM demonstrations can't be measured just by which police reforms passed and didn't, Phillip Atiba Solomon, CEO and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity, tells Axios.
- "The protests were about signaling the past due notice on an unpaid debt owed to the descendants of former slaves."
- Solomon says those debts involved acknowledgement of past discrimination and the barriers that still exist.
David J. Johns, CEO and executive director of the National Black Justice Collective, tells Axios it's important to build on the lingering goals of the reckoning and form new coalitions.
- "The goal is to really tap into that, to affirm for our folks that they're not crazy, that democracy has to be defended with each generation."
Methodology: The PRRI American Values Survey was conducted online from Feb. 28 to March 20. The poll is based on a representative sample of 5,025 adults (age 18 and older) living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who are part of Ipsos' Knowledge Panel®.
- The margin of sampling error is +/- 1.69 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample.
