As national debates about race and the criminal justice system heat up following the police killings of various unarmed black men, a new survey shows that black and white Americans are deeply divided on discussions about race.
A YouGov survey of nearly 1,000 Americans found that 57 percent of white Americans think the nation spends too much time talking about race, while 49 percent of black Americans hold the opposite view.
(YouGov)
The majority findings don't necessarily reflect the opinions of all black and white Americans. YouGov found some dissent within both groups: 18 percent of white Americans said people don't talk about race enough, while 18 percent of black Americans said people talk about race too much.
Still, the findings continue a trend of surveys that show white people tend to see race as less of an issue than their black counterparts do. Previous decades of surveys from the Pew Research Center found that black Americans express lower confidence than their white counterparts in police's ability to treat black and white people equally.
As Brian Stelter, host of CNN's Reliable Sources, previously noted, discussions about race, particularly in the aftermath of the police shooting of Michael Brown, are often characterized as national conversation — as if the entire country is having the same discussion at once. But YouGov's findings illustrate that white and black Americans are having two distinct conversations.
