About 58 percent of black Americans say there is too little attention paid to racial issues in America, while 41 percent of white American (and 59 percent of Republicans) say there is too much.
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This survey has shown that the situation remains imperfect, she said.
Among white people, 53 percent say the country still has work to do for black people to achieve equal rights with whites, and only 11 percent express doubt that these changes will come.
The Pew analysis also highlighted the issue of racial equality, revealing major differences in the opinions of Black and white respondents.
White support for the protest movement varies widely based on age and partisan affiliation.
“While about eight-in-ten (78%) white Democrats say the country needs to continue making changes to achieve racial equality between whites and blacks, just 36 percent of white Republicans agree; 54 percent of white Republicans believe the country has already made the changes necessary for blacks to have equal rights with whites”, the research center added.
For example in July 2013 following the not guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, a white man, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, Obama weighed in with emotional remarks.
Only about half of whites 52 percent agreed, with almost a third 32 percent said the president made things worse. Just 22% say blacks are treated less fairly than whites at work.
Even the first black president nears the end of his second term, white and black Americans hold sharply divided views on the state of the nation’s race relations and the progress that President Obama has made, according to a new Pew Research Survey released Monday.
Most white Republicans don’t even want to talk about race matters anymore.
Pew researchers said they were spurred to conduct the survey, which asked questions of 3,769 adults between February 29 and May 8, by national controversies over race, policing and violence, such as shootings of unarmed black men that catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement into prominence.
About half (46%) of white people polled said race relations are generally good, while 45% said they were bad.
The 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set the stage for the issue to gain national traction, eventually spawning the Black Lives Matter movement, which has become a force of popular mobilization.
However, “Blacks are far more likely – at 71% – to say they have personally experienced discrimination in their lives”, Horowitz said.
A report that asked thousands of people about their views of racism has found the nation to still be deeply divided, with majorities of black and white Americans holding almost opposite views of the impact of skin color. President Obama, whose 2008 election sparked hopes for greater racial equality, will leave office early next year with only 19 percent of Americans saying they believe race relations are improving.
The survey also asked Latinos about their views of racism against black Americans and found their views more likely to closely align the views of black Americans. Slightly more whites said Obama has made race relations worse (32 percent) than those who said he’s made them better (28 percent).
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Around half of black respondents said they had been treated with suspicion or judged as unintelligent due to their race or ethnicity in the past 12 months.
