America may have its first mixed-race Vice President, its first African-American Secretary of Defense and its first Latino and immigrant as Secretary of Homeland Security, but the country has never been so racist. That, at least, is one of the disturbing conclusions being drawn from a new Gallup poll…

But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behaviour of Americans — at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example — to see that racism has almost never been so absent…

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So why is there such a misunderstanding between the American public and the reality of US race relations? The answer…reflects a media-driven moral panic — one that is rooted in the racialisation of identity-obsessed progressive politics.

Indeed, the “rise” of racism in America since 2014 is a social construct that reflects perception rather than daily life…the idea that vivid images rather than statistical reality…shape[s] people’s perceptions. For instance, people routinely overestimate vivid phenomena…because these stories make the news…

So too with race…Whenever events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots or the killing of George Floyd make the news, people…perceive race relations to be worse than they are. What is distinctive today, however, is the sustained determination of major progressive news outlets like the New York Times or CNN to centre racism as a dominant theme in American society.

As UnHerd has previously noted…the use of the term “racism” and similar terms in mainstream news outlets took off around 2015, (which can be seen here).

What caused this spike? Goldberg cites social media and the new partisan clickbait…model in online journalism as the catalysts…

One reason for this was the media’s desire to tap into a mythic script of a white officer killing a black suspect. Indeed, Goldberg’s study of the 2015-20 Washington Post police killings database reveals that black police shooting victims received nine times the media coverage of white victims…

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed,” 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000…

The impact of such warped perceptions cannot be overstated. But rather than trying to correct untruths, the American Left has leaned into these corrosive myths…