Otherwise we might allocate 6% off the top to fund and sustain an effective fraternal order of blackness with professionial lobbyists, attorneys, and public relations officers free to pursue a doggedly and determinedly pro-black agenda.
fivethirtyeight | The overwhelming majority of black Americans view their racial identity as a core part of their overall identity, and this black identity and kinship with other black people has likely been heightened by Floyd’s killing and the resulting debate over the status of black people in the United States.
fivethirtyeight | The overwhelming majority of black Americans view their racial identity as a core part of their overall identity, and this black identity and kinship with other black people has likely been heightened by Floyd’s killing and the resulting debate over the status of black people in the United States.
About 52 percent of non-Hispanic black Americans said they viewed
being black as “extremely important” to how they thought about
themselves, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year.
Another 22 percent said it was “very important.” These numbers were
considerably lower for non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic white and
Hispanic Americans. (More on the story with Asian and Hispanic Americans
in a bit — it’s complicated.)1
Pew polling from 2016 and 2017 also showed that black people were significantly more likely than other demographic groups2 to say that their race was central to their identities.
Similarly, Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape
polling from last December found that 75 percent of black Americans
said their ethnicity and race was “very important to their identity,”
significantly higher than the share of Hispanic Americans (58 percent),
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (40 percent) and white Americans
(30 percent) who said the same. Another 15 percent of black Americans
said that their race was “somewhat important.”3
This heightened sense of black identity does not appear to be a
particularly recent phenomenon — or one that was inspired by the Black
Lives Matter movement, which began to emerge in 2013. In 2012, about 70
percent of black Americans said that being black was either extremely or
very important to their identity, about the same proportion as in 2016,
according to surveys conducted as part of the American National
Election Studies. In both years, black Americans expressed much greater
ties to their identity than white or Hispanic Americans did.4
