White Democrats Are Wary Of Big Ideas To Address Racial Inequality

Even before a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, leading to a renewed national conversation about racial inequality, white Democrats were already pretty “woke” on some issues. An overwhelming majority of white Democrats said that racial discrimination was a major barrier to Black people getting ahead in America, that the police and the broader criminal justice system in America treated Black people unfairly and that the legacy of slavery still affected Black Americans today. And on issues of criminal justice and policing in particular, white and Black Democrats held fairly similar views. Surveys since Floyd’s death¹ have shown even greater wokeness among white Democrats (and Americans more broadly). White Democrats now view the police even less favorably and the Black Lives Matter movement more favorably, and they are also more likely to agree that Black people face “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination in America today.²

What we don’t know yet is whether white Democrats have moved significantly on racial issues beyond policing and discrimination in general — issues that deal with more material concerns, such as school integration and wealth redistribution. Most polling since Floyd’s death has focused on policing, Confederate monuments and other topics that have been in the news.

But here’s what we do know right now. In polling both before and even since Floyd’s death, white Democrats have been fairly opposed to giving reparations to the descendants of enslaved people, an idea supported by a clear majority of Black Democrats. And on a wide range of other policy ideas intended to address racial inequality, white Democrats are fairly tentative. (Republicans are much more opposed to all these policies across the board, which is why we’re focusing on white Democrats here.)

To look at these differences more closely, we focused on areas of American life where there is documented racial inequality. We then searched for polling on those issues. Our aim was to find the most recent polling available, in part to see whether views on major issues had changed in the wake of Floyd’s death, but for many issues, we had to rely on older polling, conducted before Floyd was killed. We found results in four major areas: income inequality, education, housing and the workplace.

Income Inequality

The wage gap between Black and white Americans has been rising for decades, and this gap persists, even accounting for educational levels, with white college graduates earning much more than Black college graduates. Moreover, wealth in the United States is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of white Americans. Experts argue that mere changes in individual behavior is not enough to reduce these gaps, and that the government must have a specific agenda to address racial income and wealth disparities.

White Democrats support increasing taxes on the incomes of very high-earning Americans as well as taxing the wealth of people with a high net worth, according to polls. Recent surveys suggest that white Democrats may be even more supportive of these ideas than Black Democrats.³

That said, white Democrats are much less supportive than Black Democrats of providing reparations to Black Americans as restitution for slavery or to make up for past and current discrimination that African Americans have faced. That divide, which is consistent across a number of surveys, is telling, because reparations are clearly intended to benefit Black people specifically and in a way that, for example, expanding health care through a wealth tax is not.

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Floyd’s death and the heightened discussion around racism that followed have not led to substantial support for reparations among white Democrats. In late April and early May this year, a quarter of white Democrats supported reparations, according to polling from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape. In more recent polls, that support has grown to 33 percent of white Democrats. That’s a substantial increase but still nowhere near the support this policy has among Black Democrats.⁵ About two-thirds of Black Americans supported reparations both before and after Floyd’s death.⁶

Education

Education experts generally favor greater school integration and argue that it is an important tool in ensuring black Americans get a high-quality education.

White Democrats are fairly supportive of ideas like creating magnet schools that may draw in kids from across a community and redrawing school district lines to increase racial diversity. In fact, they’re about as supportive of these policies as Black Democrats are. White Democrats are also mostly in favor of having the federal government take actions to increase school integration, a step that was strongly opposed by many white Americans in the era after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. (There are reasons to be skeptical of this polling and think that some white Democrats may be lying about their true preferences, but we’ll come back to that later.)

There is division about more aggressive ideas, however. White Democrats are much less supportive than Black Democrats of forcing students to attend a school farther away from their home or in a school district outside their neighborhood to ensure schools are integrated. Those policies have some echoes of the controversial “busing” policies implemented after Brown v. Board and subsequent rulings that resulted in greater racial integration of schools but that also angered many white Americans.⁷