Six years after George Floyd's murder sent millions into the streets, Americans have officially split down the middle on whether race relations in this country are good or bad. Fifty-fifty. A perfect, damning coin flip. The catch, per a new NBC News poll released on Juneteenth, is that the experience of living inside that coin flip looks radically different depending on which side of the racial divide you actually inhabit.
The Headline Number Nobody Should Feel Good About
The NBC News poll, sponsored by More Perfect, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on advancing democracy, finds that 50% of Americans say race relations are generally bad, while 48% say they are generally good. That is presented, correctly, as an improvement. The share calling relations "good" is up 20 points since July 2020, when the country was literally on fire over police brutality.
But let's pump the brakes on the confetti. Only 7% of all adults say race relations are "very" good, even though that is, astonishingly, the highest that number has been in NBC News polling since 2011. The most optimistic Americans have been about race in fifteen years, and barely one in fourteen of them will go further than "eh, fine, I guess." That's the ceiling. That's the best case. Sit with that for a second.
White America and Black America Are Not Watching the Same Movie
Here is where the poll stops being a curiosity and starts being a document. Among white Americans, 46% rate race relations as "fairly good." Among Black Americans, that number is 24%. Already a canyon. But the real gap lives in the "very bad" category: 15% of white Americans choose that label. Among Black Americans, the number is 36%.
That is not a difference of opinion. That is two groups describing two different countries. And in a very real sense, they are. Halin Byrd, a 22-year-old Black man from Pennsylvania who participated in the survey, told NBC News that he believes race relations have "regressed." His explanation was blunt: "Everybody just feels like they can just say whatever they want, for any type of racist slur. Everybody's more comfortable now."
Byrd also wasn't surprised that white Americans see things more rosily. "They have a different experience," he said. "Privilege is invisible to those who have it." He wasn't being inflammatory. He was just describing physics.
The 'Media Did It' Crowd Shows Up On Cue
A white 56-year-old Republican from Georgia who the poll identified as Todd B. told NBC News he believed race relations were generally good, and that "everyone doesn't care about race," blaming politicians and the media for manufacturing the perception of division. Mark, a 36-year-old white Republican from Ohio, also pointed the finger at media sensationalism, telling NBC News: "I can't get on my phone without seeing: 'White guy does this' or 'Black guy does this.' Why can't it just be 'Ohio man does this'?"
This is a perfectly coherent thing to believe if you have the luxury of experiencing racism as an abstraction rather than a recurring feature of your daily life. The media critique isn't entirely baseless, to be fair. But there's a gap between "the media sensationalizes" and "therefore the underlying problem doesn't exist" that a lot of people are content to skip over without examining too closely.
Where Latino and Asian Americans Fit In This Picture
The poll breaks down views across racial groups with some genuinely interesting granularity. Latino Americans land roughly in the middle of white and Black respondents on most questions. Among Hispanics, 16% say race relations are "very good," 30% say "fairly good," 30% say "fairly bad," and 15% say "very bad." Asian Americans cluster heavily toward the middle, with 59% calling things "fairly good" and 32% "fairly bad," and almost nobody willing to commit to either extreme.
And then there's the broader unity question. NBC News also asked whether more unites or divides Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Overall, 59% said more unites us and 39% said more divides us. But among Hispanics specifically, 54% said more divides. That is the only racial group where a majority landed on division, and given that Latino communities have spent the last two years watching ICE operations ramp up and hearing the president describe immigrants from their home countries in terms that cannot be reprinted in polite company, it is not exactly a mystery why.
The President's Name Keeps Coming Up
Multiple poll respondents, unprompted, connected the current state of race relations directly to Donald Trump. Byrd told NBC News: "Trump, he's said a lot of racist things about Somalia, Mexico, Black Americans, women. And our president's a reflection of us. So that further gives people the green light to be more comfortable in their racism."
Ann, a 25-year-old Vietnamese immigrant from Kansas, told NBC News she believed Trump "affects the people to feel more comfortable being racist or feel more comfortable being prejudiced." Faviola Maichena, a 47-year-old Wisconsin independent who is Latina, said flatly that the Trump administration "is targeting demographic minorities for sure, Blacks, Latinos and other people."
This is not fringe sentiment buried in the crosstabs. These are ordinary Americans, across different demographics and party affiliations, pointing at the same thing. When your name comes up this consistently in an open-ended conversation about racial tension, that's data, not coincidence.
The Dingo Take
The most useful thing about this poll is how clearly it illustrates a fundamental problem with national conversations about race in America: the group least likely to experience racism as a daily operational reality is also the group most likely to declare the problem solved or exaggerated. When 36% of Black Americans call race relations "very bad" and only 15% of white Americans agree, that isn't a polling error. That's the gap between living something and observing it from a comfortable distance and concluding it probably isn't that serious.
And the timing of this poll's release, on Juneteenth, on a day that the current administration has done everything short of declaring legally optional, is its own kind of dark joke. The holiday exists to mark the belated arrival of freedom to people who were legally owed it. The poll exists to show us that, a hundred and sixty years later, Americans still can't agree on what freedom actually looks like in practice, or who has it, or who keeps getting in the way.
The improvement since 2020 is real and worth acknowledging. Things got so catastrophically bad during that summer that almost any movement looked like progress. But "better than the worst moment in recent memory" is a low bar to be celebrating on what is supposed to be a day of reckoning and reflection. Half the country thinks race relations are bad. More than a third of Black Americans think they're very bad. The president of the United States is spending this Juneteenth doing nothing in particular to suggest either number is wrong.
