On Feb. 20, Time magazine asked Henry Louis Gates Jr, the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard, about America’s “missed opportunities for racial equality.”

Gates replied:

One of the most dramatic shifts to the structure of the African-American community has been the doubling of the Black middle class and the quadrupling of the Black upper middle class since 1970.

Gates was drawing attention to the fact that from 1995 to 2017, the number of Black Americans with advanced degrees — Masters, Ph.D., M.D. or J.D. — tripled, going from 677,000 to 2.1 million. Over the same period, the percentage of Black adults with college degrees more than doubled, from 11 to 24 percent.

William Julius Wilson, a University Professor at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” made a related observation in 2017:

One of the most significant changes in recent decades is the remarkable gain in income among more affluent blacks. When we adjust for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of Black Americans earning at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more almost quadrupled to 13 percent (in contrast white Americans saw a less striking increase, from 11 to 26 percent).

These gains have not been restricted to affluent Black Americans.

Since 1966, two years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the percentage of African-Americans with incomes below the poverty line has been halved, from more than 40 percent to 20.8 percent in 2018.

Decades of defamatory rhetoric from Donald Trump — as both citizen and president — notwithstanding, Black America is doing vastly better than it was before the advent of the civil rights movement.

In “50 years after the Kerner Commission,” a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report, Janelle Jones, John Schmitt and Valerie Wilson found that “African Americans today are much better educated than they were in 1968” and that this development “has been accompanied by significant absolute improvements in wages, incomes, wealth, and health.”

Take wages. “The inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the typical Black worker rose 30.5 percent between 1968 and 2016, or about 0.6 percent per year,” they write, three times the rate of the “slower real wage growth (about 0.2 percent per year) for the typical white worker.”

In a separate 2018 Institute for Family Studies report, “Black men making it in America,” Brad Wilcox, Ronald B. Mincy and Wendy Wang write:

More than one in two Black men (57 percent) have made it into the middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38 percent in 1960, according to a new analysis of census data. And the share of Black men who are poor has fallen from 41 percent in 1960 to 18 percent in 2016. So, a substantial share of Black men in America are realizing the American dream — at least financially — and a clear majority are not poor.

The three authors elaborated in a commentary published by CNN:

Despite a portrait of race relations that often highlights the negative, especially regarding Black men, the truth is that most Black men will not be incarcerated, are not unemployed and are not poor.

At the same time, there is a note of pessimism among those who study neighborhood and school segregation — and the logic of this pessimism, in turn, is crucial to understanding Trump’s strategy in the closing months of the 2020 campaign.

For nearly 40 years, Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has studied racial housing patterns. Looking over his research and the work of others has led him to tackle the subject of racial and ethnic bias as it looks from the vantage point of 2020. He wrote me in an email:

Most white Americans simply cannot imagine there are Black or Hispanic neighborhoods with low crime, with high quality schools, with rising housing values, and that look well-kept. Despite the fact that there actually are such integrated neighborhoods that I have lived in myself, any mention of a high percentage Black or Hispanic (usually 30 percent or more) overwhelms their senses and emotions and signals ‘AVOID!’ no matter what else they are told about the neighborhood.

It is just this bias that Trump is determined to exacerbate — to inflame — in his sustained attack on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Trump claims that Democratic efforts to increase affordable housing in the nation’s suburbs under the aegis of the 1968 Fair Housing Act “will destroy your neighborhood and your American dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”

Trump has repeatedly pressed this theme, as well as the related theme of what he calls “open borders.” At a July 15 briefing, Trump warned that “the left-wing group of people that are running our cities are not doing the job that they’re supposed to be doing.”

This alleged failure, Trump continued, prompted his administration to conduct an “all-out campaign to destroy MS-13, a vile and evil gang of people” to counter the “radical left-wing politicians who have fought to open borders and welfare for illegal aliens.”

Four days later, Trump tweeted:

The Radical Left Democrats, who totally control Biden, will destroy our Country as we know it. Unimaginably bad things would happen to America. Look at Portland, where the pols are just fine with 50 days of anarchy. We sent in help. Look at New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. NO!

Trump’s political specialty is provoking and exacerbating subliminal or latent anxiety — and this probing is especially disruptive in the context of racial tensions that have surfaced in the aftermath of recent police killings of unarmed Black men.

Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton, has dedicated much of his work to understanding the prejudices Trump is trying to tap into. In an essay, “Still the Linchpin: Segregation and Stratification in the USA” he published in January, Massey wrote that:

In the minds of some whites, the mere presence of blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions actually are. Although whites say they would welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice they avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few blacks and confine their search to overwhelmingly white residential areas exhibiting white percentages well above those they offer in describing their ‘ideal’ neighborhood to survey researchers.

Robert Sampson, a professor of social science at Harvard, emailed me his views on the barriers facing those who work toward greater neighborhood diversity — barriers Trump seeks to raise and multiply:

Our research has shown that perceptions of disorder in a community are highly influenced by the racial composition of that community even after accounting for the characteristics of the individual, crime rates, poverty and observed levels of disorder.

Minority communities, Sampson argues, when compared to white communities with similar levels of school quality, crime and other measures “were rated much higher in multiple aspects of social and physical disorder, and interestingly, this pattern held for both blacks and whites.”

In light of these often unacknowledged attitudes, the question becomes: Can Trump eke out an Election Day victory by focusing attention and capitalizing politically on the looting and fire-setting associated with some of the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the police killing of Floyd and other African-Americans?

Emerson, the sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is deeply worried about bigotry, writing in an email:

The protests — when they turn violent as shown on many newscasts — are reinforcing white negative stereotypes about African-Americans (even though often it seems white folks are involved in the violence), preserving the wedge between groups, and because they signify losing the moral high ground, are severely curtailing what momentum there was.

Emerson asks whether “more whites will vote for Trump because of these violent aspects of the protests. The protests are giving whites, in a sense, ‘permission’ to do so.”

The depth of Emerson’s pessimism is reflected in his 2011 paper, “Who We’ll Live With: Racial Composition Preferences of Whites, Blacks and Latinos,” co-authored with Valerie Lewis and Stephen L. Klineberg, of the University of North Carolina and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

“It may be,” they write, “that whites simply will not or cannot separate race from the proxies associated with it, even if told otherwise.” That is, the three authors continue, “the categories ‘Black’ and ‘Hispanic’ may simply mean for whites higher crime rates, declining property values and poor quality schools.”

Massey shares Emerson’s concern over possible repercussions from the televised disorder and violence at some Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“Unfortunately, the stereotype of Blacks as lawless and violent persists in U.S. culture and permeates American social cognition, both explicitly and implicitly,” Massey wrote in an email. “So yes, to the extent that media reports (and especially images) link Black protesters to street violence, it reinforces negative stereotypes and creates animus against the Black Lives Matter movement and those who support it.”

This is especially true “with the Republican base,” Massey continued; whether “it will turn white suburbanites against the Democrats is a possibility, but not a given.” That will be determined by

the degree to which voters see Trump as being the instigator-in-chief and responsible for inciting the violence, or instead blame the B.L.M. demonstrators themselves.

In fact, many voters do perceive Trump as the “instigator-in-chief.”

For that reason, Robert Sampson was more cautious in his estimate of the potential for Trump to make political gains by focusing on the violence and destruction associated with some of the protests:

The lesson from prior research is that racial context often frames how we define and interpret the meaning of disorder and acts of violence or destruction. The active stoking of racial tensions by Trump exploits this social process, but whether it will yield a political benefit for him is unclear.

An alternative scenario, Sampson wrote, is that

increasing revulsion at vigilantism and public violence occurring under this administration’s watch may spur a multiracial backlash that offsets or overturns the standard script.

Christian Davenport, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and the author of “Media Bias, Perspective and State Repression: The Black Panther Party,” does not believe there will be much movement either to the left or the right among racially conservative whites. In an email, he argued that

The truth of the matter is that there is probably very little that could take place during the protests that would shift the opinion of some whites. Their positions are fixed already and they would likely only see the negative manifestations which you could almost always find during extended campaigns.

For these voters, Davenport continued, “the idea of African-Americans in a group might be enough of an offense.”

Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out in an email that the fear of a surge of conservative reaction to the protests is based on the assumption that events today fit the model of “1988, and Trump is the equivalent of George Bush trotting out Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis.”

Spence contends that reporters and columnists should

write about 2020 as if it were 2020. Not as if it were 1990. Write as if Trump is NOT George Bush, but something altogether unique. Write as if we are in a moment in which the entire world protested George Floyd’s death, not just Black and brown people in Los Angeles after Rodney King.

Spence is referring, of course, to the 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush, who capitalized on Willie Horton ads to win the presidency, just as Richard M. Nixon relied on a law-and-order/silent majority theme designed to convert George Wallace voters into reliable Republicans.

The May 25 killing of George Floyd — captured on video — prompted a surge of support for Black Lives Matter.

Polling conducted by Civiqs shows that more whites opposed Black Lives Matter than supported the organization from April 2017 to the start of May 2020. But by early June, a week after the Floyd killing, white opinion shifted strongly, to 44 percent approval of the movement and 34 percent disapproval.

In the weeks since then, as the media and the Trump campaign have focused on the violent conflict in Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle and, more recently, Kenosha, Wis., white attitudes toward Black Lives Matter have returned to pre-Floyd levels, according to the Civiqs data, 46 percent opposed, 40 percent in support.

From that perspective, the trends would appear to be moving in a direction favorable to Trump. But Trump continues to trail Biden in head-to-head surveys. Unlike Nixon or Bush, Trump’s appeals to law and order have not yet paid off in the polls.

Why not?

I think my colleague Ron Brownstein may have pinpointed the reason Trump has had trouble capitalizing on the violence in a Sept. 3 Atlantic article, “The Huge Snag in Trump’s Re-election Pitch”:

The biggest problem with Trump running on restoring order is that his performance in office has caused many voters to view him as the candidate of disorder.

Traditionally, voters have favored the Republican Party over the Democratic Party on the panoply of issues related to violence and the use of government force to restore order, whether it’s crime, terrorism or national defense.

An August 27-28 Yahoo/YouGov survey asked registered voters “which comes closest to your view, ‘Trump will protect us from the chaos’ or ‘Trump is the source of the chaos’?” 30 percent chose protect and 50 percent said Trump was the source of chaos.

A second set of Yahoo/YouGov questions asked whether the country would become more or less safe under Biden or Trump. By a slim margin (42-39), registered voters said that the country would become safer under Biden. If Trump gets re-elected, voters said the country would become less safe, 44-36.

Voters in that key state (where Kenosha is located) preferred Biden over Trump by 47-42.

A more recent September 2-4 CBS News survey asked whether Biden and Trump are “trying to calm the situation down” or “trying to encourage fighting.” By 49-30, voters said Biden was trying to calm the situation while, in the case of Trump, voters said he was trying to encourage fighting by 47-39.

Perhaps the most revealing question in demonstrating Trump’s liability in running as a law-and-order candidate asked whether Trump or Biden had “the right temperament” to be president.

By 59-42, voters said Biden had the right temperament; by 63-37 they said Trump did not.

These numbers clearly pose a threat to a candidate claiming that he will restore order in the nation’s “Democrat-run cities,” as Trump likes to say.

Mark Penn, director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, told The Hill that the most recent survey shows rising concern over disorder in the nation’s cities: “The civil unrest has become a significant issue in the country,” Penn said. “Nine in 10 expect it to be an issue and support for the police has been rising to nearly 7 in 10 support, while favorability of Black Lives Matter is just about half” of what it had been three and a half months ago.

Penn’s comments should be music to Trump’s ears, but the same poll found that in these circumstances, voters see Biden as better equipped to handle the issues that Trump has been laying claim to.

The Hill put it this way:

The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll finds that 58 percent of voters say Biden would do a better job of curbing violence in cities and 57 percent say he’d do better addressing civil unrest. Fifty-nine percent say Biden is better equipped to solve the nation’s issues on race and policing. By a margin of 54-46, Biden leads Trump on establishing law and order. Biden is viewed as the candidate best equipped to bring the country together by a 61-39 margin.

There are still 55 days to go before Election Day, a lifetime in politics. Imponderables abound: turnout, lying to pollsters, accusations of voter fraud and double voting, active voter suppression, the fate of absentee ballots, the political and logistical status of the United States Postal Service, and that’s before we even get to the three presidential debates.

The biggest imponderable of all is whether Trump will attempt to subvert the election directly, whether he will accept results he does not like, what unfathomable lengths he might go to — and whether the Republican Party, the Senate and the Supreme Court will stand firm in support of democracy or abet Trump in his reach for unconstrained power.