57 percent of Americans think U.S. race relations are 'bad'

A new poll from NBC News and The Washington Post found that a majority of Americans think race relations in America are "bad." As NBC News notes, the poll marks "the most pessimistic assessment of racial issues in almost two decades."

Four in 10 Americans polled said they believed U.S. race relations are "good," but 57 percent of respondents disagreed. And 23 percent of those polled said America's race relations are "very bad."

A July 2013 poll found that 52 percent of Americans approved of U.S. race relations, but NBC News says the new poll "most closely matches" a survey from 1995, during the month O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder. In the 1995 poll, 61 percent of respondents said the country's race relations were bad. In both cases, the disapproval of U.S. race relations spans across both white and black respondents.

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The poll comes after the killings of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, by white police officers. In the poll, four in 10 white respondents and 73 percent of African-Americans said that a grand jury's decision not to indict Garner's killer "made them less confident in the nation's legal system."