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Wie rassistische Einstellungen gemessen werden: Rassimuskonzepte und Messinstrumente in quantitativen Verfahren
Abstract
Rassismus ist Realität - auch in der pluralen Gesellschaft Deutschlands. Doch was braucht es, um Rassismus zu erfassen, zu erforschen und politische sowie zivilgesellschaftliche Antworten auf ihn zu finden? Die Beiträger*innen liefern einen interdisziplinären Überblick zu grundlegenden Perspektiven, Theorien und Forschungsansätzen für eine zeitgemäße Rassismusforschung. Die im Rahmen des Nationalen Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitors (NaDiRa) entstandenen Analysen bieten unverzichtbare und einzigartige Erkenntnisse zu Ursachen, Ausmaß und Folgen des Rassismus in Deutschland.
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This research article reports on the initial findings of a critical quantitative study, which developed and implemented a series of quantitative scales utilizing conceptualizations of racial fragility and anti-racist teacher self-efficacy scales. The scales were administered through a survey and yielded a usable sample of 4770 teachers in Missouri. Specifically, we address the scale development process, theoretical framework, and validation of the developed scales. The process analyzes the Racial Fragility Scale and the Racialized Teaching Efficacy Scale across teacher demographics. Ultimately, this project seeks to better articulate the nuances of non-racist, colorblind teaching in pursuit of moving the field toward an agentic, anti-racist stance in classrooms.
At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states - called core affect - influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.
The sociology of racism is the study of the relationship between racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequality. While past scholarship emphasized overtly racist attitudes and policies, contemporary sociology considers racism as individual- and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality in diffuse and often subtle ways. Although some social scientists decry this conceptual broadening, most agree that a multivalent approach to the study of racism is at once socially important and analytically useful for understanding the persistence of racial inequality in a purportedly ‘postracial’ society.
People with higher levels of formal education report less prejudice in survey research. Here we present novel evidence on the nature of educational differences in anti-Black attitudes among Whites. We replicate the education effect on explicit self-report measures of anti-Black attitudes, but we find that education is much less related to implicit measures of anti-Black attitudes. Implicit measures differ from explicit measures in that they do not allow respondents to control the measurement outcome; they therefore measure more spontaneous aspects of attitudes. These results shed new light on intergroup attitudes of the higher educated. Higher educated people are more likely to be aversive racists, that is, to score low on explicit, but not implicit measures of prejudice. Given the differential relation of explicit versus implicit measures to behavior, they have wide-ranging implications for the kind of intergroup behavior and discrimination we can expect from less and more highly educated people.
The viability of modern homonegativity was examined in two studies using Canadian (N = 374) and American (N = 608) university students as participants. Results suggest that negativity toward sexual minorities grounded in contemporary assertions such as gay men and lesbian women no longer experience discrimination and possess all the rights they need, appears to be distinguishable from old-fashioned negativity, which reflects traditional, moral, and/or religious objections to homosexuality. Invariance analysis revealed that a majority of items designed to assess modern homonegativity had equivalent loadings across the two samples. Results also indicated that American participants were more homonegative than their Canadian counterparts, though this difference was most apparent with old-fashioned homonegativity. The limitations associated with the current series of studies are discussed and directions for future research are articulated.
Investigated, in 2 experiments, whether judgments of happiness and satisfaction with one's life are influenced by mood at the time of judgment. In Exp I, moods were induced by asking 61 undergraduates for vivid descriptions of a recent happy or sad event in their lives. In Exp II, moods were induced by interviewing 84 participants on sunny or rainy days. In both experiments, Ss reported more happiness and satisfaction with their life as a whole when in a good mood than when in a bad mood. However, the negative impact of bad moods was eliminated when Ss were induced to attribute their present feelings to transient external sources irrelevant to the evaluation of their lives; but Ss who were in a good mood were not affected by misattribution manipulations. The data suggest that (a) people use their momentary affective states in making judgments of how happy and satisfied they are with their lives in general and (b) people in unpleasant affective states are more likely to search for and use information to explain their state than are people in pleasant affective states. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Prejudice and discrimination against women has become increasingly subtle and covert (N. V. Benokraitis & J. R. Feagin, 1986). Unlike research on racism, little research about prejudice and discrimination against women has explicitly examined beliefs underlying this more modern form of sexism. Support was found for a distinction between old-fashioned and modern beliefs about women similar to results that have been presented for racism (J. B. McConahay, 1986; D. O. Sears, 1988). The former is characterized by endorsement of traditional gender roles, differential treatment of women and men, and stereotypes about lesser female competence. Like modern racism, modern sexism is characterized by the denial of continued discrimination, antagonism toward women's demands, and lack of support for policies designed to help women (for example, in education and work). Research that compares factor structures of old-fashioned and modern sexism and racism and that validates our modern sexism scale is presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted 2 field studies examining the likelihood of black and of white victims eliciting altruistic behavior from New York Liberal and Conservative Party members. When it was reasonable to assume Ss could recognize that their help was needed, black victims elicited relatively less help than white victims from conservatives than from liberals. Liberals terminated the encounter prior to the request for help more frequently for the black than the white victims. The actual levels of help and discrimination could not have been predicted from verbal reports from similar Ss regarding help expected from themselves and others. Results suggest that liberals and conservatives both harbor antiblack attitudes, but liberals are more egalitarian when normative directives are salient. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Ss reported their standards for how they should respond and how they would respond in contact situations with Black people (Study 1) and homosexual men (Study 2). Interest centered on the affective consequences associated with should–would discrepancies. Low and moderately prejudiced Ss with discrepancies reacted with feelings of global discomfort and with more specific feelings of compunction (guilt and self-criticism). High prejudiced Ss with discrepancies experienced only global discomfort. Study 3 data indicated that low prejudiced Ss internalized their nonprejudiced standards and felt obligated to respond consistently with them. High prejudiced Ss' personal standards were less well internalized and appeared to be derived from their perceptions of society's standards, which Ss indicated were mixed (i.e., contained both egalitarian and discriminatory components). Implications for prejudice reduction and contemporary models of prejudice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The theory of aversive racism deals specifically with individuals who are presumed to be consciously egalitarian yet unconsciously prejudiced. In this chapter, we review research in which we reconceptualize aversive racists as those with a discrepancy between their relatively low-prejudiced attitudes at the explicit (i.e., conscious and controlled) level and their relatively high-prejudiced attitudes at the implicit (i.e., unconscious and automatic) level. In three studies, we compare the discriminatory behavior of participants identified as truly low-prejudiced with those identified as aversive racists to test the theory of aversive racism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The status of black Americans is the longest standing and most glaring exception to the American promise of freedom and equality. For this, as well as other reasons, social psychologists have long sought to shed light on the ways in which racial attitudes, beliefs, and values affect and are affected by patterns of black-white relations. Blackwhite relations now seem more complex and contradictory than ever before. From basic economic and demographic indicators to indicators of racial attitudes and beliefs, simultaneous patterns of progress, deterioration, and lack of change can be discerned.
Although theories of prejudice have been extensively catalogued, empirical confrontations between competing theories are rare. The present study tested 2 major theoretical approaches to prejudice by Whites against Blacks: realistic group conflict theory, which emphasizes the tangible threats Blacks might pose to Whites' private lives; and a sociocultural theory of prejudice termed symbolic racism, which emphasizes abstract, moralistic resentments of Blacks, presumably traceable to preadult socialization. The main dependent variable was suburban Whites' voting behavior in 2 mayoral elections in Los Angeles, both strongly influenced by racial issues, that matched the same 2 candidates, 1 Black and 1 White. In both elections, symbolic racism (sociocultural prejudice) was the major determinant of voting against the Black candidate for people removed from possible personal threats posed by Blacks as well as for those at risk. Direct racial threats to Whites' private lives (to their jobs, their neighborhoods, their children's schooling, their families' safety) had little effect on either anti-Black voting behavior or symbolic racism. Implications for theories of prejudice and for interpretations of the effects of voters' private lives on their political behavior are discussed. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In past studies, researchers have drawn a conceptual distinction between old-fashioned and newer forms of racial prejudice but questions persist about their distinctiveness. We reexamine the differences between these two forms of prejudice, arguing that negative racial stereotypes are the active political ingredient in the new prejudice. We explore the differing impact of old-fashioned racism and negative racial stereotypes on opposition to social welfare programs aimed at all impoverished African Americans and individualistic programs targeted at a subset of deserving blacks. The findings of this study suggest that old-fashioned racists oppose all racial policies including individualistic programs, whereas individuals who endorse negative stereotypes only oppose social welfare programs. Moreover, evidence that old-fashioned prejudice and negative stereotypes have different political effects and distinct origins poses a serious challenge to advocates of the new racism thesis, who argue that negative stereotypes are simply old-fashioned racism in another guise. Multivariate regression analyses of data from the 1990 General Social Survey are used to test the hypotheses.
In contrast to the original Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT) measures the evaluation of a target object without the need to simultaneously evaluate a counter-category. The present research investigates (a) whether position within a series of several ST-IATs affects reliability and validity, and (b) whether the ST-IAT exhibits adequate construct validity if the target objects are closely interrelated. We address these questions by taking five interrelated yet distinct political parties in Germany as an exemplary domain. The ST-IAT reliably and validly assessed attitudes towards political parties (Study 1). Serial position effects did not affect the results. The ST-IATs mostly captured a specific party evaluation and exhibited discriminant validity. At the same time, discriminant validity was limited among parties within one wing of the political left–right spectrum that underlies implicit and explicit party evaluations (Study 2). If used with caution, the ST-IAT can be a valuable supplement to implicit measures in the case of multiple single-target assessments.
This paper develops, measures, and tests two types of intergroup prejudice—blatant and subtle. Blatant prejudice is the traditional, often studied form; it is hot, close and direct. Subtle prejudice is the modern form; it is cool, distant and indirect. Using data from seven independent national samples from western Europe, we constructed 10-item scales in four languages to measure each of these varieties of prejudice. We report the properties, structure and correlates of both scales across the seven samples, and make initial checks on their validity. The cross-nationally consistent results support the value of the blatant-subtle distinction as two varieties of prejudice. While they share many correlates, their distinctive differences suggest better specification of these correlates of prejudice. And the blatant-subtle distinction also aids in more precise specification of the effects of prejudice on attitudes toward immigrants. The paper closes with a normative interpretation of Subtle Prejudice.
Until relatively recently the sociology of race and ethnicity, with a few notable exceptions, has been predominantly concerned with ethnic minorities and colour-based forms of racism. However, developments across a range disciplines have seen a new attention given to the question of white ethnicity and the meaning of whiteness. This paper considers three discernable approaches to critical whiteness studies and is focused on developing a productive dialogue between the materialist, deconstructionist and psychoanalytic frameworks identified. The author argues that these repertoires differ in seeking to abolish, deconstruct or rethink the meaning of whiteness and white identities as they currently stand. It is suggested that each of these positions can inspire an interrogation of white identities capable of disturbing the more traditional focus of race enquiry to engender new theory and political practices in the field. The article concludes by pointing to some of the limits of white ethnicities research and argues for more international approaches to offset the parochial possibilities of a ‘white studies’ agenda. It is suggested that new geographies of whiteness can displace the construction of critical whiteness studies as a Western pursuit and open up researchers to a global interpretation and postcolonial understanding of such race markers.
This chapter begins with a summary of the case of Thomas Brewster, who was tried for murder based in large part on eyewitness testimony. Ultimately DNA came to Brewster’s rescue, and he was freed before the trial ended. Analyses of taped interviews in the case help reveal how the interviewing process itself may have tainted the eyewitness testimony. The chapter continues with discussions of new psychological research on memory for complex events. This work shows how the details of events can be changed when witnesses are exposed to post-event information that is misleading. And with enough suggestion, entire events can be planted into the mind of ordinary healthy adults. The final section discusses new findings concerning eyewitness memory for people. This includes eyewitness identification of previously seen strangers, and new findings on procedures that can reduce mistaken identifications.
The concept of symbolic racism was originally proposed 30 years ago. Much research has been done and the society itself has changed, yet many of the original items measuring symbolic racism remain in use. The primary objective of this paper is to present and evaluate an updated scale of symbolic racism. The scale proves to be reliable and internally coherent. It has discriminant validity, being distinctively different from both older forms of racial attitudes and political conservatism, although with a base in both. It has predictive validity, explaining whites' racial policy preferences considerably better than do traditional racial attitudes or political predispositions. Evidence is presented of its usefulness for both college student and general adult population samples, as well as for minority populations. Data using this scale contradict several critiques of the symbolic racism construct (most of which are speculative rather than based on new data) concerning the consistency of its conceptualization and measurement, the coherence of the symbolic racism belief system, possible artifacts in its influence over whites' racial policy preferences (due to content overlap between the measures of independent and dependent variables), and its differentiation from nonracial conservatism and old-fashioned racism.
Evaluative priming is based on the notion that evaluative classifications of target stimuli are faster (vs. slower) when they are preceded by a prime stimulus of the same (vs. opposite) valence. Although evaluative priming is widely used as an implicit measure of evaluation, there is no common procedure for the treatment of response-latency outliers. To address this limitation, four studies examined common outlier-treatments in terms of (1) the overall size of evaluative priming effects, (2) their internal consistency, and (3) their relation to corresponding explicit measures in the domains of conditioned attitudes (Study 1), political attitudes (Study 2), racial attitudes (Study 3), and ethnic attitudes (Study 4). The algorithm with the best performance uses a priori cutoffs of 300 ms and 1,000 ms, treating response times beyond these cutoffs as missing values. Internal consistency was low for all algorithms, indicating limits in the usefulness of evaluative priming for correlational studies.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Survey. They indicate that such opposition is more strongly rooted in racial antagonism than in non-racial conservatism, that whites tend to respond to quite different racial policies in similar fashion, that racial attitudes affect evaluations of black and ethnocentric white presidential candidates, and that their effects are just as strong among college graduates as among those with no college education. Second, we present evidence that symbolic racism is consistently more powerful than older forms of racial antagonism, and its greater strength does not diminish with controls on non-racial ideology, partisanship, and values. The origins of symbolic racism lie partly in both anti-black antagonism and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, and so mediates their effects on policy preferences, but it explains substantial additional variance by itself, suggesting that it does represent a new form of racism independent of older racial and political attitudes. The findings are each replicated several times with different measures, in different surveys conducted at different times. We also provide new evidence in response to earlier critiques of research on symbolic racism.
In the United States, the 1960s and early 1970s were characterized by significant societal changes. The Civil Rights Movement and social, political, and moral forces stimulated these changes to address racism by White Americans toward Black Americans and achieve the nation's historical egalitarian ideals. With the Civil Rights legislation and other federal mandates, it was no longer simply immoral to discriminate against Blacks; it was now also illegal. Surveys and national polls revealed significant reductions in overt expressions of prejudice among Whites toward Blacks (Dovidio & Gartner, 2004). This unprecedented change in race relations in the United States changed the nature of racial attitudes, from blatant to subtle, and consequently the study of prejudice in psychology (Dovidio, 2001). In other countries, similar normative changes have reduced blatant expressions of prejudice while more subtle, yet equally pernicious, forms of bias persist (see Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995).
This chapter reviews the development of theory about contemporary forms of racism – focusing primarily on aversive racism – tracing the evolution of this perspective, describing key empirical evidence, and identifying productive avenues for future research. We begin by reviewing relations among different theories of subtle contemporary racism and discussing work on implicit prejudice and its relationship to aversive racism. We then consider the implications of aversive racism for interventions to reduce bias and identify promising new directions for research on contemporary racism, in general, and aversive racism, in particular.
Implicit social cognition Some of the most influential examples of scientific genius start with a powerful idea followed by development of methods to evaluate it. Einstein's theories of relativity were a remarkable insight that inspired decades of methodological innovation to confirm them. Most scientists, however, are no Einstein. Scientific progress can also accelerate rapidly in the reverse direction. Methods may generate evidence that inspires new ideas and theories. This is evident, for example, in Nobel Prize winner citations over a 13-year span for Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology and Medicine. Eighty-four percent of the citations credited a methodological achievement as the primary basis for the prize as opposed to a theoretical advance (Greenwald, 2001). In empirical research, theory and method are interdependent. Theoretical advances may spur methodological innovation by identifying a new possibility that has not yet been investigated. Methodological advances may spur theoretical innovation by producing evidence that existing theories ...
The present research, involving three experiments, examined the existence of implicit attitudes of Whites toward Blacks, investigated the relationship between explicit measures of racial prejudice and implicit measures of racial attitudes, and explored the relationship of explicit and implicit attitudes to race-related responses and behavior. Experiment 1, which used a priming technique, demonstrated implicit negative racial attitudes (i.e., evaluative associations) among Whites that were largely disassociated from explicit, self-reported racial prejudice. Experiment 2 replicated the priming results of Experiment 1 and demonstrated, as hypothesized, that explicit measures predicted deliberative race-related responses (juridic decisions), whereas the implicit measure predicted spontaneous responses (racially primed word completions). Experiment 3 extended these findings to interracial interactions. Self-reported (explicit) racial attitudes primarily predicted the relative evaluations of Black and White interaction partners, whereas the response latency measure of implicit attitude primarily predicted differences in nonverbal behaviors (blinking and visual contact). The relation between these findings and general frameworks of contemporary racial attitudes is considered.
Three studies tested basic assumptions derived from a theoretical model based on the dissociation of automatic and controlled processes involved in prejudice. Study 1 supported the model's assumption that high- and low-prejudice persons are equally knowledgeable of the cultural stereotype. The model suggests that the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of a member (or some symbolic equivalent) of the stereotyped group and that low-prejudice responses require controlled inhibition of the automatically activated stereotype. Study 2, which examined the effects of automatic stereotype activation on the evaluation of ambiguous stereotype-relevant behaviors performed by a race-unspecified person, suggested that when subjects' ability to consciously monitor stereotype activation is precluded, both high- and low-prejudice subjects produce stereotype-congruent evaluations of ambiguous behaviors. Study 3 examined high- and low-prejudice subjects' responses in a consciously directed thought-listing task. Consistent with the model, only low-prejudice subjects inhibited the automatically activated stereotype-congruent thoughts and replaced them with thoughts reflecting equality and negations of the stereotype. The relation between stereotypes and prejudice and implications for prejudice reduction are discussed.
Throughout our history, white Americans have singled out Afro-Americans for particularly racist treatment. Of all the many immigrant nationalities that have come to these shores since the seventeenth century, Afro-Americans have consistently attracted the greatest prejudice based on their group membership and have been treated in the most categorically unequal fashion.
This study applies the aversive racism framework to Spain and tests whether aversive racism depends on intergroup contact.
Relying on a 3 (qualifications) by 3 (ethnicity) experiment, this study finds that aversive racism is especially pronounced
against the Mexican job applicant, and emerges among those who held overtly positive attitudes toward immigrants. Friendships
with Latinos predicted decreased overt prejudice yet exacerbated aversive racism. Exposure to immigrants in one’s neighborhood,
in turn, predicted overt prejudice but was unrelated to aversive racism. These results suggest that (i) aversive racism emerges
in Spain and against some immigrants, (ii) overt attitudes do not reliably reflect subtle biases, and (iii) among this sample,
intergroup contact does not improve deep prejudices and is limited to affecting overt prejudice against out-groups only.
In this paper, biological, symbolic, and aversive racism are conceptualized on the basis of their most characteristic components. In a survey of 1,760 Dutch secondary school students, the empirical basis for this conceptualization was examined. It is hypothesized that the forms of racism are steps in a single cumulative dimension of ethnic attitudes. This hypothesis is based on Myrdal's rank order of discrimination and Blumer's idea of the color line. The validity of the forms of racism is tested by relating the steps of the ethnic attitude to intentions regarding discriminatory behavior, stereotyping, and attitudes toward affirmative action. It was found that 1) the distinguished forms of racism, operationalized on the basis of literature research, were largely corroborated by our empirical data; 2) the forms of racism can be arrayed on one underlying Guttman-type dimension: and 3) egalitarians, aversive racists, ethnocentrists, symbolic racists, and biological racists scored significantly differently on the variables measuring various axpressions of prejudice.
We compared the psychometric qualities of seven indirect attitude measures across three attitude domains (race, politics, and self-esteem) with a large sample (N = 23,413). We compared the measures on internal consistency, sensitivity to known effects, relationships with indirect and direct measures of the same topic, the reliability and validity of single-category attitude measurement, their ability to detect meaningful variance among people with nonextreme attitudes, and their robustness to the exclusion of misbehaving or well-behaving participants. All seven indirect measures correlated with each other and with direct measures of the same topic. These relations were always weak for self-esteem, moderate for race, and strong for politics. This pattern suggests that some of the sources of variation in the reliability and predictive validity of the indirect measures is a function of the concepts rather than the methods. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Brief IAT (BIAT) showed the best overall psychometric quality, followed by the Go-No-Go association task, Single-Target IAT (ST-IAT), Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP), Sorting Paired Features task, and Evaluative Priming. The AMP showed a steep decline in its psychometric qualities when people with extreme attitude scores were removed. Single-category attitude scores computed for the IAT and BIAT showed good relationships with other attitude measures but no evidence of discriminant validity between paired categories. The other measures, especially the AMP and ST-IAT, showed better evidence for discriminant validity. These results inform us on the validity of the measures as attitude assessments, but do not speak to the implicitness of the measured constructs.
In recent years as public opinion polls have shown a decline in racist responses, white Americans have strongly resisted school desegregation and affirmative action programs. Hence, there has been a debate over the extent to which racism has really declined. The theory of modern racism addresses these issues, distinguishing between old-fashioned racial beliefs recognized by everyone as racism and a new set of beliefs arising from the conflicts of the civil rights movement. The theory proposes that antiblack feeling remains high and has been displaced from the socially undesirable old-fashioned beliefs onto the new beliefs where the racism is not recognized. Three experiments were performed; results showed that, regardless of context, the old-fashioned items were perceived as more likely to reveal prejudice. The results are discussed in terms of their significance for opinion polling and continuing racial conflict in America.
In this article, a model is proposed and tested that explains support for David Duke in three statewide Louisiana elections. The model, which is tested at the individual level, includes independent variables to reflect the impact of racism, cynicism toward government, economic factors, and a variety of demographic characteristics. Symbolic racial attitudes were by far the most influential factor in explaining Duke support in all three contests. This held true even when Duke faced conservative opponents and in the fact of controls for ideology and other confounding factors. The notion of the Duke vote as being a protest vote or an expression of antigovernment feelings was only borne out in the campaign against the incumbent. Modest economic effects were also observed.
In this article I argue that a critical theory of whiteness is necessary, though not sufficient, to the formulation of an adequate explanatory account of the mechanisms of racial oppression in the modern world. In order to explain how whiteness underwrites systems of racial oppression and how it is reproduced, the central functional properties of whiteness are identified. I propose that understanding whiteness as a structuring property of racialized social systems best explains these functional properties. Given the variety of conceptions of whiteness in the literature, the several uses of the term are analysed and it is shown that there is a unifying concept underlying these various senses of whiteness. Lastly, some of the implications of this account of whiteness for anti-racist engagement are considered.
The present research explored how White college students may exhibit response patterns associated with a subtle and rationalizable contemporary bias, aversive racism. In the study, higher and lower prejudice-scoring participants evaluated applicants for admission to their university, for whom information about high school achievement and college board scores (aptitude and achievement test scores) was independently varied as strong or weak. As predicted, discrimination against Black applicants relative to White applicants did not occur when the credentials were consistently strong or weak; however, discrimination by relatively high prejudice-scoring participants did emerge when the credentials were mixed and hence ambiguous. Moreover, relatively high prejudice-scoring participants weighed the different, conflicting criteria in ways that could justify or rationalize discrimination against Black applicants. The implications of these data for understanding contemporary racism and their relation to the shifting standards model of bias are considered.
The study of race and ethnic conflict historically has been hampered by in- adequate and simplistic theories. I contend that the central problem of the various approaches to the study of racial phenomena is their lack of a struc- tural theory of racism. I review traditional approaches and alternative ap- proaches to the study of racism, and discuss their limitations. Following the leads suggested by some of the alternative frameworks, I advance a struc- tural theory of racism based on the notion of racialized social systems. "The habit of considering racism as a men- tal quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned." -Frantz Fanon (1967:77) he area of race and ethnic studies lacks a _ sound theoretical apparatus. To compli- cate matters, many analysts of racial matters have abandoned the serious theorization and reconceptualization of their central topic: rac- ism. Too many social analysts researching racism assume that the phenomenon is self- evident, and therefore either do not provide a definition or provide an elementary definition (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Sniderman and Piazza 1993). Nevertheless, whether im- plicitly or explicitly, most analysts regard rac- ism as a purely ideological phenomenon.
Researchers in American race relations have demonstrated the ambivalence white Americans feel toward black Americans. The prejudiced white behaves positively or negatively toward blacks depending on the context of the behavior, while the less prejudiced white behaves more consistently across contexts. In this study, the ambivalence concept was used to demonstrate the construct validity of a relatively nonreactive scale of racial prejudice-the Modern Racism Scale. Eighty-one white college students were pretested on the scale and then evaluated job candidates with identical resumes (except for a picture of a black or white male) under contexts designed to elicit positive or negative discrimination by ambivalent (presumably prejudiced) subjects. As predicted, when the candidate was black, the Modern Racism Scale was negatively correlated with hiring evaluations in the negative context and positively correlated in the positive context. When the job candidate was white, context and the Modern Racism Scale were unrelated to hiring evaluations.
The variability in individual respondent's considerations over racial policy may be due to uncertainty or to ambivalence. Ambivalence is distinct from uncertainty in that it stems from incommensurable choices, and cannot be altered with additional information. Using a heteroskedastic probit technique, we consider six separate core beliefs potentially relevant towards racial policy choice (modern racism, antiblack stereotyping, authoritarianism, individualism, and anti-Semitism) for four different policy choices. We evaluate two separate models for the source of individual variance: conflicting values and direct effects of values. Our analysis indicates that modern racism trumps rival explanatory variables in explanations of racial policy choice, and that variability in attitudes toward racial policy is due to uncertainty, and not to ambivalence.
This chapter examines one factor that contributes to the current frustrations of black Americans: the operation of a subtle form of racism among individuals that is less overt but just as insidious as old-fashioned racism.
Despite encouraging trends in the intergroup attitudes of white Americans, there are still reasons for concern. One reason is that, across a variety of surveys and polls, 10%–15% of the white population still expresses the old-fashioned, overt form of bigotry. These respondents consistently describe blacks as innately less intelligent than whites, say that they will not vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate simply because of that person's race, and oppose programs designed to ensure full integration and equal opportunity. Another reason for concern is that a substantial portion of the white population expresses merely racial tolerance but not true openness to or enthusiasm for full racial equality. A third reason for concern, which is this chapter's current focus, is that there is also evidence that many of the people who are part of the 85%–90% of the white population who say and probably believe that they are not prejudiced may nonetheless be practicing modern, subtle form of bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Traditional political analysis assumes that policy attitudes of the American public are influenced more by personal self-interest than values or ideology. A symbolic politics approach holds that policy preferences are more the result of the residues of early political and value socialization, especially when the policies are linked to racial or ethnic groups. In this article, the relative strengths of the self-interest and symbolic politics approaches are tested in the context of the busing for school desegregation controversy in Louisville, Kentucky. Regression analysis of a random sample of Louisville adults found that measures of self-interest (having a child in the public schools, having a child bused, having strong ties to the neighborhood) were related only weakly and inconsistently to anti-busing attitudes whereas measures of racial attitudes (Old Fashioned and Modern Racism) were strong and consistent correlates of opposition to busing: the more prejudiced, the more opposed. The implications of these findings for school desegregation policy are discussed.
Research on “symbolic racism” has underscored an important paradox in racial attitudes: whites' rejection of racial injustice, in principle, has developed without diminishing resistance to the social policies designed to correct the injustice. Yet despite the currency of symbolic racism in contemporary research on racial attitudes, questions about the meaning of the concept remain unanswered. The results of two investigations reported in this paper indicate that (a) the conceptual and empirical distinctions between symbolic racism and “old-fashioned” prejudice have been exaggerated, and (b) symbolic racism may be best understood as one symptom of generalized tendencies to derogate out-groups—tendencies associated with a configuration of personal attributes that reflect commitments to conservative sociopolitical values and conventional standards of conduct. These findings are discussed in reference to the persistence of racial prejudice, as well as its implications regarding exposure to and the effects of interracial contact.
The aversive racism framework (S. L. Gaertner & J. F. Dovidio, 1986) suggests that bias against Blacks is most likely to be expressed by Whites when it can be explained or justified along non-racial grounds. The present experiment adopted a 2 (Evidence: admissible vs. inadmissible) × 2 (Defendant Race: White vs. Black) between subjects design, asking White participants, whose self-reported prejudice was assessed, to judge a legal case. As predicted, increased guilt ratings and longer sentencing recommendations were forwarded for the Black (vs. White) defendant only when DNA evidence linking the defendant to the crime had previously been ruled inadmissible. This result was not qualified by self-report racial attitudes. The implications for evidence inadmissibility in interracial contexts are considered, along with the repercussions of finding experimental evidence of aversive racism outside of North America. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Symbolic racism is the expression by suburban whites in terms of abstract ideological symbols and symbolic behaviors of the feeling that blacks are violating cherished values and making illegitimate demands for changes in the racial status quo. In this paper, the correlates of symbolic racism from a sample of seminary students and of voters in a Los Angeles suburb are presented. Measures of symbolic racism predicted voting preferences for a white incumbent over a black challenger in the 1969 Los Angeles mayoralty election, and symbolic racism was itself correlated negatively with sympathetic identification with the underdog and with education. It was positively correlated with Republican party identification and with measures of traditional or conventional religious and secular American values. Symbolic racism was not correlated with measures of occupation, income, tolerance of ambiguity, alienation, social rootlessness, self-concept, or relative deprivation. It is proposed that symbolic racism rests upon antiblack racial socialization and conservative political and value socialization, and some speculations are offered to account for why symbolic racism has emerged at a time when traditional measures of racism indicate a decline in antiblack prejudice.
This chapter reviews and critiques recent work on prejudice, discrimination, and racism, with an emphasis on evidence of continuing discrimination in the United States and efforts to understand its basis in prejudice. Three lines of research are the primary subject of the review: recent work on the measurement of discrimination, especially audit methods; theories of new prejudice and new racism following the Civil Rights movement; and research on implicit prejudicial attitudes. The most sophisticated new work on prejudice and discrimination is characterized by a multidimensional understanding of prejudice and/or the use of experimental methods. This review argues that research on implicit prejudice, largely developed by psychologists, provides an important new understanding of the basis of discrimination and should be incorporated in sociological accounts.
White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioeconomic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans.
Although research suggests that manifestations of blatant racism are on the decline, findings additionally demonstrate that subtle racism remains prevalent when contexts provide sufficient ambiguity for the expressions to go unnoticed. Notably, studies examining these outcomes have typically been confined to intergroup contexts, despite the fact that mediated contact may yield parallel responses. The present investigation examines this relationship by applying aversive racism and social identity theory assumptions to assess the influence of exposure to television depictions of Latinos, on White viewers' judgments. Results cautiously reveal that racial identification and media ambiguity affect both viewers' evaluations of target racial/ethnic out-group members as well as in-group esteem.