Racial attitudes have not
improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black
president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans
now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or
not.
Those views could cost
President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found,
though the effects are mitigated by some Americans' more favorable views of
blacks.
Racial prejudice has
increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using
questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through
an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking
questions about that topic directly.
In all,
51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey.
When measured by an
implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black
sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential
election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes
fell.
"As much as we'd
hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of
anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years
ago," said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with
AP to develop the survey.
Anti-Hispanic
feelings
Most
Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That
figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no
past data for comparison.
The AP surveys were
conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan
and NORC at the University of Chicago.
Experts on race said they
were not surprised by the findings.
"We have this false
idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big
step. That is not the way history has worked," said Jelani Cobb, professor
of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the
University of Connecticut. "When we've seen progress, we've also seen
backlash."
Obama himself has tread
cautiously on the subject of race, but many African-Americans have talked
openly about perceived antagonism toward them since Obama took office. As
evidence, they point to events involving police brutality or cite bumper
stickers, cartoons and protest posters that mock the president as a lion or a
monkey, or lynch him in effigy.
"Part of it is
growing polarization within American society," said Fredrick Harris,
director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia
University. "The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a
national discussion about race. There's been total silence around issues of
race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an
elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take
more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings."
Overall, the survey found
that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off
his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican
challenger Mitt Romney. However, Obama also stands to benefit from a 3
percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall,
that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black
attitudes.
The poll finds that
racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans.
Although Republicans were
more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions
measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32
percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the
two parties.
That test showed a
majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent
of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political
independents (49 percent).
Obama faced a similar
situation in 2008, the survey then found.
The Associated Press
developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and
repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012.
The explicit racism
measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of
statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how
well respondents thought certain words, such as "friendly,"
"hardworking," "violent" and "lazy," described
blacks, whites and Hispanics.
The same respondents were
also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a
photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral
image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their
feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people
transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing
researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not
acknowledge them.
Results from those
questions were analyzed with poll takers' ages, partisan beliefs, views on
Obama and Romney and other factors, which allowed researchers to predict the
likelihood that people would vote for either Obama or Romney. Those models were
then used to estimate the net impact of each factor on the candidates' support.
All the surveys were
conducted online. Other research has shown that poll takers are more likely to
share unpopular attitudes when they are filling out a survey using a computer
rather than speaking with an interviewer. Respondents were randomly selected
from a nationally representative panel maintained by GfK Custom Research.
Overall results from each
survey have a margin of sampling error of approximately plus or minus 4
percentage points. The most recent poll, measuring anti-black views, was
conducted Aug. 30 to Sept. 11.
'Hard-wired'
with 'racial resentment'
Andra Gillespie, an Emory
University political scientist who studies race-neutrality among black
politicians, contrasted the situation to that faced by the first black mayors
elected in major U.S. cities, the closest parallel to Obama's first-black
situation.
Those mayors, she said,
typically won about 20 percent of the white vote in their first races, but when
seeking reelection they enjoyed greater white support presumably because
"the whites who stayed in the cities ... became more comfortable with a
black executive."
"President Obama's
election clearly didn't change those who appear to be sort of hard-wired folks
with racial resentment," she said.
Negative racial attitudes
can manifest in policy, noted Alan Jenkins, an assistant solicitor general
during the Clinton administration and now executive director of the Opportunity
Agenda think tank.
"That has very real
circumstances in the way people are treated by police, the way kids are treated
by teachers, the way home seekers are treated by landlords and real estate
agents," Jenkins said.
Hakeem Jeffries, a New
York state assemblyman and candidate for a congressional seat being vacated by
a fellow black Democrat, called it troubling that more progress on racial
attitudes had not been made. Jeffries has fought a New York City police program
of "stop and frisk" that has affected mostly blacks and Latinos but
which supporters contend is not racially focused.
"I do remain
cautiously optimistic that the future of America bends toward the side of
increased racial tolerance," Jeffries said. "We've come a long way,
but clearly these results demonstrate there's a long way to go."
Zeph 2:1- Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together,
O nation not desired;
Isa 11:12-
And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts
of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of
the earth.
Isa 11:13-
The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be
cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim.
Jer 3:18- In
those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel, and they
shall come together out of the land of the north to the land that I have given
for an inheritance unto your fathers.
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