Lynn Vavreck writes:
I just heard the Carter interview about Obama and racism. Simon Jackman and I have a bit of evidence on this from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. These are data from white, registered voters nationwide about stereotypes of different groups. You can see, roughly a third of the people think blacks are inferior to whites on lazy v. hardworking and similarly on intelligent/unintelligent:
[click for larger version of the table]
This, of course, doesn’t answer the question about whether Carter is right—but, it does provide some systematic evidence for his claim that many Americans don’t think African Americans are “qualified” (his words) to lead this country.
Some people would take these data as evidence of racism, but I have a more positive spin. The table gives the average rating for whites, and for southern whites, and from these you can back out the implied rating for non-southern whites. And we’re lookin good. We’re as intelligent as Asians and almost as hardworking! In the words of a famous non-hardworking, non-southern white: Woo-hoo!
Of course I don’t buy this—no way are non-southern whites as hard-working and intelligent as Asian Americans—I mean, c’mon. But it’s good to know that white people, at least, still think this. Now I want to see Lynn and Simon break down their respondents by where they live. Do southern whites themselves think they are lazier and dumber than non-southern whites??
P.S. The question stem reads:
Now, some questions about different groups in our society. Rate each group on the following scale, where “1” means you think almost all of the people in that group are “lazy”; and “7” means that you think almost everyone in the group is “hardworking.”
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I moved to the South in 2005, and I am half-White, half-Latina. So do I average out Whites, Southern Whites, and Latinos to get my ranking?
(Just kidding–my methodology skills are rusty, but I remember the ecological fallacy.)
Take a look at that table more carefully . . . you get a special benefit for being female!
These studies never seem to consider where blacks, Asians and Latinos place people on these scales….only whites.
How about some cross-racial comparisons?
We wouldn’t want cross-racial comparisons because political science journals and reviewers would never consider evidence showing that other groups show similar biases and prejudices.
Those social scientific comparisons need to be ignored for the sake of ideology.
Milliard, I don’t think your comment is accurate. See “Metastereotypes: Blacks’ Perceptions of Whites’ Stereotypes of Blacks” by Sigelman and Tuch in Public Opinion Quarterly (1997).
If you go to google scholar, you’ll see 69 citations of this article. I did not read all of them-not even close-but there seems to be some work at least related. Additionally, I do know that one the works citing the “meta” article did examine the degree to which white and black high school seniors endorsed interracial ties over a period of 20 years. The reviewers and the editors liked this comparison at least a little bit. Certainly they did not quash it.
Anyway, “never” seems like not only a strong word but the wrong one.
We have very good reason to suspect that blacks not only stereotype others, but also themselves. We need studies of black prejudice, not studies of what blacks think that whites think about them, as in the study identified above.
Further, there is also good reason for believing that there are very high rates of prejudice among Asian Americans — as some of the research emerging from the LA riots obliquely suggested.
Yet when it comes to soc science research, there is next to nothing on these kinds of comparisons that would put whites and the subject matter of stereotyping and prejudice in appropriate context.
The studies are all about white prejudice.
Why is that? As if whites are the only ones that harbor prejudice or engage in stereotyping.
It’s because of ideology (and also an overreliance on surveys that undersample minority groups) — but mostly ideology that skews what is studied and what can get into print.
Millard F.:
I wouldn’t say it’s “ideology” that leads some research to focus on out-group stereotypes, and especially stereotypes of ethnic and other minorities. These particular stereotypes have played a significant role in centuries of discrimination, racism, and even genocide. So it’s quite understandable that scholars would pay attention to them. The historical significance of these stereotypes demands it.
Should we study self-stereotyping? Should we study how ethnic minorities stereotype whites and other ethnic minorities? Of course. No one disagrees with you.
But it’s not fair to say that studies are “all about white prejudice.”
See this:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/userhome/psych/chardin/Sinclair_Hardin_Lowery_2006.pdf
And this:
http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/6/781
And this:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1389355
I’m sure these pieces contains references to other research in a similar vein.
Maybe the sum total of this literature is not enough to satisfy you. But to pretend that such a literature doesn’t exist is unfair to scholars who have worked on these questions.
And not ONE of these by a political scientist or in a political science journal. This lit is conspicuously thin. And yet without it, it appears that whites are far more unique than they actually are.
This is not unrelated to recent studies of publication bias of a different kind that has led us to believe our results are more remarkable and robust than they are.
Millard F.:
I am a political scientist. I have co-authored (with other political scientists) two books directly focused on African Americans’ racial attitudes, including quite a bit of analysis of their attitudes toward whites and other racial/ethnic groups. Also some article-length treatments of similar topics, including an analysis of anti-semitism among blacks.
Having said that, I agree with your broader point that we know MUCH more about whites’ racial attitudes than about blacks’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this. John notes one important reason in the first paragraph of his comment above. Another obvious one is that in survey-based research, attempts to analyze blacks’ attitudes quickly run afoul of a severe small-n problem unless one has the good fortune to be working with a specially-commissioned survey of blacks or one with a large black oversample. (The pertinent research that IS available does indicate that negative stereotypes of blacks are pretty widespread among blacks, consistent with your point. But the fact that such studies exist runs against the thrust of your point.) And yes, political scientists appear, according to surveys, to fall on the liberal side of the liberal-conservative divide, and it would not come as a shock to learn that their choices of issues to study are influenced by their political predispositions. (Ditto for conservatives.) But let’s resist the tendency to overstate the case by attributing the lack of research solely to ideology — it’s more multi-faceted than that.
Okay, Lee S., so it’s not about ideology but about the lousy data political scientists work with (leaving aside the whole issue that survey data are a terrible resource for studying racial attitudes), coupled with their lack of imagination.
The consequences are the same, regardless of the source of this disciplinary blind-spot. White people look unique in holding prejudices and engaging in negative stereotyping. Racism therefore looks like a white problem. White socialization looks particularly defective. When it is highly likely that all people make judgments of others based on impoverished information.
In fact, with a more complete picture of the subject, we might find that strong in-group preference is common across all groups. Indeed, it is so strong that it might even be hard-wired, and less the product of socialization than we think.
That changes all sorts of conclusions we might otherwise draw from white-only studies like that of Jackman and Vavreck, and the hundreds of others like it that have deluged political science journals.
This form of publication bias leads to, at best, a misunderstanding of the subject matter; and at worst, a whole series of faulty inferences and normative judgments.
Well, speaking of hard wired, just saw this story in Newsweek, in fact the cover story:
Is your baby racist?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989
So it may not be clueless political scientists, but *someone* is looking into a genetic link.
Millard:
I agree –as John did above — that we need a lot more research of various sorts on the racial attitudes of African Americans and other minority group members, because they’re worthy topics in and of themselves and because the more groups we study, the more context we have for understanding the attitudes of any particular group.
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