Appendix 1

Are Americans Racist?

Racism isn’t that big a deal anymore. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It’s rapidly becoming an ugly memory.

—TONY SNOW
(soon to be press secretary to President George W. Bush), October 2002

I am constantly surprised by how much I hear racism talked about and how little I actually see it.

—DINESH D’SOUZA,
What’s So Great About America?

Americans born since 1960 may have difficulty comprehending that in the forty years prior to 1930, lynchings of Black Americans averaged between fifty and a hundred per year.1 They may know that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many states had laws permitting or requiring segregation of Blacks from Whites in public places such as schools, buses, hotels, and restaurants. But that world may seem unimaginably remote. The quotes from Snow and D’Souza reflect dramatic changes that have occurred in the last fifty years, and with an African American president now in office in the United States, their statements might seem to be appropriate final words on the subject of American racism.

But many scientists regard Snow’s and D’Souza’s statements as capturing only a surface appearance. This appendix looks at nearly a century of scientific studies of racial attitudes. That history will provide a basis for understanding why many scientists now believe that, rather than disappearing, Americans’ race prejudices have merely metamorphosed into harder-to-see forms. While milder in appearance than what came before, these evolved forms of prejudice may remain potent as sources of race discrimination.

Widespread Overt Racism Before 1950

The earliest scientific studies of discrimination in the United States documented prejudices against just about every ethnic and racial group in the country. Sociologist Emory Bogardus was the first to study prejudicial attitudes scientifically. In the early 1920s he asked Americans to say how close they were willing to be to members of forty “races”—almost all of which were groups that present-day Americans refer to as “nationalities” or “ethnicities” rather than as “races.” The groups named in Figure 1—Mexicans, Greeks, and Negroes—were just three of the forty groups that Bogardus asked about in the first study using his newly created Social Distance Scale. Considerably more than half of Bogardus’s 1,725 respondents indicated that they did not welcome the prospect of even the most distant form of contact with Mexicans, Greeks, or Negroes. They preferred that members of those groups not even visit the United States.

A few years later, psychologist Louis L. Thurstone created a “nationality preferences” measure, which he tested on 239 White male undergraduate students at the University of Chicago. Figure 2 shows one version of the question that was put to Thurstone’s subjects. However, instead of being asked to indicate preferences among just the four pairs of nationalities shown in Figure 2, Thurstone’s subjects were asked to indicate this type of preference for all 210 possible pairs of the twenty-one nationalities that he studied. Using mathematical analysis of each subject’s 210 judgments, Thurstone was able to measure attitudes toward each of the twenty-one groups.

Because twenty of the forty “races” that Bogardus studied were also among Thurstone’s twenty-one “nationalities,” it was straightforward to construct a picture (Figure 3) that shows how closely the two methods agreed in what they revealed about racial attitudes.

In the upper right of Figure 3 is American. Most of Bogardus’s respondents were ready to welcome Americans to “marry into my family,” the closest relationship that he asked about. In close alignment with this finding, almost all of Thurstone’s respondents judged that they preferred Americans over any of the other nineteen groups.

At the lower left of Figure 3 is Turkish. To get as low a score as Turks received, most of Thurstone’s student subjects must have said that they preferred every other group to Turks. Bogardus’s subjects were similarly extreme—most of them wanted Turks to be excluded from the United States. For Thurstone’s subjects, Negro received an even lower preference score than Turkish, while on Bogardus’s measure there were four groups—Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and Hindu—that were more readily nominated for exclusion from the United States than were Negroes. Perhaps this difference indicated only that Bogardus’s subjects knew that “Negroes” were already well established in the United States, so keeping them out would require the extreme measure of deporting them rather than just denying them entry.

The degree to which Bogardus’s and Thurstone’s findings converged can be seen in the nearly straight line running from the points at lower left to those at upper right in Figure 3. The two researchers’ different procedures can therefore be seen as having tapped essentially the same psychological phenomenon—a mental attribute that social psychologists of the 1930s were just beginning to refer to as “attitudes” toward the various groups—and the two researchers arrived at similar assessments of those attitudes.

One irrefutable conclusion to be drawn from this simple graph is that attitudes toward the less-liked groups were extreme in their negativity. For example, a majority of Bogardus’s respondents did not welcome members of more than half of the twenty groups as either coworkers or as neighbors.

The negativity of pre-1950 Americans’ race attitudes became even more apparent after 1929 when E. D. Hinckley introduced another measure, his Attitude Toward the Negro scale, which asked subjects to agree or disagree with thirty-two statements about African Americans. Six of those statements appear in Figure 4.

Consider Statement 1: “The educated Negro is less of a burden on the courts and is less likely to become a dependent or a defective than the educated White man.” Most present-day Americans will consider the language of this statement objectionable enough that it would be difficult for them to express either agreement or disagreement. Hinckley’s subjects, however, had no reluctance about responding. Their frequent endorsement of Statement 1 was interpreted as a sign of a favorable attitude toward Black Americans.

Now consider statement 6: “The feeble-mindedness of the Negro limits him to a social level just a little above that of the higher animals.” This statement (like quite a few others from Hinckley’s study that are not shown here) may be so offensive to present-day Americans that their response to any survey that included it might be either to tear up the survey form or to request that the researcher who devised it be fired.

The results of the Bogardus, Thurstone, and Hinckley studies made it clear that Americans of the first several decades of the twentieth century were very ready to openly express strong racial prejudice. Indeed, in the cultural climate of early twentieth-century America, it may have been as politically incorrect to express tolerance as it is to express prejudice in early twenty-first-century America.2

Evolution of Racial Attitudes, 1950–2000

As the science of survey research developed in the second half of the twentieth century, researchers continued to refine the question-asking techniques of the preceding decades to document Americans’ racial attitudes. They focused increasingly on Black-White relations, which became the most intensely studied form of prejudice—a status that it retains to the present day. To enable tracking of changes in racial and other attitudes over time, researchers administered surveys in which the same questions were repeated every few years. Q1 and Q2 below are examples of questions that were repeatedly used in surveys over four decades between 1960 and 2000. The changes in response over those decades tell a story similar to what many other studies in the late 20th century showed.

Q1. Do you think White students and Black students should go to the same schools or to separate schools?

Q2. Do you think that White people have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods if they want, and Blacks should respect that right?

Figure 5 shows four decades of results for Americans’ answers to Q1 and Q2. In the early 1960s only about 60 percent of Americans favored racially integrated schools. By 1995 that support had grown to nearly 100 percent—after which the question was removed from regular administration because it was no longer informative. Americans’ endorsement of residential integration of housing showed a similarly sharp rise over time, increasing from less than 40 percent in the early 1960s to more than 80 percent in the 1990s.

Q3 and Q4, just below, are two other questions that were regularly repeated in surveys of Americans’ race attitudes. These questions asked about the appropriateness of government assistance to Black Americans.

Q3. Do you think that the government in Washington should make every possible effort to improve the social and economic position of Blacks and other minority groups?

Q4. Do you think that Blacks have been discriminated against for so long that the government has a special obligation to help improve their living standards?

One might expect these two questions to provide evidence of the same increasingly favorable attitudes toward Black Americans that were revealed by the time trends for Q1 and Q2 in Figure 5.

But, as Figure 6 shows, across three decades the time trends for Q3 and Q4 were flat. The top line shows gradually increasing opposition to government assistance to African Americans. The lower line shows that majority opposition to assistance to African Americans remained stable over the decades during which the question was asked.3

What does it mean that between 1960 and 2000 Americans expressed consistent opposition to government assistance to minorities at the same time that they were expressing steadily increasing support for racial integration? Scientists have disagreed in interpreting these juxtaposed trends. One camp, guided mainly by the responses to questions such as Q1 and Q2, believes that Americans’ racial biases have largely disappeared. The other camp, persuaded more by responses to questions such as Q3 and Q4, concludes that Americans’ racial biases persist, but in altered form.

The disappearing-bias camp understands Americans’ sustained opposition to assistance for minorities as the expression not of racist attitudes but of a belief that American Blacks need no assistance because America now offers equal opportunity for all. According to this position, which has been called the principled conservative view, America now provides a level playing field that affords equal privileges and opportunities to Black and White Americans. With this level playing field in place, there is no justification for government intervention to benefit those who are less well off.4

A majority of social scientists opposes the principled conservative view, holding that wide opposition to government assistance to minorities (as in responses to Q3 and Q4) should be understood as an expression of racial bias. They interpret the evidence of decreasing bias (responses to Q1 and Q2) by saying that racial bias in America still exists but has metamorphosed into a covert, less detectable form. This covert bias camp believes that many of the Americans who express egalitarian views in public continue to quietly harbor, in private, racial biases that remain potent sources of discrimination.

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, the debate between these two camps has persisted unresolved for about thirty years.5 A recent study that was designed to settle this long-standing disagreement asked 1,077 White Americans to respond to a survey including two questions about government assistance. Each survey respondent answered both questions. Half of them got this question first, which asked about assistance to women:

Some people say that because of past discrimination, women should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion of women is wrong because it discriminates against men. What about your opinion—are you for or against preferential hiring and promotion of women?

The other half of the respondents got the following question first. It was the same as the question above, with the exception of four words (“women” changed three times to “Blacks”; “men” changed once to “Whites”):

Some people say that because of past discrimination, Blacks should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion of Blacks is wrong because it discriminates against Whites. What about your opinion—are you for or against preferential hiring and promotion of Blacks?

The study’s results showed that White respondents were less opposed to preferential hiring when it benefited women than when it benefited Blacks. From this finding the authors concluded in favor of the covert bias view: “The finding that people are more opposed to affirmative action programs for Blacks versus women is one of the most compelling indicators that race remains a factor driving opposition to affirmative action.”

Although this interpretation has some justification, it is not the only possible interpretation. Many of the survey’s respondents opposed government assistance for both women and Blacks, which appears consistent with the principled conservative position. Also, because the question about assistance to Blacks did not mention the gender of potential Black beneficiaries of hiring preference, the survey’s respondents may have assumed that this question was asking mainly about Black men. If so, part of their observed opposition to preferential hiring could have been due to opposition to preferential hiring for men of any race.

The bottom line is that after considering the results of this interesting study, we have to conclude that both interpretations of survey respondents’ unchanging answers (across three decades) to questions about government assistance to Blacks—the covert bias view and the principled conservative view—seem viable. And because these two interpretations do not actually contradict or exclude each other, it may be most reasonable to believe that each is partly correct. In other words, those who oppose government assistance plausibly include some who are racially biased, some who are principled conservatives, and some who are both.

“Unobtrusive” Research Methods

Amid developing concern about the difficulties of drawing conclusions from studies based on question-asking methods, researchers in the 1970s began to develop alternative methods that had roots in two famous experiments from the 1930s.

In 1934, Richard LaPiere reported the results of an ingenious study for which his main piece of research equipment was an automobile. Between 1930 and 1932, accompanied by a Chinese couple, LaPiere toured the southwestern United States, where the trio stopped to request accommodations at 251 hotels, motels, campgrounds, and restaurants. They received the accommodations they sought in 250 of their 251 attempts, being denied only once.

Approximately six months after each visit, LaPiere sent a letter to proprietors of each of the 251 establishments, asking for a response to this question: “Will you accept members of the Chinese race as guests in your establishment?” Surprisingly, more than 90 percent of the answers he received stated that they would not. This was puzzling. Why were answers to the mailed inquiry so consistently negative, while face-to-face responses to the three travelers were so uniformly positive?

Any interpretation of LaPiere’s study is complicated by a few details of his methods. For one, the person who answered each establishment’s follow-up letter was not always the same person from whom the traveling trio had received accommodations. Even more important, LaPiere’s Chinese traveling companions were young, polite, and middle-class, none of which was necessarily assumed by the person who answered the mailed inquiry. These complications notwithstanding, the unarguably important scientific takeaway from LaPiere’s study was the value of using behavior observation in addition to using question-asking methods.

Mamie and Kenneth Clark, two African American psychologists who were interested in the way Black children internalized racism, reported a stunning series of experiments that came to be known as the “doll studies.” These started with work done by Mamie (Phipps) Clark while she was a graduate student at Howard University in the late 1930s. The Clarks’ experiments showed that when young Black children ages three to seven were offered a choice between playing with a Black doll or a White doll, two-thirds of them chose the White doll. These studies later became famous to law scholars because of their role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case—the decision that declared racial segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court drew on the Clarks’ findings in concluding, in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, that race segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority … that may affect the children’s hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”6

What the studies by LaPiere and the Clarks had in common was that neither the proprietors visited by LaPiere’s peripatetic trio nor the small children who made doll choices in the Clarks’ studies had any awareness that their actions in offering accommodations or choosing among dolls were being recorded, let alone being used to infer racial attitudes. These were the first unobtrusive-method studies. But that name for the method did not appear until the late 1960s. And it was not until the 1970s that two forces prompted researchers studying discrimination to conclude that unobtrusive methods were attractive. One force was the expansion of scientific interest in prejudice, propelled by the tense and sometimes violently confrontational race relations of the 1960s. The other was a growing discovery of problems with question-asking methods. Social psychologists were becoming increasingly aware of the tendency of research subjects to fall prey to impression management—the desire to present themselves in ways that would be looked upon favorably by others (see Chapter 2).

The first researchers to develop new unobtrusive methods for studying racial bias in the 1970s wanted to see whether Whites would help Blacks with the same frequency with which they would help other Whites. Further, they wanted to observe this when research participants had no inkling that anyone was observing whether or not they would help. Social psychologists Samuel Gaertner and Leonard Bickman invented a “wrong number” technique to see how a sampling of residents of Brooklyn, New York, would respond to calls from Blacks and Whites seeking help. The help seekers trained by Gaertner and Bickman called 1,109 Brooklyn residents, 569 White and 540 Black. (Because of the sharp racial segregation of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods circa 1970, the researchers knew with near certainty whether each call would be received by a White or a Black resident. The callers themselves were also easily identified by race on the basis of racially characteristic speech accents.)

All calls began with the caller saying, “Hello … Ralph’s Garage? This is George Williams.… Listen, I’m stuck out here on the parkway … and I’m wondering if you’d be able to come out here and take a look at my car.” After being informed that he had not reached Ralph’s Garage and after apologizing for his mistake, the caller (indicating some distress with his predicament) said that he had used his last coin in a pay phone, immediately following which he made the critical request: “Do you think you could do me the favor of calling the garage and letting them know where I am …? I’ll give you the number.… They know me over there.”

The result: White call recipients discriminated by race—they were less likely to help Black callers (53 percent) than White callers (65 percent). For any single call recipient who did not help a Black caller, that nonhelping could have been race discrimination, but it could also have been caused by other factors—such as mishearing the phone number for Ralph’s Garage, failing to make an accurate note of the number, or forgetting it. Problems caused by this necessary uncertainty were overcome by assigning all call recipients at random to receive the call from either a Black or White caller. This use of randomization is an essential ingredient of experimental methods, and it is what makes experimental findings convincing. It helped also that three later repetitions of Gaertner and Bickman’s experiment reproduced their findings, each confirming that the caller’s race was critical. In each of these follow-ups, Black callers received significantly less help than White callers.

Another innovative study that used unobtrusive measures began with researchers preparing stamped, addressed, and (importantly) unsealed envelopes, each containing a completed application to graduate school. These envelopes were placed in airport telephone booths, where they would inevitably be discovered by travelers. Only data from White travelers were considered. When 604 of these White travelers found and (naturally) looked at the envelopes’ contents, they could not avoid seeing a photograph that showed the applicant’s White or Black face. A note in the envelope, which asked “Dad” to mail the envelope, made it appear that the applicant’s father had lost the letter before mailing it. Again, race was critical in determining helping. The letter was more likely to be mailed when the applicant’s photograph was White (45 percent) than when it was Black (37 percent). As an interesting additional finding, the researchers found that more attractive photos (of both races) led to more help.

Dozens of other experiments in the 1970s tested the amount of help that Black and White help seekers would receive from White potential helpers who did not know that they were being observed. The sought help consisted mostly of minor favors, such as picking up a box of dropped pencils, providing change for a quarter, or giving money to a Salvation Army donation stand attendant during the Christmas season. In a few experiments the help was more substantial, such as helping a Black or White person who had fallen in a subway car or who was standing alone on the roadside next to a disabled car.

When in 1980 social psychologists Faye Crosby, Stephanie Bromley, and Leonard Saxe reviewed a large collection of these unobtrusive-measure studies, they concluded that the findings of race discrimination in these studies disagreed with what was expected based on the results of studies that had used question-asking methods to assess race prejudice: “Discriminatory behavior is more prevalent in the … unobtrusive studies than we might expect on the basis of survey data.” Crosby and her colleagues also found that race bias was more evident in “remote” interactions, when the help giver and recipient were not face-to-face. That conclusion very nicely made contact with LaPiere’s observation forty years earlier that discrimination against travelers was expressed only in the remote situation of answering a letter that asked whether Chinese travelers would be welcomed.

The lost-letter and other unobtrusive-measure studies of the 1970s had the character of Candid Camera–type snapshots of behavior in natural settings, and they definitely strengthened scientific belief that racial bias remained a potent force, albeit in a covert form that appeared very different from the open racism expressed in the early twentieth century. After 1980, this type of research waned as researchers became increasingly reluctant to observe people who were unaware of being observed. Nevertheless, unobtrusive-measure studies still appear occasionally and they continue to reveal race discrimination in the form of reduced helping.7

Answering the Question

The question we have in mind is the one in the title of this appendix: Are Americans racist? The strongest case that America is no longer racist is made by results of surveys that use questions such as Q1 and Q2, shown in Figure 5. These questions and others that ask about attitudes toward segregation have shown changes spanning four decades, by the end of which Americans were expressing very little support for racial segregation. Another observation in support of the conclusion that American society is not presently racist is the extent to which egalitarian principles have been adopted in American laws and institutions. In addition to the existence of federal legislation outlawing all forms of racial discrimination in public life, it is now effectively a requirement for any large organization—business, government agency, school, hospital, or charitable institution—to have a publicly stated policy that describes its efforts to be egalitarian both in the treatment of employees and in the provision of services to clients.

Egalitarian principles also now appear routinely in informal public discourse. The years since passage of America’s major civil rights laws in the 1960s have seen the introduction of strong social pressures—often disparagingly labeled “political correctness”—that effectively prohibit spoken or written expressions of prejudices or stereotypes. The present-day power of political correctness is suggested by a list, from just very recent years, of famous people who made remarks that were taken to indicate their racial or ethnic bigotry, setting in motion barrages of negative publicity that no doubt were damaging in themselves but also often resulted in the people being fired from prominent positions: radio host Don Imus (April 2007), Nobel Prize–winning biologist James Watson (October 2007), actor Mel Gibson (July 2010), radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger (“Dr. Laura,” August 2010), TV news anchor Rick Sanchez (October 2010), and radio news analyst Juan Williams (October 2010).

Two incidents deserve mention outside this list of prominent people embarrassed by racially or ethnically insensitive or inflammatory speech. After a November 2006 anti-Black tirade in response to audience hecklers during his nightclub comedy routine, Michael Richards (portrayer of Cosmo Kramer on the long-running television comedy series Seinfeld) used a television appearance several days later to make a very public and self-critical apology. In July 2010, a high official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod, was fired for remarks that were almost immediately shown to have been misleadingly edited by political opponents to appear racist. A few days later, Sherrod received very public apologies from those who fired her. Although she was offered her job back, she did not return to it.

These unambiguous examples of America’s rejection of racism notwithstanding, compelling bodies of research provide evidence of remaining prejudice and discrimination (detailed further in Appendix 2). Even the election of Barack Obama, which many interpreted as proof that America had at last become “postracial,” contained its own clear indications that potent racial influences persist in American politics. If Obama had been obliged to rely only on the White American electorate, he would have lost in a landslide—exit polls revealed that Obama lost the White vote by 12 percent. That 12 percent deficit was noticeably larger than the 8 percent deficit in Obama’s White vote predicted by pre-election polls. The surprisingly large 4-percentage-point discrepancy between forecasts and the actual vote was itself an indication that racial factors were involved in the way people described their voting intentions to pollsters.8

In conclusion, although racially discriminatory attitudes persist in American society, it is a mistake to characterize modern America as racist—at least not in the way that the label of “racism” has long been understood. Most Americans—a large majority—advocate racial equality. Although some Americans who oppose government assistance to African Americans and other minorities likely do so as an expression of either implicit or explicit racial bias, others base this policy stance on egalitarian principles, believing—in line with the two quotes that opened this appendix—that America has already achieved racial equality.

At the same time, it is all too clear that any portrait of America as a postracial society provides, at best, a poor likeness. The unobtrusive-measure studies clearly indicate otherwise, and many social scientists have interpreted Americans’ opposition to assistance for minorities—as shown in Figure 6—as indicating the persistence of racial bias in a covert form that is quite different from the racism that was so openly professed in the early twentieth century.

We view America’s persisting racial bias as a strong undercurrent, composed of two types of hidden biases. What may be the lesser type consists of biases that are recognized and espoused by their possessors but deliberately suppressed from public expression, plausibly in response to the pressures of political correctness and impression management. In our view, the stronger portion of the hidden undercurrent of biases consists of biases that remain outwardly unexpressed for the simple reason that their possessors are unaware of possessing them. These are biases in the form of associative knowledge that can be measured by the IAT, as described in Chapter 3. Collectively, these two types of hidden bias plausibly contribute more to discrimination in America than do the overt biases of an ever-decreasing minority of Americans—a minority that remains content to openly express racial and ethnic dislikes.