My election prediction is that if President Obama wins, writers and media will call him America's first black two-term President. If he loses, he will be America's first multiracial one-term President. What do YOU think?
Racial Views: Poll Shows Majority Harbor Prejudice Against Blacks
WASHINGTON — 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
people's 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.
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
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. But 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 AP 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.
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."
Source:
AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
