What Does it Mean to be Racist?

• In Event: Interrogating Racism

Abstract

Since Allport’s (1954) classic work, much effort across the social sciences has gone into investigating the psychology of racism. Typically, these works attempt to define racism, measure that conceptualization, and measure its effects on opinions and behavior. While this approach has yielded many breakthroughs in our understanding of racism and its effect, we argue that it also misses an important part of the story: There is no public consensus on what does and does not constitute racism. We contend that this variation in people’s conceptualizations of racism is among the most critical issues to examine if we hope to make progress on racism in contemporary politics.

We explore people’s conceptualizations of racism through a series of surveys and experiments. In each of these studies, we asked survey participants to read a series of scenarios designed to represent different scholarly conceptualizations of racism. After reading each scenario, participants were asked whether they believed it constituted an instance of racism.

Our results show substantial variation in what people consider to be racist, and party identification is the most powerful predictor of this variation even after controlling for other demographics. Our ongoing experimental tests suggest that these party identification effects are at least partly attributable to cueing effects, whereby partisans’ beliefs about what constitutes racism are shaped by cues from party elites. Additional experimental results suggest that some of these beliefs can be altered by small variations in question wording, such as changing referring to “racial injustice” rather than “racism.”

Authors

• Eric Groenendyk, University of Memphis

• Antoine J. Banks, University of Maryland