Understanding Change in Public Opinion among Black Americans

• In Event: Attitudes Toward Social Groups

Abstract

Improving race relations in the U.S. requires understanding the drivers of attitude change in both White and Black Americans. Unfortunately the vast majority of research to-date has focused on the views of Whites alone. Moreover, what little research has been conducted on the views of Blacks relies almost exclusively on cross-sectional surveys, and thus cannot speak to how individual attitudes change over time. This study aims to further understanding of changes in public opinion among Blacks through an examination of Black racial attitudes during and after one of the most salient race-related events of modern times: the 2008 campaign and election of Barack Obama. The data come from four waves of a nationally representative probability panel that tracked Blacks’ racial attitudes before and after Obama’s campaign, as well as two years later in fall 2010.

The key finding that motivates this study is a significant decline in levels of Black racial prejudice – that is, the extent to which Blacks rated their own Black “in-group” more positively than the White “out-group” on scales ranging from hardworking to lazy, trustworthy to untrustworthy, and intelligent to unintelligent – during and immediately after the 2008 campaign. What explains these changes in Black racial attitudes? We theorize that for many Blacks media exposure to the campaign showed a surprising number of White individuals supporting Obama. These positive White “exemplars” countered Blacks’ preexisting perceptions of White racism, thus improving attitudes toward Whites. We test this theory using fixed effects analyses.

First, decomposing the prejudice measure into its component parts reveals that the overall decline in Black racial prejudice was due primarily to a positive shift in Blacks’ attitudes toward Whites, rather than a negative shift in attitudes toward Blacks. In fact, daily tracking shows that Black pride increased around key campaign events – Obama’s nomination, his election victory, and his inauguration – but these changes were temporary. Ultimately, levels of Black pride were about the same in late January 2009 and mid-July 2008, when measurement began. By contrast, Blacks’ attitudes toward Whites became and remained more positive, consistent with exposure to positive White exemplars.

Second, we capitalized on items tapping the extent to which Blacks perceive Whites as holding negative racial stereotypes – that is, “metastereotypes.” We created a four-item scale comprised of questions that asked Blacks if they think most Whites perceive Blacks as lazy, less intelligent than Whites, lacking self-discipline, and as more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Consistent with the idea that Blacks increasingly viewed Whites as less racially prejudiced, average levels of Black metastereotypes declined during the 2008 campaign.

Blacks’ views of Whites improved during the 2008 campaign, but can these changes be pinned on media exposure to Whites supporting Obama? Using novel measures of political television exposure and fixed effects models of within-person change, we find that Blacks who increased the most in their overall political television exposure showed modest improvements in their attitudes toward Whites. More importantly for our theory, Blacks who increased the most in their exposure to liberal programs that would be most likely to showcase White supporters of Obama showed the biggest declines in racial prejudice and metastereotypes, and consequent improvements in attitudes toward Whites. By contrast, exposure to conservative and neutral programs had no beneficial effect; if anything, viewing these programs was associated with somewhat higher levels of Black prejudice.

Of course, an important question is whether the overall positive changes in Black racial attitudes that we uncovered were sustained or temporary. The underlying psychological process of exemplification suggests a temporary accessibility effect, driven by short-term exposure to salient group exemplars. If the balance of positive and negative White exemplars to which Blacks were exposed changed after Obama’s inauguration, then the theory would predict that Black racial attitudes should change as well. We investigate this question using a fourth wave of panel data that recontacted a representative subsample of Blacks in fall 2010.

Authors

• Seth K. Goldman, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Diana C. Mutz, University of Pennsylvania