Do Whites Admit to Discrimination of Blacks but not White Privilege?

• In Event: Black Lives, Black Deaths, and Black Protest: Political Scientists Respond (Anew) to a Persistent Challenge: Black Lives Matter and Political Behavior: Public Opinion and Political Participation

Abstract

In political science we use a four-item racial resentment scale to measure racism. The current measure of individual negative attitudes towards blacks was developed in response to the widely recognized decline in openly hostile “traditional” racism. It is sometimes called “symbolic” or “modern” racism and captures a more veiled form of individual-level resentment toward black Americans than the explicit racism of the Jim Crow era. Since the development of this scale by Kinder and Sears in the 70’s, the scale has been used extensively in public opinion scholarship.For the past 10 years or so, however, it has become widely recognized that today’s racism is not so much a problem of individuals or their negative attitudes towards blacks. As critical race scholars argue, the problem of racism in the US is not a problem of individual people, but of institutions. Institutions like public schools and the criminal justice system for example disproportionately disadvantaging people of color. Public policy, on the other hand, systematically advantages white people (GI Bill, New and Fair Deal Legislation, Redlining, etc). In other words, the real reason why racial disparities remain is not because of a few racists, but because of white Americans’ denial of the systemic way that they benefit from the current racial hierarchy. Thus, the symbolic racism scale may need updating. If the problem is not individual-level resentment, but individual-level denial of white privilege or systemic racism, then a new scale is needed to measure this new form of racism/ passive endorsement of the racial order. In this paper I present the results from an experiment designed to capture whites' willingness to admit to systemic privilege.

Author

• Mona S. Kleinberg, University of Massachusetts, Lowell