The White View of Black America: Three Forms of Prejudice

• In Event: 4157 - Regular session: Racism and Antiracism I

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary racial attitudes of white American adults towards black Americans, using data from the General Social Surveys, and classifies these attitudes using latent class analysis. The main finding is that the expressed attitudes can be broadly classified into four types. Applying latent class analysis to data from the General Social Survey, three distinct types of racists are uncovered in the adult white population. The first type displays characteristics of symbolic racism, and the second type displays characteristics of laissez-faire racism. The third type, which is the most common and yet has gone almost wholly unappreciated, is a virulent combination of symbolic racism and laissez-faire racism. True non-racists, those who do not belong to any of these three categories, comprise as little as eight percent of the adult white population. The analyses also reveal that education has the effect of decreasing the likelihood of symbolic racism while increasing the likelihood of both laissez-faire racism as well as non-racism. This discovery suggests that two well-known competing theories of the effect of education on racism — the ideological refinement hypothesis and the enlightenment hypothesis — are simultaneously valid.Three of these four types, comprising a total of nearly 90 percent of the adult white population, display elements of racial prejudice of various kinds.

Author

• Esha Chatterjee, Stanford University