AP poll: A slight majority of
Americans are now expressing negative view of blacks
By Associated Press, Updated:
Saturday, October 27, 2012
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.”
