From AP poll: Majority harbor prejudice against blacks
WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.
Soul food for thought:
1. A heartening level of white support for a black President has not undermined racial prejudices or abdicated institutionalized racism.
2. If America was a nation of whites alone, Obama would not have been President, and could not now be re-elected. Racism remains that strong.
3. I suspect that being liberal is not proxy for an absence of racial prejudices of the sort picked up by the poll.
4. I suspect, also, that considering racial animus exclusively through a lens "liberals vs conservatives" is simplistic and damaging—doing so will only prolong racism's impact on our society, as liberals will not fight hard enough to stamp out racism (or its political effects) if they presume themselves to be unaffected by racism as a bloc.
5. The poll isn't all that surprising, as we've all come to not only expect, but also be unsurprised, by conservative voices' sometimes-veiled but often obvious racial platitudes. What this poll does do is lend an air of much-needed 'legitimacy' to the notion that racism persists—and not just in the backroads or on the farms of America. Racism is everywhere—in your family, at your job, in your church, and, most definitely, sadly, most perniciously, in your school.
The single best thing we can do as a nation, if we are serious about significantly chipping away at racism, is to take a serious look at strategies for desegregation.
P.S. FWIF: I oftentimes find myself observing/thinking: "Wow, these white people, they look so happy together. And they would absolutely not miss us if we were gone."