Obama Election Transforming Perceptions of Race Relations
As you can see on the right, the latest CBS News poll seems to indicate that Barack Obama’s election has led the way in dramatically altering African-American perceptions of race relations in the United States. White people feel somewhat better, too, but black people’s view of the matter has really shifted enormously. Interestingly, and probably accurately, Obama doesn’t actually get a ton of credit for this: “Fifty-nine percent of blacks and 65 percent of whites say race relations have stayed the same since Mr. Obama took office.” Rather than Obama transforming race relations, I would say that Obama’s election seems to indicate that the state of race relations was better than many people realized before the campaign. These days it seems almost funny to look back at the time when many people—white and black, liberal and conservative—thought a black candidate would suffer from an insurmountable disadvantage, but that time wasn’t very long ago.
This is also interesting:
Despite the increasingly positive perceptions, however, most blacks feel that discrimination lingers. Asked who has a better chance to get ahead in U.S. society, fifty-one percent of blacks said white people do. Forty-four percent said both races had equal opportunity, while just one percent said blacks had an advantage.
White people, by contrast, were far more likely to see a level playing field, with 62 percent saying both races had equal opportunity. Roughly one in four white said white people have a better chance to get ahead, while seven percent of whites said black people have the better opportunities.
The white result is about what I would expect. I’m surprised that as many as forty-four percent of blacks say that both races have equal opportunity. I think the evidence is unambiguously clear that they do not. African-American children have parents with lower levels of income and education. Their families, even when they have above-average incomes, tend to have less wealth than white families. And even controlling for parental income and educational attainment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids. Then beyond all that, there’s clear evidence of discrimination against job applicants with “black” names that tends to suggest a broader pattern of employment discrimination. There are inequities in the criminal justice system both in terms of more punishment being meted out to black offenders, and the police and the courts doing less to protect black victims.
I’m not surprised that most white people prefer to ignore this sort of evidence and believe in the existence of equal opportunities, but it’s surprising to me how many African-Americans have adopted an unrealistically optimistic view.
27 Responses to “Obama Election Transforming Perceptions of Race Relations”
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April 28th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
i’m pretty sure that blacks perceptions have improved because of all the white people smiling at them now.
oh-sorry. actually, that’s creeping them out.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Most definitely, a white liberal blogger citing to easily manipulated statistics has a better handle on opportunity, or lack thereof, in America than those African Americans actually experiencing it. For sure.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
There have been follow-up studies that show that the “black name discrimination” is a class issue and not a race issue. If you hand out resumes with names like Terrell and Roland on them, they will get call backs. But if you hand out resumes with “white trash” names they will not get call backs.
Of course, race and class are heavily intertwined in the US.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
controlling for parental income and educational attainment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids
Wait a sec, how does that constitute “controlling for educational attainment”???
April 28th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I’m not surprised that most white people prefer to ignore this sort of evidence and believe in the existence of equal opportunities, but it’s surprising to me how many African-Americans have adopted an unrealistically optimistic view.
Perhaps they are interpreting the question as being whether it is a disadvantage to being black as opposed to being poor or stupid.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
I’m not surprised that most white people prefer to ignore this sort of evidence and believe in the existence of equal opportunities, but it’s surprising to me how many African-Americans have adopted an unrealistically optimistic view.
I’m not really surprised. While it seems clear to me that there’s still an awful lot of racial discrimination around, it also seems plausible that some African Americans might consciously or unconsciously decide that they were better off blinding themselves to any even remotely ambiguous evidence that they were being discriminated against.
The same sort of dynamic operates in gender discrimination — the most accurate perception of whether gender discrimination is occurring is not necessarily the most advantageous to the person being discriminated against.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I think it’s pretty easy to understand black optimism if you assume people are understanding the question not as “what group has a better chance to get ahead” but as “does the fact of being black itself mean you have less of a chance to get ahead.” This would mean you could just be yourself from where you come except with a different colored skin. This is a questionable interpretation of the question, and the answer that there are equal responsibilities is still, in my view, inaccurate. Racism is still a big problem.
Also, how was this survey conducted? Maybe black people didn’t want to sound grasping to the interviewee by saying things were worse for them.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
[...] Ygz is glad to see that polls show African Americans’ views of the state of race relations hving improved dramatically in recent months, but surprised to see that fully 44 percent of black respondents believed that blacks and whites now enjoy equal opportunity in the United States—despite ample evidence that, presidential elections notwithstanding, this is not yet the case. [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I think the question is ambiguous as to whether or not you are supposed to include class, or assume a white and black of equivalent socioeconomic backgrounds. While I think there probably is still some disadvantage for blacks in the latter case, it’s clearly much smaller and some people might be likely to overlook it – *if* they interpret the question that way.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
In my previous post #7, that should be “interviewer,” not “interviewee.”
April 28th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Race relations suck as much as ever if you remember that there are other races.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
The “who has a better chance to get ahead” question seems to miss the point a bit. All else being equal, I’d tend to agree that race isn’t even a major factor in getting ahead.
But that “All else being equal” carries a lot of weight. Basically, blacks in America are systematically poorer, and have less access to the institutional resources needed to get themselves out of poverty. It’s getting to the point where all else really is more or less equal that’s the challenge, much more so than curbing racist attitudes, I think.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
So, Matt, are you ever going to write about the Ricci Supreme Court reverse discrimination against white firemen case? I guess you just haven’t figured out a way to spin it yet…
April 28th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Perhaps the best way to put this would be “Obama’s election seems to have made people realize that the state of race relations was better than they thought before the campaign.”
Brad,
It would appear that said white blogger is such a master manipulator of statistics that he made you miss the fact that a majority of black respondents agree with him, 51%-44%.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
But if you hand out resumes with “white trash” names they will not get call backs.
I’d be interested in seeing a link to that, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity on what constitutes a white trash name.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I’d be interested in seeing a link to that, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity on what constitutes a white trash name.
Any Hebrew name with at least four syllables (Jebediah, Jedidiah, Ezekial, Zebediah, Zephaniah). Cletus. Enos.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
When discussing unequal opportunity, it’s important to keep conscious and unconscious discrimination in mind, in terms of decisions being made about who gets hired, who gets interviewed, etc. It’s also important to keep in mind the factors that prevent decisions about whether the black applicant gets the job from ever being made. The separate spheres that the Brown vs. Board decision talks about have been significantly eroded and blended, but they haven’t gone away altogether. A lot of jobs and deals get handed out based on who you know, and it doesn’t take the slightest bit of discriminatory intent or even tendencies to simply not have people from other races, ethnic groups, and economic classes within your social and professional network.
April 28th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
controlling for parental income and educational attainment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids
Wait a sec, how does that constitute “controlling for educational attainment”???
I think that what Matt was saying was:
controlling for parental income and parental educational attainment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids
April 28th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
“controlling for parental income and parental educational attainment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids”
Right. Even when you statistically control for everything socioeconomic, blacks still end up with worse test scores, gpa’s, on the job performance, etc. etc.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Right. Even when you statistically control for everything socioeconomic, blacks still end up with worse test scores, gpa’s, on the job performance, etc. etc.
How about if you control for family history? I.e., were their ancestors enslaved and their parents, grandparents, etc. legally treated as second-class citizens, educated separately, possibly lynched, etc.?
April 28th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Right, control for ancestry and you can make the gaps in performance disappear statistically. But is that what you really want to say?
April 28th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Anyway, Matt, when are you going to write about the biggest Supreme Court case of the year, Ricci v. DiStefano, the New Haven firefighters who have been denied promotions for five years because only whites and one Latino passed the promotional exam back in 2003?
You can get started coming up with your anodyne, tangential response by studying up on the facts of the case here:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/090419_ricci.htm
April 28th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Steve, the point is not that people are all the same, but that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the differences in academic performances between black and white Americans that doesn’t rely on the differences being genetic or otherwise innate.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I’m well aware of America’s history of racial strife and fully acknowledge that these injustices are still being played out today. Yet I want to go out on a limb here and make a statement that will strike the majority of my fellow progessives as absurd but which, nonetheless, I believe to be true: America is the least racist nation in the entire world.
Say what? Here’s an anecdote. Because the job situation in New York is so terrible, I am applying to several programs to teach English in South Korea. What I’ve learned from my Korean-born Professor and from a friend who is currently teaching in Seoul is that these programs are notoriously racist: they only want to hire WHITE Americans and Brits, and all require a photo submission to weed out the others. Now Obama may very well have faced a good deal of predjudice growing up bi-racial in America, but when you compare his life to, say, those of South Koreans born to African-American servicemen and South Korean mothers, it’s a no brainer. The latter have been treated like pariahs in their home country and subjected to the worst kinds of cultural ostracism and bigotted hatred.
We normally think of countries with high minority or majority-minority populations as being the most racist. But really, countries with huge ethnosectarian majorities are typically MORE racist than their diverse counterparts; there are just statistically fewer victims of this racism, so we don’t notice it. (One can see, for example, the Korean predjudice towards African-Americans playing out in the notoriously bad relations between Korean-American deli/convenience stores and the urban communities that they serve.) America may have a higher number of racially-motivated flare-ups than more ethnically homogenous countries, but it also has a higher percentage of non-bigotted people than any other place in the world. And quite frankly, a Barack Obama would not have been elected anywhere else, PERIOD.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
[...] The graph on this post is very interesting. Over the past year the percentage, nationally, of blacks saying race relations [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
America is the least racist nation in the entire world
Most other countries are explicitly ethno-religious nation-states created to serve the interests and self-determination of the ethnic group. The United States actually claims to be something else, which is why its prejudice against its native-born population of blacks is so insidious– it’s not simply that we’re prejudiced against “outsiders”– we’re prejudiced against our own people.
a Barack Obama would not have been elected anywhere else, PERIOD.
Peru elected a descendent of Japanese immigrants and France elected a man of Hungarian/Thessalonian Jewish descent.
What was so shocking about Barack Obama’s election is how long it took to happen: with a single exception (Kennedy) we elected presidents from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant group of people, which is strange given our “national of immigrants” mythology.
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 am
There is documented bias against Asian and Muslim names as well. It’s not racial discrimination. Foreign,
“unassimilated” names simply do not bode well with employers.
And I say this as an Asian American person with a weird name, who dares not fret about such disadvantages because she refuses to play the token “oppressed” minority to the white liberal.