By Gregory S. Parks & Matthew W. Hughey
On Tuesday, January 25, 2010, Arab television network Alhurra interviewed Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA). During the interview, Congressman Moran stated that Republicans made big gains this past November because “a lot of people in this country . . . don’t want to be governed by an African American.” To some, these statements were not only controversial, but false. This is because we live in a supposedly post-racial America since the election of our first black President. For example, the 2008 voting booths had barely cooled before the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that Obama’s victory meant that we could “put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”
There have been sweeping changes in legal equality between blacks and whites since, say, the 1950s. Moreover, white’s racial attitudes have also shifted during that same period. For example, in 1958 most whites indicated that they would not vote for a well-qualified, black presidential candidate; by 2007, almost ninety-five percent said they would. Measuring racial progress and determining the degree to which race actually matters in America, however, is not simply—or even best—reflected in people’s expressed racial attitudes as measured through surveys. Rather, a better measure might be the examination of people’s automatic, if not unconscious, racial attitudes. This includes how Americans decided whether to vote for, weigh the policies of, and even re-elect the first black President.
For over the past quarter century, psychologists have found that people make automatic associations between black and white racial categories, and negative and positive words, respectively. Even where individuals appear to harbor explicit, racially egalitarian attitudes, their unconscious racial attitudes may be wholly inconsistent. Numerous studies find that anywhere from 75-90% of whites, roughly 65% of Asian and Latino/a Americans, and from 35-65% of blacks harbor these automatic, unconscious, pro-white/anti-black biases. Not only do college first-year students—the typical participants of university-based psychological studies—harbor these biases; studies show that judges, lawyers, physicians, black professionals, and a broad swath of the American public hold these biases as well. These biases are important because the influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior.
More specifically, the rhetoric against and opposition to candidate Obama can be traced, at least in part, to these unconscious anti-black biases. Undoubtedly, many conservatives probably would not have voted for candidate Obama simply because of his political leanings, party affiliation, and policy positions. However, this point does not provide an end to the analysis of whether race matters in how Americans are influenced by Obama’s race. With regard to the run-up to the 2008 election, there are some important things to contemplate:
First, liberals and conservatives do not differ much with respect to their unconscious racial biases. But while there is little difference between conservatives’ explicit and unconscious racial biases (both being relatively high), liberals have relatively high unconscious—but low explicit—anti-black biases. Comparatively, conservatives’ greater consistency in their unconscious and explicit social evaluations suggests that they may be more inclined than liberals to use their unconscious biases for explicit judgment, including voting. Second, the rhetoric around whether or not Obama is a “legitimate” American citizen appears to have substantial roots in