The Subtlety of Modern Racism

It’s 2016, and most people would say that issues of race are a thing of the past. The president of the U.S. is African American; this has to be evidence that we are no longer plagued by racism. However, there are numerous police and African American confrontations, in which excessive force is used and the victim is killed. The white police officer is often not charged with any crime, which demonstrates that prejudice still exists. The only difference is that it is no longer as overt. If you ask people directly if they think they are superior than minority groups, most people would say no. However, people still hold either implicit or less overtly explicit negative views of minorities.

The Symbolic Racism Scale was created to measure prejudice towards blacks in a subtler way than the Old Racism Scale. There are eight items in the test, and for each item there are 3 or 4 alternative choices and the examinee must choose one.

Below are two items on the test.

The scale works best for white examinees, across all education levels. The Cronbach’s alpha for white respondents was 0.79, and for other ethnicities it is between 0.42 and 0.72 depending on the ethnicity (Fiske & North, 2015). The test has a high test-retest reliability of 0.68 over two years (Fiske & North, 2015). The test also has good convergent and divergent validity.

However, some criticisms for the scale is that it doesn’t measure racism but rather people’s ability to give politically correct responses about race and their motivations to appear unprejudiced. In a study by Fazio et al. (1995) Respondents had first taken a mass survey of the Modern racism scale (which is the previous version of the Symbolic Racism scale). At a later time, the participants in a lab were made aware that the examiner would later have to enter their answer in the computer. The experimenter was either white or black. As the graph demonstrates, when they know someone will be reading their responses there was a change towards less prejudicial answers, and this effect is especially strong for those with a black experimenter. Therefore, since people can control their overt prejudicial responses, a better way to access true racial attitudes is an implicit test.

However, just because the Symbolic Racism Scale is not a true assessment of internal attitudes, does not make it ineffective. It measures explicit attitudes, which is a controlled process. In many situations our controlled processes override the immediate automatic processes. When participants in a study are asked to make judgments about the innocence of a black male defendant in an ambiguous situation, the Symbolic Racism Scale will predict their behavior (Dovido et al,, 1997). Therefore, the Symbolic Racism Scale is useful as long as it is used to measure controlled processes of prejudice.

Thus, the Symbolic Racism Scale is a valid measure of prejudicial beliefs towards African Americans. However, they are not the only minority in North America, and in some cases there are other minorities that in current times face worse prejudice. Following the 9/11 and recent bombings there is a lot of prejudice towards Muslims. Perhaps a broader scale that does not designate a specific ethnicity would be able to transcend the test of time.

References

Dovido, F., Kawakami, K., Johnson, C., Johnson, B., & Howard, A. (1997). On the Nature of Prejudice: Automatic and Controlled Processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 510–540.

Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(6), 1013–1027.

Fiske, S.T., & North, M.S. (2015). Measures of Stereotyping and Prejudice: Barometers of Bias. Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs, 684–718. DOI: 10.1016/B978–0–12–386915–9.00024–3.