More Americans are expressing prejudice against African Americans than they did during the last presidential election, a recent poll from The Associated Press reported.
The poll shows that 51 percent of Americans express outright anti-black attitudes, a number that increased from the result of 48 percent in 2008. These results were measured using questions that explicitly asked participants about racist attitudes.
However, Charles Payne, assistant provost for diversity at Ball State, said he is not sure these numbers truthfully reflect American views.
“With polls, it depends on who they were sampling,” Payne said, reminding that the backgrounds and opinions of the participants may be vastly different from the rest of America.
Payne said his opinion was strengthened by President Barack Obama’s re-election Tuesday night, which seems to be in stark contrast with the poll results.
“Now that we elected him again, it might say something about having an African-American president,” Payne said. “It might be saying that we are moving forward.”
Payne said he thinks the numbers may not necessarily be due to an increase in racism but an association made between the president and his race, he said. He believes some people may be taking their dissatisfaction with Obama’s term in office and applying it to African Americans in general.
For Logan Roeth, a senior telecommunications major, the issue seems to be the prevalence of the president and how quickly people are to criticize, she said.
“I’ve noticed people being a lot more open with their racism,” Roeth said. “Before, they might have been able to hide it, but now that they have to deal with it in this way — with a black man as the president — they fall back on race because it’s easy.”
Roeth said she also worries that automatically associating Obama with other African Americans because of race will lead to a divide in the country.
“A lot of what I keep hearing is that African Americans are only voting for Obama because they are the same race,” Roeth said. “Regardless of if that is true or not, it’s automatically separating the U.S. into races instead of just being citizens as a whole.”
Participants were also measured for implicit racial attitudes — attitudes that the participants may not even know exist. These feelings are typically based on past experiences and are rooted at a deeper level.
To measure these views, participants were asked questions that indirectly measured their attitudes. They also partook in a word association exercise that calculated their reflex time when pairing certain words with ethnicities.
The results showed 56 percent had negative implicit racial attitudes, compared to 49 percent in 2008. The fact that this percent is higher than the explicit percent is something that concerns Payne, he said.
“Implicit [attitudes] are probably more dangerous,” Payne said. “People may be acting due to something within, something they may not know about. If it’s explicit, they at least know why they are acting on it.”
Regardless of the results of the AP poll, Payne said he is confident in America’s growth and views Obama’s two terms as a sign of progress.
“I kind of wonder, in my own mind, if this doesn’t mean that we are beginning to live in a more racial society,” Payne said. “We’re moving away from one group dominating the political scene and moving toward a more accepting environment. Only time will tell.”
