New Research on Racial-Ethnic Attitudes
29 01 2008As our nation celebrates the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today, it’s appropriate that we reflect on the state of his quest toward racial harmony and equality in contemporary American society.
Specifically, in this day and age, racial/ethnic relations seem to influence many of the most controversial and hotly-debated issues in modern American society. This includes immigration (especially illegal immigration), racist imagery such as recent noose incidents, and most recently, issues surrounding Barack Obama’s campaign.
With that in mind, I think it’s useful for us — or at least for me as a sociologist — to try to take a step back and look at these issues from a more institutional or contextual perspective. In other words, to understand each of these specific issues that I just mentioned better, I think it’s useful for us to first understand the social context which forms the framework within which each issue unfolds.
With that in mind, the results from two national-level surveys have just been released to try to give us this larger, societal picture of the current state of racial/ethnic relations. Specifically, studies conducted by the Pew Research Center and New America Media each provide data and insight on attitudes toward and between different racial/ethnic groups in America. So let’s take a look at each to see what they say and how they can help us understand American racial/ethnic relations better.
The Pew Research Center study generally concludes that among Whites, Blacks, and Latinos, large majorities of each group report that they get along “pretty well” or “very well” with members of the other groups. However, there are some differences — Black and Latino seem to be slightly less positive:
While 70% of blacks say blacks and Hispanics get along very or pretty well, just 57% of Hispanics agree. Meantime, some 30% of Hispanics say blacks and Hispanics get along not too or not at all well; this is the most negative assessment registered by any group in the survey about any inter-group relationship.
It’s important to note however, that although this 57% of Latinos who report good relations with Blacks is lower than what Blacks report themselves, it is still a numerical majority.
The Pew study also reports that generally speaking, those with higher education and income tend to report better cross-racial relations. Perhaps surprisingly, Blacks living in rural areas tend to report better relations with Whites than Blacks who live in urban or suburban areas. Also, there were no significant differences in terms of attitudes by region of country. Finally and perhaps on a discouraging note, younger Blacks report worse relations with Whites than older Blacks.
In general, I found the Pew study informative but with one significant drawback — they chose to exclude Asian Americans from the study.
In my opinion, this omission is absolutely inexcusable in this day and age when the Asian American population is close to 15 million, in which Asian Americans are some of the most socioeconomically successful ethnic groups in the U.S., and when Asian Americans increasingly make up large proportions of the population of many states and majorities in many cities.
I am extremely disappointed that an organization as otherwise professional and well-regarded as the Pew Research Center chose to exclude Asian Americans from this important study.
To remedy that, let’s turn to the other national study on racial attitudes, from New America Media (NAM), in conjunction with Bendixen & Associates. This survey included Asian Americans, Latinos, and African Americans, but because it focused on attitudes among and between racial/ethnic minority groups, the study did not include Whites.
Similar to the Pew study, I am a little disappointed that Whites were not included, but in relative terms, there is already a sufficient level of racial attitude data that exists among Whites, but much less so when it comes to data on racial minorities, especially Asian Americans.
Also, I am impressed that the NAM study was conducted in multiple languages to maximize its overall validity and generalizeability. A Powerpoint presentation of their major findings is also available for download. To summarize, the study notes:
[The poll] uncovered serious tensions among these ethnic groups, including mistrust and significant stereotyping, but a majority of each group also said they should put aside differences and work together to better their communities. . . .
Predominantly immigrant populations – Hispanics and Asians – expressed far greater optimism about their lives in America, concluding that hard work is rewarded in this society. By contrast, more than 60% of the African Americans polled do not believe the American Dream works for them. . . .
[Regarding tensions and mistrust], 44% of Hispanics and 47% of Asians are “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.” Meanwhile, 46% of Hispanics and 52% of African Americans believe “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect.” And half of African Americans feel threatened by Latin American immigrants because “they are taking jobs, housing and political power away from the Black community.” . . .
[Nonetheless], the poll found “a shared appreciation” for each group’s cultural and political contributions. “Hispanics and Asians recognize that African Americans led the fight for civil rights and against discrimination, forging a better future for the other groups,” she said.
“Asian Americans and African Americans say Hispanic culture has enriched the quality of their lives. African Americans and Hispanics perceive Asian Americans as role models when it comes to family and educational values.”
Generally, I am saddened — but entirely shocked — to hear that apparently, there is still a lot of racial tension and suspicion between Asian Americans, Latinos, and African Americans. I agree that important issues need to be addressed for these stereotypes to eventually be disproved.
Nonetheless, I would point out two points in regard to this NAM survey. The first is that as the Pew Research Center study generally showed, more educated and higher-income respondents are likely to be more positive about cross-racial attitudes and experiences.
With that in mind, it appears that the NAM survey did not disaggregate its responses by social class, instead lumping everyone from all kinds of educational, income, and occupational backgrounds together within each racial/ethnic group. This is disappointing and unfortunately, distorts the findings a little bit.
But perhaps more importantly, I am disappointed in some of the wording of the questions in the NAM survey. For example, it asked Asian and Latino respondents whether they agreed with the statement “I am generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.”
I must say that I finding that wording to be a biased, leading, and confusing, based on conventional sociological methodologies and guidelines of creating empirically valid surveys. First of all, it asks two questions in one — whether they are afraid of African Americans, and two, whether they agree that African Americans commit most of the crime. One of the key rules about questionnaire design is that you should only ask one question at a time.
Second, presenting the statement that African Americans “are responsible for most of the crime” is leading — it should have just asked the question, “Do you agree or disagree that African Americans are responsible for most crimes committed” would have been less leading and more direct. The distinction between the two is subtle, but empirically valid.
Another example of a poorly-worded and misleading question is “Latin American immigrants are taking away jobs, housing and political power from the Black community,” asked of African American and Asian respondents. Again, the problem here is that there are three questions combined into one — whether Latino immigrants take away jobs, take away housing, and take away political power are all three distinct issues and questions that are unfortunately all rolled into one.
Take together, I would argue that these two questions may have distorted and exaggerated the overall level of racial tension between Asians, African Americans, and Latinos, especially considering most of the other findings in the NAM study, which generally showed a high level of willingness to cooperate with each other.
Specifically, 86% of Asians, 89% of African Americans, and 92% of Latinos agreed with the statement, “African Americans, Latinos, and Asians have many similar problems. They should put aside their differences and work together on issues that affect their communities.”
Ultimately and in my opinion, that is the probably the most significant finding from the NAM survey — although some tensions and stereotypes still exist between Asians, Latinos, and Africans Americans (although the true extent is still unknown because some of the questions asked were biased and misleading), overwhelming majorities of each group are willing to work together to address issues of discrimination and inequality that they have in common.
To conclude, both the Pew and NAM studies stand as useful examples of both useful and interesting data, but also how shortcomings in their fundamental design unfortunately compromised their overall value.
As sociologists and as Americans in general, these are the kinds of institutional issues we need to keep in mind when we try to apply them to better understand specific issues.
As a New Yorker, I see that African Americans do get along better with Latino/Latinas. There was once in gym class where an AA told his Spanish friend that they are both the same, and when the friend responded with “What about Asians?” African American responded “Nah, they ain’t the same. We think different.” I want to know why we are different (especially since the whole school consists of 97% of minorities?) Is it because of preconceived notions about Asian Americans (i.e. stereotypes from the media)?
**The breakdown is (approximately)… 55% Hispanics, 33% African Americans, 9% Asians and Asian Pacific Islander Americans, and 3% Whites, Non-Hispanic.
I think there is a preconceived notion about what is “white” behavior and that Asians (especially Asian Americans) as seen as identifying and reproducing these patterns of behavior. So often Asian Americans are considered to be the “model minority” that succeed in education and the business world and maintain an equal playing field with whites. This, of course, is not true. But because less of a social gap appears to exist between Asians and whites, they are not considered on the “same level” as African Americans and Latino(a)s.
It seems even a professional organization, such as the PEW research center, feels that it can concede to popular stereotype to justify lazy reporting of statistics.
What follows below is an analysis of the role race is playing in the Obama campaign – many cases in spite of Obama’s intentions.
This was published in the NY Times
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February 12, 2008
Seeking Unity, Obama Feels Pull of Racial Divide
By GINGER THOMPSON
WASHINGTON — It was November 2006 when Senator Barack Obama first gathered friends and advisers at a Washington law firm to brainstorm about what it would take for him to win the presidency.
Those who attended the meeting said the mix of excitement and trepidation at times felt asphyxiating, as the group weighed the challenges of such a long shot. Would Mr. Obama be able to raise enough money? What kind of toll would a campaign take on him and his family? What kind of organization could he build?
Halfway into the session, Broderick Johnson, a Washington lawyer and informal adviser to Mr. Obama, spoke up. “What about race?” he asked.
Mr. Obama’s dismissal was swift and unequivocal.
He had been able to navigate racial politics in Illinois, Mr. Obama told the group, and was confident he could do so across the nation. “I believe America is ready,” one aide recalled him saying.
The race issue got all of five minutes at that meeting, setting what Mr. Obama and his advisers hoped would be the tone of a campaign they were determined not to define by the color of his skin.
As he heads into a fresh round of contests Tuesday, the Potomac primaries, in a tight rivalry with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and with an impressive record of victories across the nation in which he drew significant white votes and overwhelming black support, he claims to have accomplished that goal. Some South Carolina supporters summed up his broad appeal and message about transcending differences in a chant: “Race Doesn’t Matter.”
Glimpses inside the Obama campaign show, though, that while the senator had hoped his colorblind style of politics would lift the country above historic racial tensions, from Day 1 his bid for the presidency has been pulled into the thick of them. While his speeches focus on unifying voters, his campaign has learned the hard way that courting a divided electorate requires reaching out group by group.
Instead of following a plotted course, Mr. Obama’s campaign has zigged and zagged, reacting to outside forces and internal differences between the predominantly white team of top advisers and the mostly black tier of aides.
The dynamic began the first day of Mr. Obama’s presidential bid, when white advisers encouraged him to withdraw an invitation to his pastor, whose Afro-centric sermons have been construed as antiwhite, to deliver the invocation at the official campaign kickoff. Then, when his candidacy was met by a wave of African-American suspicion, the senator’s black aides pulled in prominent black scholars, business leaders and elected officials as advisers.
Aides to Mr. Obama, who asked not to be identified because the campaign would not authorize them to speak to the press, said he stayed away from a civil rights demonstration and did not publicize visits to black churches when he was struggling to win over white voters in Iowa. Then, a month after Representative John Lewis of Georgia endorsed Mrs. Clinton, setting off concerns about black voters’ ambivalence toward Mr. Obama, the campaign deployed his wife, Michelle, whose upbringing on the South Side of Chicago was more familiar to many blacks than Mr. Obama’s biracial background.
The campaign’s strategy in the first contests left Mr. Obama vulnerable with Latinos, which hurt him in California and could do the same in the Texas primary on March 4.
Faulted by Latino leaders as not being visible enough in their communities and not understanding what issues resonated with immigrants, the campaign has been trying hard to catch up, scheduling more face-to-face meetings with voters, snaring endorsements from Latino politicians and fine-tuning his message.
Mr. Obama has resisted any effort to suggest that the presidential primaries were breaking along racial lines.
“There are not a lot of African-Americans in Nebraska the last time I checked, or in Utah or in Idaho, areas where I probably won some of my biggest margins,” he said Sunday in an NPR interview.
“There’s no doubt that I’m getting more African-American votes,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that the race is dividing along racial lines. You know, in places like Washington State we won across the board, from men, from women, from African-Americans, from whites and from Asians.”
A Rhetorical Tightrope
David Axelrod, the chief strategist of the Obama campaign, said in an interview that although he and Mr. Obama did not map out a detailed strategy for dealing with race when plotting a presidential run, they were well aware it would weigh on his campaign.
As a consultant to several black elected officials, Mr. Axelrod has been steeped in racially charged elections. And he said Mr. Obama had faced the challenges of racial politics in the campaign that propelled him to the Senate, where he is only the third black elected since Reconstruction.
Mr. Axelrod said he had learned there was “a certain physics” to winning votes across racial lines. Previous campaigns by African-Americans — the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton — had overwhelmingly relied on black support that wound up defining, and confining, their candidacies.
By contrast, from the moment Mr. Obama stepped onto the national political stage, he has paid as much attention — or more, some aides said — to a far broader audience. “He believes you can have the support of the black community, appealing to the pride they feel in his candidacy, and still win support among whites,” Mr. Axelrod said.
Questions about Mr. Obama’s “blackness,” though, quickly threatened to obscure the reasons he believed himself most qualified to become the country’s next president. A Rolling Stone article linked him to the militant preaching of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The story quoted the minister as saying in a sermon, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.”
Mr. Axelrod said he and Mr. Obama decided to take Mr. Wright off the program for the campaign announcement in February 2007, concluding that the attention would drag the pastor into a negative spotlight and might distract from efforts to portray the senator as a candidate capable of unifying the country.
The day after the rally, which was on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Illinois, Mr. Obama was sharply criticized by African-American academics, media celebrities and policy experts at a conference in Hampton, Va. Among the most often cited was Cornel West, the renowned Princeton scholar. He and others argued that Mr. Obama should speak forcefully about the legacy of racism in the nation and not cast the problems that disproportionately affect blacks as social ills shared by many Americans.
“He’s got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties,” Dr. West said at the time. “He’s got to speak them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length; enough to say he loves us, but not too close to scare them away.”
Working From Inside
Mr. Obama was so annoyed by the complaints, one aide recalled, that he asked staff members to invite more than 50 influential African-Americans, including some of his critics, to meet with him, hoping to win them over with the gale force of his charisma.
But his aides cautioned that such a large event would be sure to draw press attention. Instead, they suggested that Mr. Obama establish a smaller advisory council of prominent black figures. In a two-hour telephone call, he not only persuaded Dr. West to serve on the panel, but also convinced him that his rhetorical tightrope — reassuring whites without seeming to abandon blacks — was necessary.
Dr. West recalled the conversation, saying that if Mr. Obama focused on disparities caused by a history of white privilege, “he’d be pegged as a candidate who caters only to the needs of black folks.”
“His campaign is about all folks,” Dr. West said.
Initially, Mr. Obama’s aides said, his campaign was all about Iowa, whose mostly white electorate had established a reputation for launching political underdogs. He seldom talked explicitly about race, aides said. He did not publicize appearances at black churches on his press schedule. Still, his campaign reached out quietly to African-American voters, realizing that even the smallest pockets of supporters could be decisive.
Aides said Mr. Obama’s campaign was unaware of the magnitude of the tensions brewing in Jena, La., over charges of attempted murder that had been filed against six youths involved in a schoolyard fight until plans for a march, organized by Mr. Sharpton, began to appear in the news media.
Mr. Obama was the first presidential candidate to respond to Mr. Sharpton’s call to denounce what was going on in Jena, saying the cases against the students were not a matter of black versus white, but a matter of right versus wrong. He then called Mr. Sharpton to explain that he had important votes in the Senate, and that he would not attend the march because he did not want to politicize the issue.
“We agreed on inside-outside roles,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to himself and Mr. Obama, echoing a famous conversation between President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I would continue my work agitating the system from the outside, and he would do what he could to make changes from the inside.”
By the fall, however, while Mr. Obama’s campaign was still trailing Mrs. Clinton among white voters in Iowa, the loss of the endorsement by Mr. Lewis, the Georgia representative, made clear that he faced troubles among black voters as well.
“He told John that that he felt like a father was stabbing him in the back,” an aide to Mr. Obama said. “Barack sees himself as an extension of the civil rights movement, and so it hurt him deeply when a leader of that movement told him he wasn’t ready.”
Aides said it proved a pivotal moment in the campaign, with some staff members — mostly white — urging Mr. Obama to stay focused on Iowa, while others — most of them black — warning that he needed to court black voters and elected officials more actively.
“Nobody put race explicitly on the table,” one aide said. “But there was certainly the feeling among some of the black staff that some of the white staff did not care enough about winning black votes.”
New Efforts to Reach Out
In the end, Mr. Obama satisfied both groups, keeping himself focused on Iowa while dispatching his wife to South Carolina, where she delivered a major speech at South Carolina State University, a historically black college in Orangeburg.
“It took Barack a while to agree,” said Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard professor who is part of the black advisory group. “But we told him she had to be the one to confront the myths and fears of black voters.
“Here was a black woman, a mother, who grew up poor, learned to sleep without heat and rose above that to get an Ivy League education,” Professor Ogletree added. “But she was also the kind of woman who would take her shoes off because her feet hurt. She was real from the moment she stepped on stage.”
By mid-January, Mr. Obama had so much support among black voters in South Carolina that he worried that his rivals would try to marginalize his campaign as a black-only phenomenon — a concern that later proved well-founded when former President Bill Clinton compared Mr. Obama’s campaign to Mr. Jackson’s. So before arriving in the state, Mr. Obama stopped in Atlanta to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday.
Georgia, like South Carolina, was expected to deliver large numbers of black votes to Mr. Obama. But it was also a place where his viability as a candidate would be measured by his ability to win a respectable number of white votes.
Standing before a congregation filled with veterans of the civil rights movement, Mr. Obama talked about the struggles of a poor white woman, whose family had no health insurance and often had to choose between buying food and medicine.
While Mr. Obama has made great strides in appealing to white and black voters, his campaign has proved less effective in drawing Latino support. While a few experts point to longstanding rivalries between blacks and Hispanics over jobs and other opportunities, most faulted him as doing too little, too late.
“Obama’s campaign failed to rise to the occasion,” scolded La Opinión, the leading Spanish-language newspaper in California, which had endorsed Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama’s national field director, Cuauhtemoc Figueroa, vowed that Mr. Obama’s effort in Texas would be different.
“You are going to see Senator Obama campaign the way he did in Iowa,” Mr. Figueroa said. “We’re going to take him to little communities so that he’s not only going to touch voters with his words, he’s going to be able to reach out and physically touch them.”
Jeff Zeleny and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
I would just like to comment on the video we watched in class on Tuesday, I think that the quote “the winner gets to write history” is absolutely true. I for one did not know that the Cherokee were so willing to change and did so. The textbooks and history books only tell about the Native Americans as being intolerant of change and make them out to be the bad guys. It always seemed like the Native Americans were being portrayed as unwilling to cooperate and very resistant and negative toward the colonists. Also regarding the Philippines and America trying to “civilize” them was very new information to me. In class someone else had said that they hadn’t heard that either and I think it is very interesting how the truth about the past is changed according to the agenda of who has the power. It is clear that to this day, the truth about treatment of different populations is still not being taught truthfully and until that happens I believe that racism and discrimination will continue to exist.
A really good portrayal of what you are saying is written by Howard Zinn, in “A People’s History of the United States.” In this book he shows history through the viewpoint of those being conquered rather than the conquerers. Or the loser’s point of view going back to your post. Each chapter shows a different oppressed group in the United States starting with Columbus, and ending with the 2000 Presidential Election, and the War on terror. It seems like you would be interested in this book, as the video just hit the tip of the iceberg and is an interesting look at all of the history lessons you may have had in high school or earlier told from the opposite view point.