The Willie Horton ad used by George H. W. Bush in his 1988 presidential campaign is considered to be one of the most effective political ads in U.S. history. It's also the prototype for the use of symbolic racism in political campaigns. Brad Ashford is a Democrat running for Congress in Nebraska's 2nd District. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending $170,000 to run the following TV spot in support of his opponent, incumbent Lee Terry.
The ad is technically correct. Nikko Jenkins was released from prison under a Nebraska law that allows early release for good behavior, and went on to murder four people. Ashford supported this law while a member of the state legislature--as, presumably, a majority of Nebraska politicians did.
To call this an example of "dog whistle politics" may be to credit it with more subtlety than it actually shows.
By the way, the U.S. held 2.23 million people in prisons and jails in 2012, seven times the number in 1972, and by far the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It will be difficult to reduce these numbers if politicians who vote for prison term reductions are held responsible for any recidivism that results.
Republicans controlled both houses
of the legislature and the governorship. 83% of voting restrictions
were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures.
The state had become increasingly
competitive in the last presidential election. Note that passage of
voter ID laws required both increased competitiveness and
Republican control. Those states that had become more competitive
but had Democrats in control were less likely to pass voter
ID laws.
The state had a higher proprtion
of African-American and Latino residents, and minority and low
income turnout had increased in the last presidential election.
There were more allegations of
voter fraud. This variable had less impact than the other three.
Note also that very few allegations of voter fraud have been
substantiated.
Their study is entitled “Jim Crow
2.0.”
What about the individual legislators
who vote for voter ID laws? Earlier this year, Mendez and Grose reported an experiment in which 1871 state legislators from 14 states
with relatively high Latino populations received an e-mail from an
apparent constituent asking whether a driver's license was required
in order to vote. The legislators were randomly assigned to one of
four treatment groups. The e-mail either came from an Anglo (Jacob
Smith) or a Latino (Santiago Rodriguez) man, and was written either
in English or Spanish. The dependent measure was whether or not the
legislator replied. Here are the results:
Supports Voter ID
Does Not Support Voter ID
Anglo Name/English
45.0%
50.3%
Latino Name/English
27.5%
43.4%
Anglo Name/Spanish
10.1%
12.5%
Latino Name/Spanish
1.1%
11.7%
The results are clearest with the
English-language e-mail. Those who supported voter ID were 17.5%
more likely to respond to the Anglo constituent, while those who did
not support voter ID were 6.9% more likely to respond to the Anglo
constituent. Response rates were depressed considerably when the
e-mail was in Spanish, but the same pattern was obtained. Supporters
of voter ID were more likely to discriminate against Latino
constituents.
Did the legislators themselves decide
whether or not to answer the e-mail, or was it a staff member? It
probably doesn't matter, since legislators hire like-minded staff
members.
The authors claim that the experiment
shows discriminatory intent on the part of legislators who supported
voter ID. It could be argued that Republican legislators cast their
vote for partisan reasons, and the fact that they also happened to be
prejudiced was coincidental. However, not all Republicans supported
voter ID, and further analysis showed that those Republicans who
voted in favor of voter ID were more likely to discriminate against
the Latino constituent than those Republicans who voted against it.
(No Democrats in the entire sample supported voter ID laws.)
I'm not suggesting that prejudice and
political partisanship are separate alternative explanations for
support for voter suppression, either among legislators or the
general public. It is likely that Republicans support these laws
both because they harbor racial resentment and because the
laws are advantageous to their party. In fact, in the last six
years, attitudes toward a variety of political issues, such as health care, have become more strongly correlated with racial attitudes.
The Republican Party has gradually evolved into an unabashedly racist party, much like the neo-Nazi parties of Europe.
I woke up yesterday morning to the
following headline: “GOP calls for travel ban for West Africa over Ebola.” Will Republican Congresspeople be willing to support
adequate financial aid for Ebola-stricken countries, or will they use
fiscal austerity as an excuse to throw West African Black people
under the bus?
With the election coming up in two
weeks, voter ID laws are back in the news. The Supreme Court has accepted or rejected state voter suppression laws in a seemingly
random pattern, without explaining their rationale. In news stories
about voter ID, the corporate media typically demonstrate false balancing. They fail to examine Republican claims that voter
impersonation is a problem. (It is not.) They report but don't
evaluate the Democrats' argument that voter ID laws suppress turnout
among key Democratic constituencies, such as the poor, minorities,
and college students. (There is evidence to support this claim.)
While the media sometimes imply that these laws are politically
motivated, new evidence suggests that they may also be motivated by
racial prejudice. These studies confirm every bad thing you
suspected about voter ID laws.
In a new study, David Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Delaware's Center for Political
Communication (CPC) used cognitive priming to test the
prejudice hypothesis. Their experiment was embedded in the 2012
Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, managed by computer by
YouGov/Polimetrix. They had 1436 US adult respondents, 1100 of whom
were White. The White participants were randomly assigned to one of
three versions of a question asking them whether they favor or oppose
voter ID laws. For one-third of the respondents, the question was
accompanied by a photo of a White voter and poll worker. For another
third, the voter and poll worker were African-American. The
remainder of the participants were not shown any image. The photos
and the wording of the question are shown in the results table below.
Support for voter ID laws was quite
high. Most importantly, when given the Black prime, a reminder of
the fact that African-Americans vote, the White respondents were more
in favor of voter ID laws than when given the White prime or no prime
at all. The fact that the race of the prime was manipulated in a
true experiment suggests that race plays a causal role in attitudes
toward voter ID.
These results are consistent with an earlier correlational study by Wilson and Brewer. This was a 2012
telephone survey of 906 adult Americans conducted by the CPC.
Particpants were asked their party affiliation (Democrat, Republican
or Independent) and their political ideology (liberal, moderate or
conservative). White respondents were also given a three item measure of racial resentment similar to the Symbolic Racism Scale:
I resent any special
considerations that African Americans receive because it's unfair to
other Americans.
Special considerations for African
Americans place me at an unfair disadvantage because I have done
nothing to harm them.
African Americans bring up race
only when they need to make an excuse for their failure.
As indicated in the chart, Republicans
and conservatives supported voter ID laws more than Democrats and
liberals. There was also a significant correlation between racial
resentment and support for voter ID. Racial
resentment was higher among Republicans and conservatives than
Democrats and liberals, with Independents and moderates in the
middle. However, racial resentment still had a significant effect on
attitudes toward voter ID laws even when controlling for political
partisanship, ideology and several other demographic variables.
Interestingly, racial resentment had a greater effect on the
attitudes of Democrats and liberals, since Republicans and
conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws regardless of how
much racial resentment they express.
Of course, public opinion does not
automatically translate in social policy. Please see Part 2 of this
post.
In spite of declines in violent crime during the past two decades, the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and at any time in its history. Our punitive criminal justice policies have had a grossly disproportionate impact on racial minorities. While African-Americans make up 12% of the population, they are 40% of our criminal inmates. These disparities exist even where evidence suggests there are no racial differences in commission of the offense.
Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have argued for reducing the length of prison terms for nonviolent offenses, giving racial disparities in incarceration as one of their reasons. The President commented on this issue when the administration announced new guidelines for public school discipline intended to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions and dropout rates.
I remember thinking at the time that this argument could backfire. In a racist society, stating racial discrimination as a reason to reduce mass incarceration carries the risk of increasing support for punitive crime policies. Ian Haney-Lopez has noted that get-tough crime policies are a "dog whistle" used by politicians to appeal to white prejudice without referring directly to race. These coded racial appeals are used because they are effective. A new article by two Stanford social psychologists, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt, supports these speculations.
Hetey and Eberhardt note that racial disparities in imprisonment are usually treated as an unintended outcome of punitive policies. They propose instead that knowledge of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is one of the causes of widespread public support for these policies. They conducted two field experiments.
In the first, white registered voters were approached by a white female experimenter at a train station and asked to sign a petition for a ballot initiative to reduce the punitiveness of California's "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law. Before being presented with the petition, participants were shown a 40-sec video about the prison system. The video did not refer to race, but in one version, 25% of the inmates shown were black, while in the other version, 45% were black. As predicted, fewer people (27%) were willing to sign the petition in the More-Black condition than in the Less-Black condition (52%).
The second study was an online survey of white New York City residents conducted by Survey Sampling International. Near the beginning of the survey, participants were given demographic information stating that the prison population was either 40.3% or 60.3% African-American. (Both statements were true. The first referred to the U. S. prison population, while the second referred to New York City.) Later in the survey, participants were shown a petition calling for an end to the New York police's "stop-and-frisk" policy, and asked whether, if they had been approached, they would have signed it. The results confirm those of the first experiment.
A measure of fear of crime was included in the survey. The relationship between racial composition of the prison population and support for less punitive policies was mediated by fear of crime. That is, the More-Black condition produced greater fear of crime, which led to less willingness to sign the petition. However, this was not the whole story. The effect of racial composition on policy acceptance was statistically significant even when fear of crime was statistically eliminated.
The authors admit that their results pose "quite a challenge for those striving to create a more just and equal society." It appears that presenting people with evidence that a social policy leads to racial injustice has the effect of increasing, rather than reducing, support for the policy. Maybe the President should emphasize the fact that reducing the prison population would save money.
After signing his landmark 1964 Civil
Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson is said to have become
depressed. When asked what was troubling him, he said, “I think we
just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to
come.” He was wrong. It was not just the South. Although Johnson
won that fall, since 1964 a majority of whites have voted for the
Republican candidate in every presidential election. The last column of the table shows the Republican margin of victory among
white voters.
Year
Republican Candidate
Democratic Candidate
Margin
1964
Goldwater
Johnson
-29%
1968
Nixon
Humphrey
16%
1972
Nixon
McGovern
40%
1976
Ford
Carter
4%
1980
Reagan
Carter
20%
1984
Reagan
Mondale
32%
1988
Bush I
Dukakis
20%
1992
Bush I
Clinton
2%
1996
Dole
Clinton
2%
2000
Bush II
Gore
13%
2004
Bush II
Kerry
17%
2008
McCain
Obama
12%
2012
Romney
Obama
20%
In Dog Whistle Politics,
Ian Haney Lopez makes a strong case for the argument that race has
been the driving force in American politics since the '60s.
Beginning with Nixon in 1968, the Republican Party developed a
winning strategy of appealing to white voters with messages based on
symbolic racism. One of the results
is that the Republicans have increasingly become the “white man's
party.” A new set of studies by Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University suggests that what is now a bad
situation is likely to become worse.
The
Census Bureau projects that by 2042, the US will become a
majority-minority
nation. That is, more than 50% of Americans will be non-whites. The authors hypothesized that this information is threatening to white voters, and making it salient will cause them to shift toward a more
conservative ideology and become more likely to vote Republican. The
information is, in effect, a dog whistle, that Republicans will be
able to use to their advantage in future elections.
The
Craig and Richeson article presents three increasingly impressive
experiments. The first is an internet study of a random sample of
white Independent voters—that is, voters not affiliated with either
the Republican or Democratic Party—living in the Western US.
California is already a majority-minority state, and in one
condition, respondents were informed of this fact. In the control
condition, they were told that Hispanics had become roughly equal
in number to blacks in the US. Participants were then asked to
indicate the extent to which they leaned toward one of the two major
parties, and to rate their political attitudes on a 5-point scale
from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The results of
the political leaning question are shown below.
People
informed of the majority-minority status of California also rated
their political attitudes as significantly more conservative than the
control group.
A second experiment used a random sample of white American adults from
all regions and political parties. Some of the participants—the
racial shift
condition—were told that America would become a majority-minority
nation in 2042, while those in the control group were given
information about geographic mobility. Attitudes were measures
toward five social policies, such as immigration and health care
reform. The authors proposed that the conservative shift was
mediated by group status threat.
This was measured by two questions about whether the American way of
life is threatened, and whether conditions in the US are getting
better or worse. Three other potential mediators of the conservative
shift were measured, but, as expected, none of them panned out.
As in
study 1, the participants in the racial shift condition shifted in
the conservative direction on the five attitudes and those in the
control group did not. Those in the racial shift condition also
showed greater evidence of group status threat, and, as predicted,
group status threat mediated the relationship between the racial
shift information and political conservatism. (See my earlier post explaining how mediation is inferred.)
Finally,
if the conservative shift is mediated by group status threat, then
providing participants with information that mitigates that threat
should reduce the size of the shift. Their third experiment had three conditions. Some participants were given the racial shift
information. The control group was again told about geographic
mobility. And finally, there was an assuaged-threat
condition. Two sentences were added to the racial shift information
reassuring the respondents that, despite the majority-minority shift,
white privilege would be maintained. Specifically, “white
Americans are expected to continue to have higher average incomes and
wealth compared to other racial groups.” Some new social policy
questions were also added.
As
expected, only the racial shift group showed a conservative shift on
the social policy questions. The participants in the assuaged-threat
condition did not differ from the control group.
It
should be noted the authors divided their social policy questions
into those they thought were race-related, i.e.,
immigration, and those they thought were not, i.e.,
health care reform. The size of the conservative shift was the same
on both sets of questions. This result would not surprise Lopez,
since he maintains that virtually all domestic political issues have
been racialized. For example, the term “Obamacare” is a dog
whistle meant to persuade white voters—incorrectly, of course—that
their heard-earned money is being taken by the government and given
to “Obama's people”—undeserving minority citizens.
The
Craig and Richeson article may help Republicans to identify
another reliable dog whistle, although Pat Buchanan called it to their attention years ago. The majority-minority shift is sometimes
said to foretell the demise of the Republican Party. However, in the
short run, it is likely to increase the racial polarization of the
two parties, and it may help Republicans temporarily by increasing
their appeal to white voters. Lopez suggests that whether the Republican Party can remain viable in the long run may depend on
their ability to persuade some non-whites, i.e., Asian-Americans and
light-skinned Hispanics, to redefine themselves as “white.”
(W)e have got a tailspin of culture,
in our inner cities in particular, of men not working. And just
generations of men not even thinking about work or learning the value
of work, and so there's a real culture problem here that has to be
dealt with.
Rep. Paul
Ryan (D-IL)
The 2012 Republican candidate for Vice
President made this comment Wednesday (March 12) on Morning in
America, a radio talk show
hosted by Reagan administration Secretary of Education and compulsive
gambler Bill Bennett. He followed it up the next day at the
Conservative Political Action Committee convention with a denunciation of the school lunch program.
Ryan's comments about “inner city” poverty are a thinly veiled
racial attack and cannot be tolerated. When Mr. Ryan says “inner
city,” when he says “culture,” these are simply code words for
what he really means: “Black.”
Two weeks ago, I posted some candid remarks by the late Republican
campaign manager Lee Atwater, a primary advocate of the “Southern
strategy.” Atwater pointed out that, in the 1950s, it was
considered acceptable for politicians to appeal openly to the racial
fears of White voters. However, by 1981, it was necessary to use
more “abstract” language, such as favoring “states' rights”
or “cutting taxes.”
Ian
Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at
Berkeley, has a new book, Dog Whistle Politics,
about the history and current relevance of race-baiting in political
campaigns. (I haven't read it yet; I have it on order.) He uses the
metaphor of the dog whistle since it is inaudible to the human ear,
but reliably influences the dog's behavior. Dog whistle political
appeals seem on the surface not to be about race, but they are
understood as racial by White voters. The fact that these statements
refer to something else gives the politician plausible deniability
when he or she is accused of racism. Here is Dr. Haney Lopez discussing
his book on Democracy Now.
In recent years, the Republican Party's domestic political message has become
almost synonymous with symbolic racism. It is intended to persuade
White Americans that social welfare programs primarily benefit urban
Blacks and other minorities, and that the overrepresentation of
Blacks among the poor is due to lack of motivation to work.
Government is portrayed as stealing their hard-earned tax dollars and
giving them to lazy poor people. But the people influenced by this message are actually voting contrary to their economic self-interest, since, when elected, Republicans pass policies
that primarily benefit the wealthy. These government policies have been the primary cause of the large increase in inequality that has occurred over the past 30 years.
Ryan's remarks imply that poverty is largely an urban
phenomenon, but that is not the case. These data from the U. S.
census show that the poverty rate is higher in rural areas—not
coincidentally, the Republican base.
It
is also not the case that a disproportionate amount of tax money goes
to minority recipients. The Congressional Budget Office reports that
while African-Americans make up 12% of the population and 22% of the
poor, they only receive 14% of government benefits. Non-Hispanic
Whites, on the other hand, are 49% of the poor and receive 69% of
government benefits.
Ryan's response to criticism of his “Blacks are lazy” comments
illustrates the role of plausible deniability in dog whistle
politics. On the one hand, given Ryan's prominence in the Republican
Party, it is totally implausible that his remarks were thoughtless or unintentional. The Southern strategy is Campaigning 101 for
Republican candidates. Yet the corporate media accept his denials
without skepticism. In fact, they almost never call out Republicans
for race-baiting. Could it be because Ryan's budget proposals, which
call for cutting social spending and reducing taxes on the rich,
coincide with the policy preferences of the small number of wealthy owners and managers of
the corporate media?
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Lee Atwater (1981)
This quote comes from an anonymous interview given by Republican campaign manager Lee Atwater, then a member of the Reagan administration, to a political scientist in 1981. (You can find the entire interview here.) It describes the Republicans' Southern strategy, in which they used race-baiting to successfully persuade Southern Whites to vote against their economic self-interest and realigned political party membership in the South. It was originated by operatives for Richard Nixon, but Atwater was the best known practitioner of this strategy, which still strongly influences American politics.
Atwater became a rising star in 1980 by defeating a South Carolina Democratic Congressman in part by using fake telephone surveys that falsely implied that the Congressman was an NAACP member. He was known for his ruthless use of “dirty tricks,” including false rumors about his opponents' mental health or alleged criminal connections. He reached the height of his fame as manager of George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, where he approved the infamous Willie Horton ad, that played on White fears of Black criminals. Following the election, he became chairman of the Republican National Committee. He died of brain cancer in 1991 at the age of 40. After learning that he had terminal cancer, he claimed to have experienced a religious conversion and apologized for some of his behavior.
Atwater, a South Carolina native, was an accomplished rock guitarist and fan of the blues. His album, Red Hot and Blue, with B. B. King and several Memphis musicians, won a Grammy in 1991. Atwater always denied he was a racist, citing his personal relationships with blues artists as evidence. His biography raises interesting questions. Can you deliberately pursue policies that are harmful to African-Americans by using campaign tactics that appeal to White racism and still credibly claim that you are not a racist? In other words, can you repeatedly engage in racist behavior without developing racist attitudes? You would expect that Atwater would have experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance. If Atwater is to be believed—and given all the lies he told, there is no reason he should be—he must have been a master at compartmentalizing the different parts of his life.
All of this has come back to our attention because Atwater arranged a concert in Washington on January 21, 1989, the day after Bush's inauguration, featuring a number of blues and R&B artists. Among those I know to have participated were William Bell, Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Steve Cropper, Willie Dixon, Dr. John, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Eddie Floyd, Delbert McClinton, Sam Moore, Billy Preston, Percy Sledge, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Louis Walker and Ron Wood.
The concert seems to have aroused considerable cognitive dissonance in the performers at least, but the consensus seemed to be that you don't turn down an opportunity to play for the President, no matter how much you dislike his politics. Willie Dixon engaged in some low-key subversion by wearing a “Jesse Jackson for President” button as he performed.
The concert, long believed to have been lost, has been rediscovered. According to an article in last Friday's New York Times, excerpts from the concert, A Celebration of Blues and Soul, will be shown on PBS sometime in March. A search of the WQED (Pittsburgh) website turned up no match. The entire concert is to be released on DVD on May 6. Both programs are said to have been almost completely stripped of their political context. If I get any further information about when the PBS program will air, I'll update this post.
Authoritarian submission—a
high degree of obedience to authorities who are seen as established
and legitimate in the society in which you live.
Conventionalism—a
high degree of adherence to social conventions endorsed by society
and its established authorities.
Authoritarian
aggression—aggressive
behavior directed especially at unconventional people, and
especially when it is seen as approved by established authorities.
Authoritarians
are said to have a “bicyclist's personality,” bowing to those
above them in the social hierarchy, and kicking those below.
Measures of authoritarianism are positively correlated with measures
of political conservatism and prejudice toward racial and cultural
minorities.
A new study by Michal Tagar and others looks at how early authoritarianism
can be detected in children and whether it is related to their
parents' level of authoritarianism. The participants were
pre-schoolers, aged 3 and 4. They completed a task designed to
measure selective trust, which had two parts. In the familiarization
phase, the children watched
twelve short video clips of three unfamiliar adults each labeling
four common objects, such as a shoe. The three adults behaved
differently. One of them, the conventional
speaker, used the conventional names for the four objects, i.e.,
called the shoe a “shoe.” A second, the unconventional
speaker, used novel names for the objects, i.e.,
called the shoe a “ball.” The third, the ambiguous
speaker, used conventional names for two of the objects and
unconventional names for the other two.
This
was followed by a test phase
in which the three adults were shown naming each of four totally
unfamiliar objects, calling them by unfamiliar names. After each
video, the children were asked whether they believed the name given
by the speaker was right. This provided a measure of trust in each
of the three adults—the number of times (out of a possible four)
they believed the speaker was correct.
One of
the parents of each child was tested separately and given two tests
measuring authoritarianism, one related to child-rearing values and
the other measuring social conformity.
Two hypotheses were tested, based on two of the three clusters mentioned
earlier. Conventionalism was measured by comparing trust in the
conventional and unconventional speakers. Of course, you would
expect all the children to trust someone who calls a shoe a “shoe”
more than someone who calls it a “soapdish.” But the authors
predicted that this differential trust would be greater for children
of authoritarian parents. This hypothesis was confirmed for both
measures of authoritarianism, as shown in the chart. (In these analyses, the children's gender and IQ were statistically controlled.)
The second hypothesis tested authoritarian submission as measured by a
general tendency to respect adult authority. They predicted that the
children of more authoritarian parents would be more likely to trust
the ambiguous speaker than children of less authoritarian parents.
This too was confirmed for both measures of authoritarianism.
I have
some concerns about they way they manipulated conventionalism. While
it's true that our names for everyday objects are arbitrary,
using “correct” names is not optional. If you are to
function in society, you must call things as others call them. I
would have preferred them to define unconventional behavior in terms
of something more discretionary, such as clothing or hair style.
Discrimination against people with a nonconforming appearance is more
consistent with the everyday meaning of authoritarianism. In
addition, in order to demonstrate that authoritarian kids are more trusting of adult
authority, it would have been better to show that they trust adults more than other children.
These
results are broadly consistent with George Lakoff's theory of political socialization in which parents transmit their political
ideologies to their children through the use of two child-rearing
styles. In the Strict Father family, moral authoritarity resides
with the father, who teaches his children obedience to authority
until they have enough self-discipline to function independently. In
the Nurturant Parent Model, both parents are equally responsible for
the nurturance of children, who are taught that empathy and
cooperation with others are the ways to happiness. Most families
fall somewhere between these extremes, but the Strict Father family
would presumably be more likely to reproduce authoritarianism.
As Tagar and his colleagues point out, authoritarianism is usually
assumed to develop during late adolescence, around the same time that
political socialization takes place. But their study suggests that
political orientation is determined at a much earlier age. It
reminds me of recent studies by Mahzarin Banaji using the Implicit
Association Test, a subtle measure of unconscious racial bias.
(Please see my earlier post about how implicit racial bias is
measured.) She found that children aged 6 and 10 show about the same
amount of preference for White over Black faces as adults do. Using
a slightly different measure, she was able to detect significant
own-race bias as early as age 3. (On the other hand, when asked to
bluntly state whom they prefer, stated preference for Whites declines
from age 6 to age 10 to adulthood.)
If
authoritarianism and racism are taught at an early age, they may be
more of a cause of political party affiliation than a consequence.
One of my academic heroes, media theorist Stuart Hall died Monday
at the age of 82. He was diabetic and had been ill for some time.
Hall was born in Jamaica, came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes
scholar, and stayed on as the leader of the Cultural Studies
movement. From 1964-1979, he was the director of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He taught at
the Open University from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. He was
the founding editor of the New Left Review.
Generally speaking, cultural studies is
about how people are taught to categorize one another by
nationality, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Hall was
one of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously. We do
not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of media
representations. A lot of what seems to us to be “common sense”
is actually the opinions and perspectives of our culture transmitted
through the media. The “common sense” viewpoint is usually
motivated by social class interests that attempt to manipulate our
consciousness for ideological reasons. Cultures conceal their
ideologies, however, behind a veil of “nature,” claiming that
their own cultural practices are “natural” and everyone else's is
“unnatural.” (“Of course”Santa Claus is a White man.)
Hall originated the encoding-decoding model. This model proposes that the mass media audience is not
passive, but actively participates in understanding and interpreting
the text. Messages are constructed (encoded) by media producers and
interpreted (decoded) by audiences. Since every media text is
polysemic, or many-layered, there is considerable variability
in how a message can be decoded. Hall divides readings of a text
into three broad categories. Think, for example, of a television
commercial.
The preferred, dominant
or hegemonic reading is one in which the audience fully
accepts the producer's message. The reader accepts the dominant
ideology and “buys” the product.
An oppositional or
resistant reading is
one in which the reader uses an alternative frame of reference to
decode the message in a totally contrary way. The reader challenges
the dominant ideology, for example, by thinking that all
advertisements are lies.
A negotiated reading is a
mixture of acceptance and rejection of the preferred meaning that
was encoded in the text.
A key concept in Hall's theory is representation. The media do not reflect the real world, they
represent (or “re-present”) it. Prior to Hall, the older view
was that media representations can be compared to reality, and any
discrepancy between the two constitutes media bias. But Hall
questioned whether politically-charged events have any reality
independent of the media. What is the “true meaning” of the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Both sides watch the same newscast and see it as biased against them. Hall would argue
that there is no fixed meaning of the conflict, and no way of
reaching consensus on what would be an unbiased representation.
Hall's theory was that the true meaning
of an object or event is determined largely by how it is
representated, or as he says, the representations are constitutive
of the event. Media practices serve to define reality for us. The mass media are owned and controlled by a small number of giant corporations. The people who direct these corporations attempt to
fix meaning for their own ends and interests. Collectively, our
representations of the external world constitute ideology—the
set of beliefs and values by which people make sense of the world
they live in. The dominant ideology is the version of events
used by the ruling class to maintain or improve their social
position, which is, of course, the representation of the world
presented by the corporate media.
Examples are easy to find. What the
media define as realistic public policy is actually only a small
segment of what is possible, a segment defined by the space between
our center-right political party (called “Democrats”) and our far
right party (“Republicans.”) Social class differences, when
discussed at all, are presented as justified by the superior
abilities and effort of the rich. Social problems such as crime and
poverty are seen as caused by personal defects of the
individual, rather than by situations or structural arrangements.
Personal problems are “solved” through purchase of a consumer
product, as when loneliness is cured by mouthwash. Entertainment is
used as a distraction from depressing life circumstances. A
person with no personal power can still get satisfaction by watching
the Steelers beat the crap out of their opponent on a Sunday
afternoon.
Not surprisingly, Hall was particularly
interested in how Black people are represented in the media, and
wrote about the culural, political and economic interests that are
served by creating irrational fear of young Black men, i.e., the
“prison-industrial complex.” Although people can always
talk back to the media, Hall saw media representations as a highly
effective way of controlling thoughts and behavior, often leading to
a false consciousness in
which people vote in ways that are contrary to their self-interest.
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the
street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then
look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.
Jesse
Jackson
This is partly a housekeeping post.
Several times, I've referred, or wanted top refer, to the Implicit
Association Test (IAT), but didn't want to take the time to explain
it. In the future, I can direct the reader to this post before
continuing.
You've probably figured out what
happened. The first couple of tasks—classifying faces as black or
white and words as good or bad—were pretty easy. This was largely
a warmup to familiarize you with the procedure. But it became more
difficult when you had to respond to two conceptual dimensions at a
time. On some trial blocks, you were to press one key if either the
face was White or the word was good, and the other key if either the
face was Black or the word was bad. There were also some trials in
which you were to press one key if either the face was White or the
word was bad, and the other key if either the face was Black or the
word was good.
The computer measured your reaction
times. Trials on which you made an error or took an unusually long
time were discarded. If you responded more quickly during the
White-good/Black-bad trials than the White-bad/Black-good trials, the
feedback stated that you had an automatic preference for White people
compared to Black people. If you responded more quickly during the
White-bad/Black-good trials, you had an automatic preference for
Black people. The words "slight," "moderate" and "strong" indicate the degree of preference. An automatic preference for White people means you
implicitly associate Whiteness with goodness and/or Blackness with
badness. The more closely two concepts are associated, the easier it
is to respond to them as a single unit. These implicit associations
are completely automatic and are almost certainly based on past
activation of the concepts through social interaction and media
consumption.
The majority of Americans have an
automatic preference for White people—70%, as opposed to only 12%
who have an automatic preference for Black people. The responses of
African-Americans are less predictable than those of Whites. About
40% prefer White people, 40% prefer Blacks and 20% have no
preference. This suggests a conflict between the messages
African-Americans get from their home and neighborhood, and the from
mass media, where they encounter primarily negative stereotypes of
Black people. The reponses of Asians and Hispanics are
similar to those of Whites.
The results of the IAT suggest that we
may not be willing to report our racial attitudes honestly, or that
we may not be aware of our own racial attitudes. Many people respond
with shock and disbelief when they get their results. I've heard
many rationalizations from students. But all the obvious contaminants such as position preferences and order effects are
corrected for in the data. My own automatic preference for White
people is hard to take given my lifelong attraction to Black culture,
but it pales by comparison to Jesse Jackson's self-reported
discomfort.
Measures of racial attitudes fall into
two broad categories—explicit or self-report measures, in
which people are asked their attitudes directly, and implicit
measures like the IAT that are designed to circumvent our defenses.
There are two types of explicit measures of prejudice. Old-fashioned
racism refers to agreement with statements that are obviously
racist, such as the belief that Blacks are less intelligent than
Whites. Because expressing blatantly racist attitudes is socially
unacceptable, most people score low on measures of old-fashioned
racism, although it does predict membership in the Republican Party.
Modern or symbolic racism (sometimes called racial
resentment) refers to prejudice that is revealed in subtle,
indirect ways, through political beliefs such as the claim that
Blacks receive more favored treatment than they deserve. These
beliefs are correlated both with endorsement of social policies
harmful to Blacks and negative emotional reactions to Black people.
In effect, modern racism takes advantage of the fact that claiming to
be a political conservative gives people plausible deniability of
their racist attitudes. Implicit and explicit racial attitudes are positively related, but not strongly (r = +.35, approximately).
Can you have an automatic preference
for White people and still be free of prejudice and discrimination?
In terms of the central metaphor of this blog, the IAT represents
System 1 thought, occurring without effort or conscious awareness.
We encounter a Black person and stereotyped thoughts just “happen.”
But the conscious, effortful, deliberate thought of System 2 can override our automatic behavioral tendencies. We can choose to
disregard the stereotyped information that automatically came to
mind. One way of understanding prejudice is to note that White
people low in prejudice recognize their automatic biases and try to consciously control them, while White people high in prejudice either
are unaware of their automatic biases or see no reason to disregard
them.
In 2010, social psychologist Eric Knowles and two colleagues published a study showing that some of the
opposition to health care reform results from prejudice toward
African-Americans and dislike of Barack Obama. The research was a
panel study in which participants were interviewed several times over
the internet.
During the first contact, Knowles
measured implicit prejudice against blacks using a variation of the
Implicit Association Test. This test measures an automatic tendency
to associate white Americans with the concept “good” and black
Americans with the concept “bad.” This bias this is
unintentional and occurs without our awareness. Knowles found that
the people high in implicit prejudice toward African-Americans
reported more negative attitudes toward Obama before the 2008
election and were less likely to vote for him. This is one of
several studies to show that racial prejudice influenced votes in both the 2008 and 2012 elections.
These negative attitudes toward blacks spilled over onto Obama's policies. People high in implicit
prejudice were more opposed to health care reform in 2009, before the
Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed. How do we know their
opposition to health care reform was due to prejudice rather than
political conservatism, which is highly correlated with prejudice in
this country? Knowles did an experiment in which he described a
health care plan. For half the participants, it was presented as
Bill Clinton's 1993 plan and for the other half, it was presented as
Obama's plan. (The actual description was of features that both
plans had in common.) Implicit prejudice had no effect on attitudes
toward the “Clinton” plan, but when it was attributed to Obama,
the more prejudiced participants were more opposed to it. This study was replicated two years later with the same results.
Fast forward to 2014. Aaron Chatterji and colleagues just published a study asking why members of the House
of Representatives did or did not vote for the ACA. The study only
included Democrats, since only one of 177 Republicans voted for the
bill. The researchers looked at whether three variables were related
to the legislators' votes: (1) the percentage of their constituents
without health insurance, (2) Obama's margin of victory or defeat in
the 2008 election in their district, and (3) political contributions
from health insurance companies. The statistical analysis also
controlled for eight demographic variables, such as the age and
racial composition of the district, and five Congressperson
characteristics, such as their own 2008 margin of victory. The results were:
Percentage of constituents without
health insurance was unrelated to the legislators' votes.
Obama's margin of victory made a
significant difference. The 219 Democrats who voted for the ACA
came from districts in which Obama's average margin of victory was
+30%, while the 39 Democrats who voted against it came from
districts in which Obama lost by slightly under 10%. Obama's margin
of victory accounted for 47% of the variance in these
Representatives' votes.
Political contributions from the
health insurance industry also had no relationship to voting.
The authors note that if the
Congresspeople had the best interests of their constituents in mind,
there should have been greater support for the ACA from
Representatives whose districts contained a higher percentage of
uninsured people. At different places in the article, they refer to this as either ignoring their constituents'
preferences or ignoring their constituents' needs. The latter is more accurate,
since they have no measure of voter preference. Maybe some of the people who needed the ACA did not prefer it (or did not know they
preferred it). It is primarily the needs of their poorer
constituents that these legislators ignored. This is no surprise,
since there is a growing body of research showing that politicians
votes are consistent with the opinions of their constituents in the
top third of the income distribution, but the opinions of the lower
and middle thirds are disregarded.
Of course, Obama's margin of victory or
defeat is also a salient indicator of constituent preferences, and
these Congresspeople were very responsive to it. However, the
presidential election was not a referendum on health care reform,
which played only a minor role in the campaign, but is more
reasonably regarded as a measure of Obama's popularity. It appears
that the legislators voted for or against the ACA based on the
evidence of Obama's popularity in their district.
The common thread among both studies is
that both citizens' and legislators' attitudes toward health care
reform seem to be less influenced by the substance of the policy than
by attitudes toward the President himself. At the present time, politicians in 24 states (including Pennsylvania) are ignoring the
needs of their poorer citizens by refusing to implement the ACA's
provision to expand Medicaid. Is this decision also driven by
attitudes toward the President?
By the way, the fact that political
contributions from insurance companies had no effect on voting
doesn't really contradict the hypothesis that politicians are
influenced by campaign contributions. The health insurance industry
never clearly favored or opposed the ACA, since it has both
advantages and disadvantages for them. In fact, the authors never
predicted whether health insurance money would make a Congressperson
more or less likely to vote for the bill.
