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標題[評論] Obama and the psychology of the color barrier.
時間Tue May 13 15:52:10 2008
The New Republic
http://tinyurl.com/5jcydm
The Big Race
by John B. Judis
Obama and the psychology of the color barrier.
Post Date Wednesday, May 28, 2008
The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is
also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment
by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition.
More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign
season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their
Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and
Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight
basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.
Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race
looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has
played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama
among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently,
Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he
will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.
What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of
political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been
combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has
remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny
that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali
Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card.
Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political
psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of
other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the
primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their
findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the
American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their
own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a
sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers
something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential
candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.
If you were born before 1970 or if you read public-opinion polls, then you
cannot doubt the profound transformation wrought by the civil rights era. In
1944, the National Opinion Research Center asked whether "Negroes should have
as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or [whether] white
people should have the first chance at any kind of job"--and 55 percent still
thought white people should have the "first chance." By 1972, only 3 percent
thought so. But some academics--noting the bitterness of battles over busing,
affirmative action, and aid to cities, as well as the evolution of the GOP
into a virtually all-white party--reasoned that racial prejudice remained,
even if it was no longer overtly expressed. They believed it had simply
changed form. Their challenge was to define and to demonstrate the existence
of this new racism.
Many social scientists had long rejected the possibility that humans might
harbor unconscious attitudes different from their conscious behavior. But, in
trying to explain the persistence of racial prejudice, political
psychologists were forced to hypothesize different levels of awareness and
motivation. On the highest level was public moral reflection guided by social
norms--which led to Trent Lott being pilloried when he famously said in 2002
that, if Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had been elected president, the country
could have avoided "all these problems." Beneath this, however, was a realm
of knee-jerk opinion that might contradict a person's moral reflections; and
still beneath that were unconscious attitudes, which, like a person's
knee-jerk opinions, were often at odds with his or her public moral
reflections. If racial prejudice persisted, it was on these deeper levels.
Political psychologists devised new tests to uncover these sentiments. First,
they crafted survey questions aimed at unearthing what they called "symbolic
racism," "modern racism," and, most recently, "racial resentments," which
ascribe to blacks as a group certain negative attributes or undeserved
advantages. For example, researchers asked respondents whether they agreed or
disagreed with statements such as "It's really a matter of some people not
trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as
well off as whites" or "Over the past few years, blacks have gotten more
economically than they deserve."
Experimenters then inserted questions like these into the American National
Election Studies (ANES), extensive biennial surveys funded by the National
Science Foundation. The answers revealed a degree of racial resentment that
wasn't apparent from more explicit questions about racial bias. In 1986, for
instance, 59 percent of respondents agreed that blacks were not trying hard
enough (only 27 percent disagreed), while 67 percent thought blacks should
work "their way up ... without any special favors." Psychologists David Sears
and Donald Kinder, as well as others, found that this racial resentment was
the single most important factor--more important than even conservative
ideology or political partisanship--in explaining strong opposition to a host
of government programs that either directly or indirectly benefited
minorities. Of course, that doesn't mean there couldn't be principled
conservative opposition to government-guaranteed equal employment or urban
aid. But, according to the political psychologists, racial resentment played
the largest role in fueling public skepticism.
The answers also revealed which groups within society continued to harbor
racial resentment. With the help of Harvard doctoral student Scott Winship, I
looked at the levels of racial resentment in ANES data from 1988, 1992, and
2000 (the questions were omitted in 1996). What Winship and I found was that
resentment was highest among males rather than females, the middle class
rather than the wealthy or poor, those lacking a college degree, those who
worked in skilled or semi-skilled blue collar jobs or as laborers, and
residents of small towns in the Midwest and South. Does that profile sound
familiar? It's more or less a description of the white working-class voters
who have spurned Obama and with whom John Kerry and Al Gore had trouble. The
only groups that didn't evince racial animosity toward blacks were voters
with post-graduate degrees and, of course, African Americans. Hispanics were
nearly as prejudiced as whites, and a group labeled "other" that includes
Asian Americans was even more so--a partial explanation, perhaps, for why
Obama fared so poorly among these groups in California. Clearly, racial
resentment persisted--just in a more nuanced form.
In fact, the structure of this modern racism was even more complicated than
the ANES data suggested. In a study published in 1995, four psychologists
from Indiana University recounted taking a group of subjects who had earlier
taken the racism test (the questions had been interspersed among scores of
other questions) and giving it to them again. This time, however, a black
experimenter conducted some of the tests and a white experimenter the others.
The psychologists discovered that, when the interviewer was black, white
respondents scored substantially lower on the racism scale than before. This
meant that gut-level reactions could be easily influenced by moral reflection
and social norms. What psychologists needed was a method of measuring
prejudice that elicited immediate emotional reactions rather than the
products of deliberation.
Toward that end, they devised tests that measured racial attitudes without
subjects knowing what was happening or being able to adjust their responses
to social norms. In a study that appeared in 1989, University of Wisconsin
psychologist Patricia Devine flashed words on a screen faster than her
subjects could recognize them. Some of the words, like "blacks," were
associated with African Americans; others were neutral. She then asked
subjects whether a person's actions in a deliberately ambiguous story about a
customer wanting his money back signified hostility or not. After words
associated primarily with African Americans were flashed, the subjects rated
the person's actions decidedly more "hostile" than after predominately
neutral words were flashed. This suggested to Devine that terms associated
with blacks were priming unconscious stereotypes about aggressiveness or
hostility.
Another kind of test--known as an implicit association test--used the time it
took to complete word association exercises to unmask stereotypes.
Psychologists would ask subjects to associate positive and negative
adjectives with African American and European American faces by pressing
different keys on a computer. At each interval in the experiment, subjects
would be told which kind of adjectives to pair with which subject. If a
subject regularly took longer to pair positive words with a black face than
he did negative words, that indicated unconscious racial bias.
Using data from more than 15,000 self-selected subjects who took the test on
a website, psychologists Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek
found that the same sorts of respondents who had registered higher on the
racial resentment scale were more inclined to associate negative adjectives
with an African American face. For instance, subjects who had not graduated
from college displayed more prejudice than those who had. Men also were more
prejudiced than women.
In addition, according to questions they answered before taking the test,
there was a sharp disparity between what subjects said they believed and what
the test showed. For instance, only 32 percent of high school graduates said
they favored whites over African Americans, but in the test 64 percent did.
This disparity suggests that, in answering questions about what they
believed, subjects opted for prevailing norms over private sentiments. They
did not want to appear racist, even though, at some level, they were.
But the problem with implicit association tests--or tests that use subliminal
cues--is deciding what they mean in the real world. Do the unconscious racial
feelings they uncover affect the way whites view policy, parties, and
politicians? And, if so, how decisively?
In elections over the last three decades, Republican politicians have
repeatedly used ads, push polls, and surrogates to appeal to white voters'
racial fears and resentments. These ranged from George H.W. Bush's Willie
Horton ad in 1988 to Republican Bob Corker's infamous "Harold, call me" ad in
his 2006 Tennessee Senate race against African American Harold Ford, which
appealed to long-standing fears about black sexuality.
In The Race Card, Mendelberg argues that political ads can indeed awaken
underlying racial stereotypes and attitudes, just like a black face flashing
subliminally on a screen. She recounts the story of the Horton ads, which
first appeared in June but became widespread in October. While the press
initially presented them as being about crime, Horton's picture also
appeared--stirring unconscious racial associations. Using the ANES survey,
Mendelberg drew connections between the ad's prominence and support for Bush
against Michael Dukakis. From June to October, she shows, there was a mild
correlation between how high a voter ranked on the racial resentment scale
and his or her support for Bush. After October 1, when the ads were more
widely aired and discussed, the correlation became much stronger.
In a similar vein, Nicholas Valentino, Vincent Hutchings, and Ismail White
from the University of Michigan ran a series of experiments in 2000 using a
hypothetical George W. Bush campaign ad that promised to cut taxes, reduce
wasteful spending, and reform the health care system. There were three
versions of the ad, all with the same text: One showed neutral images of
laboratory workers and medical x-rays; another showed a black person counting
money and a black mother and child in an office just as the narrator
announced Bush's opposition to spending "tax dollars on wasteful government
programs"; a third showed white people in the same roles. After watching the
ads, subjects were asked to fill out questionnaires that included measures of
racial resentment and their preference between Bush and Gore. The findings
were similar to Mendelberg's. After seeing the neutral ad or the ad picturing
undeserving whites, subjects who scored higher on the racial resentment test
were no more likely to support Bush than subjects who scored lower. But, when
subjects saw the ad picturing undeserving blacks, there was a strong
correlation between how high they scored on the racism scale and their
support for Bush. "Overall," the political psychologists wrote, "these
results suggest that racial cues make racial concerns more accessible in
memory, subsequently boosting the impact of these concerns on candidate
evaluations."
Mendelberg's most controversial claim is that these ads work best when the
appeal is implicit. If the appeal is explicit, she argues--that is, if
politicians actually say that blacks are undeserving--then they lose support
because they have violated the norm against racism. Although voters will
respond unconsciously to an implicit appeal that they don't perceive as
racist, they will recoil for reasons of conscience or social disapproval to
an appeal that either is, or is seen as, racist. Mendelberg asserts that Bush
actually lost support to Dukakis in the closing weeks of the 1988 campaign
because, on October 21, Jesse Jackson denounced the Horton ad as racist and
Dukakis's running mate Lloyd Bentsen followed suit two days later. That made
explicit what had previously been implicit.
But other psychologists have questioned Mendelberg's theory of implicit and
explicit racial communications. Two political scientists, Gregory Huber and
John Lapinski, tried to test Mendelberg's theory by comparing the effects of
two anti-welfare ads: one using a visual image of a black recipient and the
other adding explicit language about "too many welfare recipients, especially
blacks," taking "advantage of our tax dollars." They found that the explicit
message did not produce a "significantly more liberal policy opinion than the
implicit message." Karen Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of
Maryland, is also skeptical about Mendelberg's theory. "My own work in the
context of local politics suggests that fairly explicit racial appeals
succeed quite often," she says.
Some distinctions might help preserve what is valid in Mendelberg's argument.
First, one has to distinguish between kinds of explicit messages. If a
message obviously violates norms against old-fashioned, pre-civil rights
racism--as Lott's did--then it is likely to backfire; but if it leaves any
room for disagreement about whether it is racist, then it may not. Second, a
lot depends on which voters candidates are appealing to. For example,
researchers have shown that white women are more likely than white men to
react negatively to racist appeals. George Allen learned this lesson in his
2006 Senate race when he lost support among female voters in northern
Virginia after uttering a racial slur against an Indian-American.
But there are clearly limits to how much charging racism can help Democrats.
During the 1988 election, Dukakis did surge in the last weeks, but it was at
best only partly attributable to denunciations of the Horton ad as racist--at
the time, most political analysts attributed it to Dukakis's belated adoption
of a populist economic appeal. And Dukakis's recovery in those last weeks by
no means made up for the ground he lost in the first weeks of October when
the Horton ad dominated the airwaves. Even Mendelberg acknowledges that the
Horton ad "helped George Bush win the election." Similarly, in the 2006
Tennessee Senate race, Ford was able to make up some ground after Corker's
"Harold, call me" ad was denounced as racist, but he was not able to undo the
damage the ad initially caused.
So making an implicit racial appeal explicit can help an embattled Democrat
among some groups, some of the time--but it is hardly a surefire defense
against the race card. That leaves one other option: changing the subject. In
a campaign where a large proportion of voters would score high on a racial
resentment test, a politician's best hope of countering the race card may be
to simply emphasize a more important issue. Mendelberg herself acknowledges
that "an effective defense against implicitly racial appeals requires an
issue that trumps race in the considerations of white voters. In the
nineteenth century, this issue was primarily sectionalism--northern whites'
resentment of southern whites' secession. In the twentieth century, this
issue was primarily economic prosperity and cherished social welfare
programs." Bill Clinton used this approach successfully in 1992--a year when
the Los Angeles riots had inflamed racial sentiments--to win back white
working-class voters who had left the party in prior decades.
What, then, can the political psychology of race tell us about the current
primaries and the coming general election? Clearly, Obama gained some votes
in the early primaries from college-educated Democrats who liked the idea of
an African American candidate transcending the historic conflict over race.
And, if he had not been running against a popular female candidate, he might
have won more support among white women. But Obama also lost voters to racial
prejudice.
One indication is the exit polls. The percentage of voters who backed Hillary
Clinton (or, earlier, John Edwards) while saying that the "race of the
candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote is a fair proxy for the
percentage of primary voters who were disinclined to support Obama because he
is black. That number topped 9 percent in New Jersey; in Ohio and
Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states, it was more than 11 percent. And
that's among Democratic primary voters, who are, on average, more liberal
than the Democrats who vote in general elections.
Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which exploded into the
news after the Ohio primary, may do lasting damage to his candidacy by
undermining his attempt to transcend race. Wright's words tie Obama to the
stereotype of the angry, hostile--and also unpatriotic--black who is seen as
hating both whites and white America. Wright turns Obama into a "black
candidate" like Jackson or Sharpton. And, as a black candidate, Obama falls
prey to a set of stereotypes about black politicians.
Some of these have to do with abilities. A 1995 study found that voters
believe black politicians "lack competence on major issues." Other
stereotypes relate to ideology. Several studies have shown that if subjects
compare a black and white candidate with roughly equal political positions,
they will nevertheless see the black candidate as more liberal. Obama is
already vulnerable to charges of inexperience, and, after Wright surfaced, he
fell prey to an ideological stereotype as well. Whereas he benefited in the
initial primaries and caucuses from being seen as middleof-the-road or even
conservative, his strongest support has recently come from more liberal
voters. In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among voters who classified
themselves as "very liberal" by 55 to 45 percent, but he lost "somewhat
conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent.
In a national Pew poll, Obama's support among "very liberal" voters jumped
seven points between January and May, while his support among "moderates"
dropped by two points. Since Obama's actual policies are, on the whole, no
more liberal than Clinton's (his health care plan, for instance, is
inarguably more conservative), these trends strongly suggest that some voters
are stereotyping him because of his race.
If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he should be able to inherit the
white women who backed Hillary Clinton. As political psychologists have
shown, these voters should be largely amenable to his candidacy. He should
also continue to enjoy an advantage among white professionals. But Obama is
likely to continue having trouble with white working-class voters in the
Midwest--voters who tend to score high on racial resentment and implicit
association tests and who, arguably, decided the 2004 election with their
votes in Ohio. Obama will also have trouble with Latinos and Asians, groups
that score high on both indexes, and that can be important in states like
California. It's not hard to quantify Obama's problem: If 9 to 12 percent of
Democratic primary voters in swing states have been reluctant to support him
because he is black, one can assume that, in the general election, 15 to 20
percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents may not support him
for the same reason.
Can Obama surmount these obstacles? If the strong version of Mendelberg's
thesis is correct, then the very fact that Obama is African American will
undercut any appeals to racial fears or resentments. And, if elections were
held in the manner of the Iowa caucus, where voters publicly debate their
positions and where Obama won substantial white workingclass support, then
Mendelberg's stronger thesis might well prove true. But elections are held in
the privacy of a voting booth, where a voter can give voice to fears and
resentments without danger of being heard. Obama may be able to sway some
white voters to his side by drawing attention to race, but probably not
enough to fully compensate for the disadvantage he faces.
If addressing racial resentments directly is not the answer, what is? As
Mendelberg also suggests, it's changing the subject--doing what the
Republicans of the 1870s and the Democrats of the 1990s did. This year, that
means diverting voters' attention from the politics of race to the plight of
the economy and the continuing quagmire in Iraq.
In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid
nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America's racial
history continues to influence the calculations of voters--sometimes near the
forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their
unconscious. For liberals, acknowledging these obstacles is the first step to
blunting them. If Obama can focus the election on the economy and Iraq, he
could very well win in spite of the angry words of Reverend Wright and 200
years of both old- fashioned racism and newfangled racial resentment. If he
can't, he is likely to suffer the same fate as Michael Dukakis--and this time
it won't take a Willie Horton commercial.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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◆ From: 122.127.64.57
※ 編輯: swallow73 來自: 122.127.64.57 (05/13 15:53)
推 NPLNT:請問吞嚥大縮址後面的那一段怎麼不見了? 05/13 17:40
→ swallow73:真是非常的抱歉。謝謝提醒,我馬上補回。 05/13 18:31
※ 編輯: swallow73 來自: 122.127.64.57 (05/13 18:31)
推 NPLNT:謝謝 05/13 20:32
推 NPLNT:我發現吞嚥大的所指跑出來的好像是另一篇耶... 05/13 20:52
→ swallow73:合不攏嘴了,為什麼會有這種失誤呢?還是謝謝N大幫忙抓漏 05/13 21:00
※ 編輯: swallow73 來自: 122.127.64.57 (05/13 21:01)
推 going70:PUSH 05/13 21:20