An Examination of the Racial Attitudes of Black U.S. Residents in Relation to Shifts in Systemic Racial Inequalities

Abstract

Racial progress in the U.S. over the last several decades has been mixed. Although school segregation is no longer legal and the country has now had a Black president, the racial wealth gap continues to widen. In the current work, we examine whether racial progress—reductions in racial inequalities in key structural areas—in recent decades predicts implicit and explicit racial attitudes among Black U.S. residents (N = 38,448). We observed some evidence of increased pro-Black attitudes in states where racial inequalities in income, unemployment, and being uninsured decreased over time. However, the most robust association was between decreased racial inequalities in high school completion rates and decreased pro-Black attitudes. Thus, the current findings provide empirical evidence convergent with the notion that the public education system in the U.S. might be contributing to internalized racism among Black people in the U.S.

Internalization or Polarization: Community-Level Associations of Shifts in White Americans’ Attitudes with Black Americans’ Attitudes

“…Black unemployment and incarceration were associated with decreases in Black residents' relative preference for White Americans on explicit but not implicit measures. It is unclear why there would be divergent associations between structural racism and implicit versus explicit attitudes, especially given that the direction of effects on the two measures is often similar (e.g., Cha et al, 2022;Payne et al, 2019;Vuletich et al, 2023). While some indicators of structural racism have been linked with increased relative preference for Whites (e.g., higher Black socioeconomic mobility), others have been associated with decreased relative preference for Whites (e.g., Black poverty).…”

“…As implicit and explicit measures sometimes yield different individuallevel results regarding the impact of prejudice (e.g., Livingston et al, 2002), it is important to examine both. Moreover, although internalized stigma scales exist, earlier work has operationalized internalized racism through measures of implicit and explicit relative preference for Whites among Black respondents (e.g., Cha et al, 2022;Essien et al, 2021). Simultaneously, others have conceptualized divergences in the implicit and explicit attitudes of two groups as evidence of attitudinal polarization (e.g., Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021;Sawyer & Gampa, 2018).…”

“…Indicators of structural racism are also associated with poorer physical and mental health among Black Americans (e.g., Anderson et al, 2023;Hatzenbuehler et al, 2022;Jeffers et al, 2023;Lukachko et al, 2014). However, research on the association of structural racism with Black attitudes has produced mixed results, with some nding that structural racism predicts more positive attitudes toward White individuals and/or more negative attitudes toward Black individuals; others have found the reverse (Cha et al, 2022;Payne et al, 2019;Vuletich et al, 2023). We therefore improved upon prior work by estimating autoregressive models that allowed us to examine whether change in White attitudes at one wave led to change in Black attitudes at a later wave.…”