The liberal intelligentsia of the United States appears to be in agreement that white prejudice against African-American political candidates remains a potent force in American politics.
“Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black?” wrote John Heilemann in New York magazine earlier this month. “What makes Obama’s task of scoring white votes at Kerry-Gore levels so formidable is, to put it bluntly, racial prejudice.” (The Wall Street Journal column I pulled this quote from offers other examples of the if-Obama-loses-it’s-because-whites-are-racist meme.)
Such thinking is deficient on its face — are we supposed to believe that America was less racist a month ago, when Obama did enjoy Kerry-Gore popularity levels, than it is today now that his lead in the polls has evaporated? But such views are given cover by the work of race- and gender-obsessed political scientists…. including those at the University of Virginia.
An article in the current edition of the Arts & Sciences supplement to the University of Virginia Magazine runs a story, “How Open Are We?” In that article, writer Dan Morrell describes the research of Vesla Weaver and other UVa faculty members who are exploring racial bias in voting patterns. I will concede up front that a magazine article does not have the space to express every facet of of a professor’s thinking, so I may not be presenting their arguments fully. But it does strike me that some researchers are finding what they set out to find.
Writes Morrell:
To anyone who questioned what role, if any, race would play in this year’s election, exit polls in the Pennsylvania primary in April made it clearer: One out of five whites surveyed plainly said a candidate’s race was a factor. “And those,” says Vesla Weaver (Government, English Language and Literature ’01), assistant professor of politics, “are just the ones to admit it.”
Let’s drill a little deeper into those poll results (which you can find here). First of all, it was 19 percent of Democratic primary voters, not whites, who responded that the race of the candidate they voted for was “important” in influencing their votes. Of those, 58 percent voted for Clinton and 42 percent for Obama. In other words, only 11 percent of the Democratic voters could be accused of voting against an African American because of his race. At the same time, 7 percent evidently voted for Obama because he was perceived as black. (By the Pennsylvania primary, Obama had overcome the question among race-obsessed liberal commentators of whether he was “black enough.”)
Clearly, a modest fraction of the population still takes race into consideration when voting. What we don’t know from the poll is how significant the race factor was. Did it weigh as heavily as, say, the war in Iraq? Or was it more akin to the candidate’s position on, say, ethanol subsidies? Furthermore, it’s worth nothing that bias cuts two ways. For every three people who voted against Obama in part because of his race, two people voted for him. That’s not surprising when we consider that 92 percent of all black primary voters checked the box for Obama. Net loss for Obama because of race: 4 percentage points. That’s not quite as bad as “20 percent.”
Weaver’s contribution to plumbing the nuances of bias in American society was a research project that measured the response of white voters to lighter- and darker-skinned candidates. Writes Morrell:
In head-to-head match-ups pitting black candidates (both dark- and light-skinned) against white candidates — with controls for ideology and candidate and respondent characteristics — Weaver found that whites generally preferred the white candidate. However, when respondents did choose a black candidate over the white candidate, they preferred the darker one.
This is how Weaver interpreted the results: When a dark-skinned candidate is contrasted to a white candidate, “white respondents think they are being asked about race and will vote to show they have no biases.” When a light-skinned black is offered, the response is not triggered.
What’s interesting to me is that Weaver did not test African-Americans, or if she did, she did not deem the results worthy of conveying to the magazine writer. But I would like to know, would the same pattern of preferring a candidate of one’s own race apply to African-Americans as well? If so, would we conclude that African-Americans are just as biased as whites? Or is it possible that something other than “prejudice” — a term that connotes racism — is responsible? Could people simply favor candidates whom they perceive to be like themselves? Or, alternatively, are the test subjects imputing certain cultural or ideological attributes to the candidates based on skin color?
I would hypothesize something more complex is going on. Given the extent to which African-Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as Democrats, and the extent to which the mainstream media has portrayed race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as legitimate leaders of African-Americans, and the extent to which rare conservative African-Americans like Clarence Thomas are widely decried as “race traitors,” is it not possible that conservative voters would subconsciously perceive African-American candidates as liberal — overriding Weaver’s effort to control for ideology? Could that not account for some of the “bias” that Weaver found?
The bias in such instances may be real, but it’s not necessarily what we have traditionally labeled prejudice or racism. This is just a hunch, but I suspect that Dr. Weaver, like the New Yorker columnist quoted above, is heavily invested in the idea that white racism permeates American society. If I’m right about that — and I’ll admit that I’m displaying my own prejudices regarding the political leanings of university scholars — she’ll find a way to interpret the experiment results in a way that does not conflict with her mental construct of the world. The likelihood that she would entertain my counter-hypothesis, I expect, is just about nil.
