I ran across a New York Times piece by columnist Nicholas D. Kristof called “Racism Without Racists”. He supports, in a grey, watered-down way, what I have been saying about white people – even though he is white himself. Instead of making absolute statements based on personal experience, like I tend to do, he makes softer statements based on studies, which is probably more believable (even if less true).
A bit of what he said:
One set of experiments conducted since the 1970s involves subjects who believe that they are witnessing an emergency (like an epileptic seizure). When there is no other witness, a white bystander will call for help whether the victim is white or black, and there is very little discrimination.
But when there are other bystanders, so the individual responsibility to summon help may feel less obvious, whites will still summon help 75 percent of the time if the victim is white but only 38 percent of the time if the victim is black.
What I call colour-blind racism Kristof calls aversive racism. He says it affects about half of all whites. Another 10% are still the old Jim Crow sort of racists, the kind who flat-out do not like blacks. He says that studies show that sort of racism is dying out.
So where I say 95% of whites are racist, he says it is more like 60%.
Kristof said that studies done two months before the 2008 election showed that Obama would be hurt more by colour-blind racists than the old Jim Crow sort:
The racism is difficult to measure, but a careful survey completed last month by Stanford University, with The Associated Press and Yahoo, suggested that Mr. Obama’s support would be about six percentage points higher if he were white. That’s significant but surmountable.
Most of the lost votes aren’t those of dyed-in-the-wool racists. Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.
Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.
Read the whole thing: Racism Without Racists
See also:
- Racism Without Racists – the column itself
- What Kristof said supports part of what I said in these posts:
- He would see this as too extreme:
- Jim Crow
- The race factor and Obama (the Bradley Effect)
Abagond 
Interesting bit here by NK:
when there are other bystanders, so the individual responsibility to summon help may feel less obvious, whites will still summon help 75 percent of the time if the victim is white but only 38 percent of the time if the victim is black.
He attributes that to a perceived difference in individual responsibility, which surely is a factor. But what about a sort of unconscious white solidarity as well? I think “white solidarity” is more pervasive and influential than most white folks realize. It’s almost like peer pressure.
Also, given his title, NK should’ve mentioned a particular scholar more directly (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, that is).
LikeLike
I agree, the majority of white Americans have racist attitudes, by default. It’s so hard to live in such racialized world and have not have any type of racial hangups. For whites, they’re told everyday that they’re superior. How can you not be affected by that?
I just think that there’s different levels of white racists. I say the majority are of the insidious brand. They won’t willingly vocalize their racism because there could be reprocussions. The dyed-in-the-wool, “I hate n*****s!” types, they’d be in the minority nowadays but it doesn’t mean that many more subdued racists don’t share their thoughts. They’re just not as expressive and extreme about it.
LikeLike
For whites, they’re told everyday that they’re superior. How can you not be affected by that?
For whites, they’re told everyday that they’re the cancer of the world. How can you not be affected by that?
LikeLike
Maybe in some left-wing, overly politically correct circles, but certainly not in American society at large, which is heavily Eurocentric. See the blog Racialicious, which has articles about the many subtle ways people of colour are told they are less than white people.
LikeLike
What were the rates of 911 calls when the victim was white and the bystander black? I’ll bet my hat it was no different. Kristof even says in the article that blacks have their own unconscious bias but goes no further than that comment.
I won’t argue that there is still insitutionalized racism in America but the study Kristof and ergo you refer to proves nothing other than herd mentality prevails. Unless you were to include the results for blacks or Asians or Latinos in the same study, and those results were significantly different you’ve provided nothing here to prove your point.
LikeLike
I do not get what you are saying.
If the same experiments showed that blacks are just as racist as whites, then so what? How does that prove that whites are not?
A herd mentality would explain why people do nothing to help others, but it does not explain why whites are more likely to help whites than blacks in such cases.
LikeLike
A common way that whites have of talking about their racist history is to say something like “Africans had slaves too”. It might feel nice to point fingers, but it does not make one’s past any less racist.
If America in 2009 rounded up all its Jews and killed them in death camps, would that make Hitler any less evil? Would it excuse the Third Reich? Of course not. Evil is not relative.
No where have I ever once said that blacks are saints or angels, no where have I ever once said that blacks are not racists. They are just as good and evil as everyone else, but that fact does not excuse the evil of white people – or anyone else, for that matter. Two wrongs do not make a right.
LikeLike
“John Dovidio, a psychologist at Yale University who has conducted this study over many years, noted that conscious prejudice as measured in surveys has declined over time. But unconscious discrimination — what psychologists call aversive racism — has stayed fairly constant.”
Omg!!! THIS is exactly what I have been trying to tell people when I say racism, prejudice(whatever you wanna call it) is unlikely to go away in the United States.
Ppl may not hate blacks, however, their will still be that out-group bias that helps perpetuate institutional racism.
LikeLike