Are All The Racists On The Right?
By Guest Contributor Jay Livingston; originally published at Sociological Images
About two weeks ago, Chris Hayes said, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”
The case, it turns out, is very deniable. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution denied it with data from the 2002 and 2008 General Social Survey (GSS). He looked at three questions…
- Favor laws against interracial marriage
- Would vote for a Black for president
- Blacks should not be pushy
…and concludes:
It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties.
Hayes then tweeted a retraction.
End of story?
To begin with, the sample sizes Tabarrok uses are small. In the 2002 GSS, only 87 respondents went on record against interracial marriage, and in 2008, only 80 said they wouldn’t vote for a Black for president. (All the tables and graphs presented here and in Tabarrok’s post are based on whites only.)
Only about 5% of the sample takes the racist response to these items. But I would run the table differently. Instead of asking what percent of each party is racist, I would ask where do those few racists go.
The differences are small, but the edge goes to the Republicans.
Second, there is a difference between party identification and political ideology. If you ask not about party but about political views, the differences become sharper.
The GSS has other questions that might stand as a proxy for racism. For example:
On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?
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