Principles of Color: Race, Ideology, and Implicit Cognition

Abstract

Since the 1960s, overt measures have failed to turn up much racism in the American public. Racial stereotypes and labels once accepted as reality are now perceived by most Americans as offensive and inappropriate, and political policies of segregation and discrimination find little overt support. This shift in racial relations has led some scholars to suppose that racism is no longer the driving force it once was in American public opinion. Some scholars, however, have argued that racism persists, but transformed from a blatant antipathy into a more subtle resentment or distrust. In this view, opposition to race-based policies like affirmative action is largely the product of implicit racial attitudes. Others take exception to the implication that opponents of race-target policies are racist and argue that individualist principles associated with political conservatism drive such opposition. Each side has marshaled considerable empirical evidence and contested the evidence of the other side. In this project, I use methods developed in cognitive psychology to unobtrusively examine the spontaneous associations that come to mind for both conservative and liberal Americans when they think about affirmative action and welfare. I also put the application of conservative principle to direct test, finding that sophisticated conservatives use principles like merit strategically to argue against preferential policies when targeted on African Americans, but not when the recipients of such policies are White Americans. I conclude that individualist principles are most often rationalizations of positions driven by covert racial antipathy.

Keywords: race, implicit race, principled conservatism, modern racism, political psychology, political behavior