Did you ever get the feeling that a lot of Republican voters don’t like black people? Maybe the idea occurred to you when their Senate majority leader said it is was a shame that the segregationist, Strom Thurmond, never got to be President. I took that as a pretty good indicator. I wasn’t overly impressed when George W. Bush campaigned at Bob Jones University. BJU had a policy against interracial dating. I thought that sent a message. The thought that Republicans are not that keen on African-Americans popped up again when Hurricane Katrina hit and no one with an (R) at the end of their name seemed very concerned about the people stranded and drowning in New Orleans. A certain President’s mother even opined that the Astrodome was a much nicer place to live than the Big Easy. I took that as a tip off.
Well, now my little hunch has some science to back it up.
The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have begun to study political behavior using such specialized tools as sophisticated psychological tests and brain scans.
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Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes — subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
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For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people’s associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.
The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces — evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.
“Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president,” said Banaji, “but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice.”
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Republicans tend to get very upset when they are accused of racism. But the bottom line is that the GOP appeals to racists. And it isn’t an accident. Other studies have shown that the GOP appeals to stupid people. That’s no accident either. Racists tend to be stupid.
Republicans are smart enough to use code language to appeal to their racist constituency. It’s the same game they just used to tell all their minions that Alito would overturn Roe without ever having to admit as much in the media.
And then they wonder why women and blacks prefer the Democratic Party.