Red White & Blue

Symbolic Racism Sways Presidential Vote in Arkansas, Georgia

Jim Crow racism is easy to spot: the racial ephithets, the laws promoting segregation, hate crimes, the Klan. Symbolic racism is Jim Crow gone underground: the kind of prejudice people don’t even know they have, the belief that blacks have been given ample opportunities, so problems such as poverty or unequal pay are mainly a result of a lack of ambition and effort.

Political scientists Pearl Ford, Todd Shields, and Angie Maxwell studied closely the results of the 2008 state polls in Arkansas and Georgia. What they found was the large degree to which symbolic racism influenced the voters in both states.

In the case of Barak Obama, the racism was evidenced more in what people deemed as acceptable behavior for a black man.

“During the campaign, references to his demeanor were revealing,” says Ford. “Even his running mate, Joe Biden, described Obama as ‘clean and articulate.’ Black men cannot afford to be overly angry or threatening.”

Throughout the campaign, Ford heard some refer to Obama’s elitism, to “uppity” educated African Americans. Yet, as she points out, Obama’s background and education are very similar to those of many members of Congress and the Supreme Court.

What the researchers found was that symbolic racism was a driving — and often determining — factor in how people voted in both Arkansas and Georgia.

“If people for all rational reasons should have chosen Obama, based on the issues, but they didn’t, we found symbolic racism to be the dominant force in the Arkansas presidential vote. The difference in Georgia was the effect was offset by strong gains for Democrats with new voters, African American voters, and first-time voters,” says Maxwell.

What struck the researchers was that in Arkansas, there was no precedent for electing an African American as a governor or to Congress. The whole of the South was blue in the final tally, except for Arkansas, which resembed a red bull’s eye.

Some, she says, might argue that Democrats should have won hands down, but the real victory is in how Obama won the Democrats over.

“The mobilization is the story. His youth and technology tell us that the party system has changed; candidates don’t have to pay dues for 20 years, support other candidates, and work their way up the party ladder. Obama changed all that by going straight to the people. This might be a trend we see more of in the future.”

Besides racism, the campaign exposed class divisions and gender biases. Since the election, Klan membership and hate groups have increased across the nation.

“Some whose preferences indicated they would be voting as Democrats ended up voting for McCain,” says Ford. “I remember hearing a woman on NPR asked if she trusted Obama. The woman said no, but she couldn’t say why. Or you have Rush Limbaugh saying that Hillary is more of a man than Obama.”

As far as the researchers know, they are the first to have applied the theory of symbolic racism to measure the outcome of a presidential campaign.

They asked questions in both the Arkansas and Georgia state polls, controlling for many alternative explanations — was there a Hillary backlash, was it that they hated Bush.

“We found that self-described democrats, liberals, who agreed with Obama on health care, terrorism, and the nation’s financial outlook, even though they hated Bush, they ended up voting for McCain. We found we could predict those people very well using the symbolic racism scale,” says Shields.

They relied on a theory developed by David Sears, a psychologist at the University of California–Los Angeles, used to measure the degree to which symbolic racism structures the thinking of whites, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

“Almost every president has a honeymoon period, usually the first 100 days. Obama won’t get much of a honeymoon. People are inclined to lower their opinion of him more quickly or abandon any kind of grace period they were going to give him; more than any other president he has a limited time to get things done before public opinion is going to turn on him,” predicts Shields.

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