Racial Attitudes: Summary of updates

The only other implementation question that has been repeated in recent years asks about open housing, and here there is a continuing trend toward support for laws that say
a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color.  In 1972, just 1 out of 3 whites supported this law; by the early 1990s, this had grown to about 2 out of 3 and has remained at this level up to the most recent survey data (2006).  There are by no means the same levels of universal acceptance that principles of equality achieve, but in the case of open housing, it is also true that there has not been the same decline as is the case for questions about schools and jobs.    
 

Affirmative Action.  
While support for the implementation of the principle of equality is clearly lower than that for the principles themselves, the gap is even greater when looking at more affirmative policies.  Here we have available two categories of questions—one about the level of government expenditures on problems faced by African Americans and the other about preferential treatment for blacks in hiring and promotion.  Levels of support for these two kinds of “affirmative action” vary substantially across issue area.  And there is little sign of a clear trend in one direction or the other.  But, generally speaking, support is much lower—and sometimes dramatically so—for these affirmative policies than for either the principles or the implementation questions already reviewed. 
 

Turning first to questions about government expenditures, the pattern is one of general support for the “status quo” and there has been no discernible change over the past 30 or so years.  For example, during the last 6 years, roughly one out of every two whites believed the current level of spending to “improve the conditions of blacks” is about right.  This reflects essentially no change.  A related question from ISR shows a similar pattern though there is some decrease in support for “increasing spending” and a corresponding rise in the belief that funding should be decreased.   
 

Figure 3. Trend in Whites’ Government Expenditures Attitudes 
 

A slightly different version of the question asks if the government should help blacks or if instead there should be no “special treatment.” On this question, there has been some decline in whites reporting that the government “should help,” but it has been slight and slow (see Figure 3 for trends for all four government expenditure questions).   
 

Equally unchanging and even more unpopular are policies that involve preferential treatment of blacks.  Questions that appeared in the 1997 edition of the book about preferences in admission to colleges—a policy that has come under direct attack over the past decade—have unfortunately not been replicated in recent years.  However, an ISR question asking respondents if “because of past discrimination, blacks should be given preference in hiring and promotion” reveals a clear pattern:  there is scant support among whites for this policy and this remains essentially unchanged over time (see Figure 4). Also shown in Figure 4 are the trends for new data available from NORC.  These data tell a similar story: basically stable and low levels of support.   
 

It is worth noting that although in general higher levels of respondent education result in more liberal racial attitudes, this does not hold for questions on preferences in hiring and promotion (e.g. Schuman et al. 1997).  For example, the NORC question on this topic shows that although all levels of education show substantial opposition to this policy, it is the least educated who report the highest levels of support.  Specifically, from 1994 to 2004, about 16 percent of those with less than a high school degree either favored or strongly favored preferences; among those with some college or more, the number drops to just about 1 in 10 throughout this time period. 
 

Figure 4. Trend in Whites’ Attitudes Toward Preferences in Hiring and Promotion 
 

One last insight into white attitudes toward affirmative action comes from a question that only recently became available as a time series.  The data already reported show that affirmative action in general, and preferences in hiring and promotion in particular, are unpopular policies among whites.  However, in addition to support for the policy, from 1990 to 2006, respondents were asked about the extent to which they believed that a white person was likely to be denied a job when an equally or less qualified black person got it instead.  In 1990, just over 1 in 4 whites believed this was “very likely” to happen, while another 42 percent thought it was somewhat likely.  The trend suggests that this perception of the existence of reverse discrimination has generally declined: in 2006, just 19 percent said it was very likely to happen while 51 percent said it was “somewhat likely”.     
 

Subgroup analyses of this question reveal that white perceptions of reverse discrimination are more common among southerners and the less educated; a pattern consistent with longstanding findings on racial attitudes (Schuman et al. 1997).  Although there have been declines in the percentages of whites who believe that reverse discrimination is “very likely to happen” across all levels of education and both regions of the country, it remains the case that education and regional differences persist.  For example, in 2004, 39 percent of whites with some college or more said it was “not very likely” to happen—whereas among those with less than a high school degree, the figure was 28 percent.