Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Young people are not getting beyond race: People keep saying that young people are so excited to vote for Obama because they don't care about race. I say, huh? If something doesn't matter, then it can't explain behavior. But what they seem to mean is that older people do care about race--in other words, that they're racists--and their prejudice is preventing them from voting for the candidate. This appears to be a mainstream perception, but actually it reveals a hostile view of America since the General Social Survey (GSS) shows that even more than a decade ago--1996 to be exact--93% of all Americans were willing to vote for a black president. They stopped asking the question, the number was getting so high.

So, has race become less important to young whites? GSS respondents were asked how they felt about blacks. Answer choices ranged from several degrees of cool, to neutral, to a number of degrees of warm. If race doesn't matter, we should observe more neutrals over time. This is obvious vis-a-vis cool attitudes, but it might be less clear with respect to warmth. If someone says he loves blacks, then race is important to him--he has warm feelings specific to a certain race.

Let's compare 1996 and 2006--the oldest and newest years available:

Percent neutral--ages 18-25

1996 44.2
2006 42.1

There is no evidence here that, compared to the past, race is less significant to young whites. We can see a shift, however, toward more people with warm feelings:


Percent with warm feelings--ages 18-25

1996 29.0
2006 42.8

Now, it's not difficult to argue that more warmth is a good thing. Bertrand Russell wrote that love benefits both parties, while hate profits neither. But the point here is that, according to these data, a majority a decade ago did not even claim to be colorblind, and this number has not changed.

If these attitudes predict behavior, then many young people might be voting for Obama because they like him for the color of his skin, not because they have gotten beyond race.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:26 AM

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  2. Anonymous10:01 AM

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  3. Anonymous7:17 PM

    Probably a dumb question, but did the GSS ask whites how they felt about either other whites or at least other people in general?

    If they tended to show the same warm/cool feelings towards everyone, that maybe just shows naivete or being prosocial.

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  4. Anonymous5:33 PM

    I dunno. I hated Hillary and thought given majorities Obama could hurt whites a lot less than Hillary could hurt men (I happen to be both).

    I'm not voting for McCain because he supports the war. End of story.

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  5. Anonymous11:28 PM

    What you're seeing is a new racialism. The whites of 70 years were very sensitive to race.

    The baby boomers lived through the most prosperous times in US history and were very "tolerant."

    Today's kids see diversity in their faces and are turning much like their grandparents or great-grandparents of 70 to 80 years ago.

    The most tolerant whites people come from times and places of homogeneity. This generation of kids are going to be very racialist in nature and its not going to to get any better.

    Tolerance works like an economic price curve. As the amount of diversity goes up, the tolerance for it goes down. As diversity goes down, tolerance goes up.

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