Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
- A new study finds a relationship between income inequality and racist attitudes.
- The effect is small, and doesn’t exist for every kind of racial bias.
- The data won’t be the last word on the subject, but it could give insights into how to remedy long standing issues.
The idea that income inequality and racism are related is a common one. Marxists claim racism is a tool used by capitalistic oppressors to keep the working class divided, and President Johnson kind of agreed with them. Many sociologists see them both as elements of social hierarchies that work together to legitimize themselves.
While the theory around this idea is extensive, the experimental data is lacking. After all, we could test it just by looking at statistics, so where is the evidence?
How income inequality is connected to racism
In hopes of providing an answer to that question, Paul Conner of UC Berkeley and others carried out a study comparing the GINI coefficient of states, a statistic that measures income inequality, with measures of explicit and implicit racial bias of their residents.
Explicit bias was measured by asking people how much they agreed with statements such as “I strongly prefer European Americans to African Americans.” Implicit biases were measured using Harvard’s Implicit Association Test, which measures how long it takes a person to categorize different faces with positive or negative words. It is presumed that faster responses reveal attitudes that people might try to hide when they take longer to answer.
State by state Google searches for phrases including the N-word were also analyzed.A clear, though limited, connection was found…
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