Parks

Rachlinski

Next Tuesday American voters will elect the 44th U.S. president. If he is Sen. Barack Obama, commentators will declare that racial bias is a thing of the past. If Sen. John McCain wins, they will likely argue that America is a bigoted society that will not tolerate black success. Neither perspective is sufficiently nuanced to capture the realities of race in today's America. Rather than mark the end of racism in America, Obama's candidacy reveals how race affects judgment and how a sophisticated candidate navigates America's racial waters.

Advances in the study of contemporary racism provide insights into race's role in the presidential campaign. Social psychologists argue that unconscious or implicit biases have a powerful effect on how people evaluate each other, even among people who embrace the egalitarian norm that skin color should not affect their judgment. These implicit biases are widespread; the vast majority of adult Americans, for example, more closely associate white faces with positive imagery and black faces with negative.

Implicit biases influence how people evaluate others. White interviewers who harbor strong anti-black unconscious biases make less eye contact with black job applicants, exhibit hostile body language and report that these interviews are uncomfortable. White interviewers who do not harbor such biases do not exhibit the same effects. Neurobiologically, those who tend to associate white with good and black with bad use the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with the fear response, to process black faces. And at least one study also shows that unconscious racial biases can affect how people vote.

Are these biases influencing the election? Many of McCain's advertisements portray Obama as risky or even dangerous -- perhaps hoping to capitalize on amygdala activation among voters. Although scaring voters is a common enough campaign strategy that McCain might have used even if Obama were white, there is further evidence of the influence of unconscious bias from the spring primaries.

First, according to exit polls at the Democratic primaries, Obama found real opposition among older, less educated and poorer Democrats. And research suggests that such voters are more politically conservative and evidence more unconscious anti-black bias. Further analysis suggests that the opposition among these groups correlated better with actual unconscious bias than political ideology. Two additional polls also demonstrate that Democrats who harbor negative sentiment about black Americans also tend to oppose Obama.

Second, several states exhibited an unusual pattern of polling error in the primaries. In states with small percentages of black voters, polls tended to overestimate support for a black candidate. By contrast, polls were basically accurate in states with black populations near the national black population of 12 percent, but underestimated support for Obama in states that have 19 percent or more blacks.

The pattern of polling error suggests strongly that voters either lied to pollsters or changed their minds at the last minute. White voters flinched at the last moment--unwilling to pull the lever in favor of the Black candidate. Black voters, did the opposite; convincing themselves, finding themselves unable to resist the prospect of voting for a viable Black candidate when the time came to cast their ballots.

Third, the degree of racially stratified voting in the Democratic primaries is hard to overstate. Exit polls show that in no state did Obama do better among whites than among blacks. Although he won among black voters everywhere, only in Iowa, Illinois, Vermont, Indiana and North Carolina did he win among white voters. He lost white voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky by 26, 30 and 49 points, respectively. Yet less than 10 percent of voters indicated to pollsters that race influenced their vote.

Fourth, most white adults unconsciously associate whites more than blacks with "Americanness." Similarly, showing white adults subliminal images of the American flag increases their anti-black bias in general and increases opposition to Obama in particular. The connection between black and foreign is so deep in many Americans that a 2007 study showed that voters more closely associated former British Prime Minister Tony Blair with American imagery than Obama. The McCain campaign has on several occasions emphasized Obama's middle name Hussein as another indicator that he is inauthentically American.

The 2008 Presidential campaign reflects how contemporary racism works. Obama has navigated the waters well, but he has done so only with an army of strategists and pollsters behind him. The ordinary job applicant faces the same treacherous environment without such assistance. The 2008 campaign thus teaches us that America is not so virulently racist as to reject a black applicant for a serious position outright, but the nature of the campaign shows that race continues to play a complex and profound role in how Americans judge each other.

Jeffrey Rachlinski is a law professor at Cornell; Gregory Parks, J.D. '08, works in Washington, D.C., and is the co-editor of "Critical Race Realism: Intersections of Psychology, Race and Law" (2008).