Will soft bigotry against Obama skew the vote?
It’s the elephant that’s been moving in and out of the room all year: To what extent will Barack Obama’s skin colour affect the outcome of the U.S. election? Ten days before the vote, the history-making black Democrat has a substantial lead in the polls. If he were white, victory would now be seen as likely, if not a sure thing. But no matter how good it looks, Obama’s strategists aren’t counting their political chickens just yet.
Only on the night of Nov. 4 will they know if the polls were inflated by white Americans lying about their voting intentions. Only then, how many Obama supporters got cold feet inside the polling booth, or how many young people, so vociferous in their approval of him, didn’t bother turning out. If Obama goes into election day significantly ahead of Republican John McCain and then loses, the reason almost certainly will be tagged as racism.
Sociologists say about 10 per cent of the U.S. electorate is out-and-out, unapologetically racist. Obama’s staff has factored them into the equation. The Big Unknown, however, is the impact of voters who are closet racists and those who are subconsciously prejudiced. Closet racists know who they are, but don’t publicly admit it. “It’s not cool to be racist,” says Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at the University of California (Los Angeles). In post-civil rights America, discrimination keeps itself hidden – he calls it “racism without racists.”
Conversely, subconscious racists have no idea they’re anything of the sort and would vehemently deny the charge. Yet a mass of research suggests at least 50 per cent of Americans are unwittingly biased. “Subconscious racism is a huge problem,” says Goff, who, like Obama, is biracial. “No one knows the extent of it, not the social scientists, not the pollsters, not anyone. I’m talking about white liberals, well-educated people who’ve grown up in multiracial urban centres, the `some of my best friends’ types.”
Two leading U.S. researchers in the field coined the term “aversive” racism after a series of experiments showed how unconscious bias affects whites’ decision-making in hiring and school admissions. When a black applicant has superior qualifications, aversive whites have no problem choosing him. But when a black and a white candidate are equally qualified, the white one is picked 76 per cent of the time. “The outcome is exactly the same as old-fashioned racism, though the bias is more subtle,” says Yale social psychologist John Dovidio. “Racism is like an old virus that has mutated into a new form.”
Aversive racism doesn’t mean hatred or hostility toward blacks, he says, but “uncertainty, doubt, anxiousness. People automatically identify with their own group or tribe; it’s how we’ve evolved. Race, like sex, is a tribe marker.” Dovidio’s co-researcher, Sam Gaertner of the University of Delaware, says aversives are “people who look at themselves in the mirror and think, `I’m a good guy.’ They couldn’t maintain their self-image if they thought they discriminated.”
They may see Obama as the superior candidate, but at the back of their minds, they worry about the “black baggage” he might bring with him into the White House. The idea of controversial race activists such as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton getting jobs in an Obama administration scares them. “You can see the fear existing in some people that he’ll bring `other ones,’ ” says Gaertner.
That won’t happen, says Goff: “Obama has had an explicit policy of keeping the black establishment at arm’s length. He doesn’t owe it, or anyone else, anything.” Another race-linked factor, albeit a disputed one, that could come into play is the “Bradley effect,” the phenomenon of black candidates often doing better in polls than actual elections. Studies show that significant numbers of undecided white voters – 7 to 8 per cent in the current contest – choose the white candidate in the end. The name stems from the 1982 California governor’s race, when Tom Bradley lost to his white opponent even though exit polls found he was ahead by a large margin. The “effect” also happened in 1989 to former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, another African-American. In exit polls, he was ahead by double digits, but he won by just one-tenth of a per cent.
Critics doubt the effect’s existence, but others say it’s the only explanation for the disparity between polls and outcomes in racially mixed contests. As Wilder recently put it: “Obama had better build an insurmountable edge to offset the possibilities of racism or oversampling or people saying one thing and meaning another.” But there could be a reverse Bradley effect: “There are some Republicans who are not going to say out front they’re going to vote for Obama, but they’re going to.” He may self-identify as black, but Obama is biracial and, with his Ivy League education, is “culturally” white – or so it appears to a lot of white voters, though few would publicly say so. (He’s “bilingual,” able to switch between standard English and black street talk, a trait known as code-switching.)
A Nevada Democratic canvasser recently wrote in a New York Times blog that she tells leery voters: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and was raised by his white mother. So his views are more white than black really.” Other bloggers were outraged, accusing her of racism. The “aversive” researchers found blacks have their own subconscious biases too, often against other blacks. And indeed, there was some criticism early on, says Lincoln Quillian, a sociologist at Northwestern University, that Obama was “a white man with dark skin.” Today, however, Obama is viewed by the diverse black community as a transformational figure and has the support of 95 per cent of voters, including Colin Powell, ex-Secretary of State and now, apparently, ex-Republican.
Both presidential candidates have steered carefully clear of the race issue in the campaign, though Sarah Palin has used innuendo, saying of Obama, “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do.” Her failure at one rally to rein in extremists shouting “kill him” and “terrorist” was widely seen by black commentators as racist incitement. Obama has “done everything he can” to assuage white voters’ conscious or unconscious fears, says Quillian. “When he talks about race, it’s in a larger moral context. He talks about fairness, equal opportunity, an inclusive society – not about putting African-Americans first.”
He’s also been up against the “angry black man” stereotype. Some analysts assume his strategists advised him to stay calm during the debates with McCain, no matter how provoked. But, as campaign staff refer to him as “No drama Obama,” serenity may simply be his default mode. Either way, says Yale’s Dovidio, “he can’t afford to do what white candidates can do – express anger.”
For David Bositis, a pollster and researcher at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies, an African-American think tank, racially polarized voting is very real. And he predicts Obama’s poll lead will lessen by election day. But then he’ll win more of the white vote “than any other Democrat, except maybe Jimmy Carter, going all the way back to LBJ (who brought in the Civil Rights Act in 1964).” Why? “Because people are in pain.” Bositis pauses, then confidently adds: “It’ll be all over by 9 p.m.”