PREJUDICE AND RACISMWas the election of Barack Obama bad for racial equality?
The US may have inaugurated its first black president in 2009, but the
country’s racial inequalities – in terms of education, health, incarcera-
tion and wealth – remain rife. What’s more, findings published in 2009
suggested that the mere fact that a black man was a candidate, and
subsequently got elected, may ironically have been a bad thing for
racial equality, at least in the short term.
In 2008, Daniel Effron of Stanford University asked a group of
predominantly white students which candidate they planned to vote for
in what was then the upcoming presidential election. He also presented
them with a range of hypothetical scenarios, such as making decisions
about hiring, that would reveal their racial bias. Some students stated
their voting intentions first and dealt with the hypothetical scenarios
second; other students did things the other way around. The awkward
finding was that students who declared their intention to vote for
Obama and then answered the fictional scenarios subsequently showed
more favouritism towards white people than the students who made
the hypothetical decisions first. Effron thought there was a possibility
that having the opportunity to vote for Obama had led some people to
feel it gave them licence to be prejudiced in other decisions.
Another study at the University of Washington raised similar
concerns. Cheryl Kaiser compared the support of a group of predomi-
nantly white students for anti-racist social policies ten days prior to, and
one week after, Obama’s election. She found that support for anti-racist
social policies – for example, encouraging diversity in business – was
lower after Obama’s election compared with before. The fear, she said,
is that Obama’s success led people to believe that combating racial
prejudice was no longer as important an issue.