displacing the blame for racism onto less-privileged whites. If you think you’re not racist
at all, drop this book and head immediately to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit to
take an implicit association test. “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” joked the musical Avenue
Q , and if you’re only a little, I’m impressed. About half of whites automatically prefer
white people over black people.^139 Implicit association test results show that MDs,
college grads, and MBAs did not score lower for implicit racial bias than did high school
grads.^140
Among liberals it’s a mark of sophistication to acknowledge that everyone’s a little bit
racist, yet professional-class racism slides conveniently out of sight in discussions about
working-class whites. Another facet of the problem is that whites from different classes
are racist in quite different ways. Among the professional elite, where the coin of the
realm is merit, people of color are constructed as lacking in merit. Among the white
working class, where the coin of the realm is morality, people of color are constructed as
lacking in that quality.
The strong antiracism norm among the PME should not be mistaken for a lack of racism.
My favorite study of racism in the white-collar context is the “Greg”/“Jamal” study. The
study sent out identical resumes, some with white-sounding names, some with African-
American-sounding names. The study found that Jamal had to have 8 additional years of
experience to get the same number of job callbacks as Greg; the higher the quality of the
resume, the stronger the racial bias became.^141
I am part of a team (with psychology professor Richard Lee and sociologist Su Li) that
developed a 10-minute Workplace Experiences Survey designed to measure workplace
climate. When used in a national study of engineers, the survey found that engineers of
color were more likely than white male engineers to report prove-it-again bias: engineers
of color had to prove themselves over and over; other people got credit for ideas they
originally offered; their ideas were less likely to be respected.^142 These self-reports
confirmed that the racial bias documented by 40 years of lab studies shows up in today’s
professional workplaces.^143
Working-class racism is different. First of all, it’s more explicit: studies consistently show
more explicit racist statements among whites without college degrees than among whites
with them.^144 According to an influential study of working-class whites in Canarsie, New
York, in the 1980s, these whites viewed African-Americans as lacking family values and
a healthy work ethic—the same weapons settled living whites use to place themselves
above both professional elites and hard-living whites. “It’s really a class problem,” said
- Is the Working Class Just Racist?