By Ross Clark | SPECTATOR USA
Anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice has declined since 2016, new study shows
The election of Donald Trump has, of course, unleashed the latent racist which
lurks within millions of Americans.
We know this because enlightened opinion keeps telling us
so.
The New Yorker, for example, ran a piece in November 2016
declaring ‘Hate on rise since Trump’s election’, and quoting a list of
incidents collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center – including the
experience of a girl in Colorado who was allegedly told by a white man: ‘Now
that Trump is president I am going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find’.
TIME magazine, too, ran a story in the same month
announcing ‘Racist incidents are up since Donald Trump’s election’.
In March 2017 the Nation asserted ‘Donald Trump’s rise
has coincided with an explosion in hate groups’, claiming that 100 racist
organizations had been founded since Trump began his presidential campaign.
And so it goes on.
And so it goes on.
Just as with Britain’s vote for Brexit, Trump’s strident
language and his concentration on issues such as migration is supposed to have
coarsened political discourse – legitimizing racist and xenophobic opinions in
people who might otherwise have been shamed into silence.
By this narrative, even slightly immoderate speeches,
posters and campaigns by politicians become magnified through the lens of
public opinion into something much more sinister. A speech on migration, goes
the theory, can all too easily erupt into bar room arguments and end with a
Muslim or a black man having his head kicked in.
It sounds vaguely plausible, but is it true?
It sounds vaguely plausible, but is it true?
Not if a new paper by a pair of sociologists
at the University of Pennsylvania is anything to go by. Daniel J. Hopkins and
Samantha Washington set out to measure the effect of Trump’s election on
anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice, using a randomly-selected panel of
2,500 Americans whose changing opinions have been under study since 2008.
The academics report that they had been expecting to
measure a rise in racist opinions, writing: ‘The normalization of prejudice or
opinion leadership both lead us to expect that expressed prejudice may have
increased in this period, especially among Republicans or Trump supporters’.
They had been led to expect this, they say, through an
extensive reading of recent literature in social sciences which, they say, supports
the notion that racist attitudes lie dormant inside many people, waiting to be
triggered by certain events – of which the election of Donald Trump might be
one.
There could, after all, hardly be anything more
calculated to awaken an incipient racist than the president calling Mexicans a
bunch of rapists.
Yet the study found exactly the opposite.
Yet the study found exactly the opposite.
Americans, claim Hopkins and Washington, have actually become less
inclined to express racist opinions since Donald Trump was elected.
Anti-black prejudice, they found, declined by a
statistically-insignificant degree between 2012 and 2016, when Trump was
elected.
But then after 2016 it took a sharp dive that
was statistically significant.
Moreover, contrary to their expectations, the fall was
as evident among Republican voters as it was among Democrats.
There was also a general fall in
anti-Hispanic prejudice, too, although this was more evident among Democrat
voters.
It is a similar story to that in Britain, where the attempt to link Brexit with rising xenophobia has been somewhat debunked.
It is a similar story to that in Britain, where the attempt to link Brexit with rising xenophobia has been somewhat debunked.
A murder of a Polish man in the town of Harlow in August
2016 was widely attributed to Brexit – but eventually declared by police not to
have been a hate crime at all.
Similarly, a smashed window in a Spanish restaurant in
South London on the night of the Brexit vote was initially widely reported to
be an expression of euphoria on the part of xenophobes – but was later
revealed to be an attempted burglary.
So has Trump actually been a good thing for race relations in the US, and if so, why?
So has Trump actually been a good thing for race relations in the US, and if so, why?
The University of Pennsylvania study is a little shy on
this point, but raises the theory that people have found Trump’s pronouncements
on migrants, Mexicans and so on to be so reprehensible that it has inspired
them to think about their own attitudes.
It is possible, they write ‘that Trump’s rhetoric
clarified anti-racist norms. Given that the declines in prejudice appear
concentrated in the period after Trump’s election, it seems quite plausible
that it was not simply Trump’s rhetoric but also his accession to the
presidency that pushed public opinion in the opposite direction’.
Well, maybe.
It might be added that the election of Barack Obama also
caught liberal opinion unawares.
That event, it might be recalled, was supposed to be the breakthrough
which led to a kinder, gentler America.
Instead it seemed to be followed by a more
fractious period in race relations, culminating in race riots in Ferguson, Mo.,
in 2014.
Maybe social science has got it the wrong way
round: it was the sight of a mixed race man in the White House who brought out
in the inner racist in Americans who are inclined towards those feelings, while
the reassuring sight of white man back in the Oval Office has calmed them down.
