Racial Discrimination: Effect on Support for Obama and his Policies
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009A recent study on how racial discrimination affects American support for Obama and his health care reform revealed some interesting results.
According to the study by Eric Knowles of UC Irvine, the study tested 285 whites, Latinos and Asians for underlying bias against blacks.
About 45 percent of the subjects identified themselves a liberal or very liberal, while 25 percent said they were conservative or very conservative.
The study did not attempt to measure how pervasive prejudice is rather it measures if Obama’s skin color has an effect on the perception of him and his policies.
The results show that half of the participants who were deemed to be most racially biased were 43% most likely to vote against Obama than the other half.
Among those more highly prejudiced participants, 65% liked the health plan when it was attributed to Clinton while only 41% liked it when it was attributed to Obama.
The GOP rebukes the study saying that Obama would not have won and became president if racism existed in a serious level.
I think the study shows that although racism has gone down far enough for us to actually elect a black president.
It did not actually remove some of our preconceptions, ideas or even just negative feelings against people of different races.
It exists in many workplaces where employment decisions are based on a person’s race even though sometimes it is done unconsciously.
Racism will not disappear anytime in the near future. What we can do is work on ourselves to make sure that despite what we think of others, we can be better people by seeing past what we think and see what really is.
