STUDY: Racial Disparities In Perceived Racial Progress Revealed!

There is an interesting new study ("Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2011) which compares how "Black" Americans and "White" Americans perceive racial progress of the last few decades in America. The Wall Street Journal (!) reported a summary of the results:

The researchers contacted a random national sample of 209 whites and 208 blacks, and asked them how much discrimination each group faced, on a scale of one to ten, for each decade since the 1950s.

Black Americans saw anti-black bias as declining steadily, from 9.7 in the ’50s to 6.1 in the ’00s. Over the same period, they perceived a small increase in anti-white bias, from 1.4 to 1.8.

White Americans saw an even steeper decline in anti-black bias: from 9.1, in the ’50s, to 3.6, in the ’00s. But more striking, according to the researchers, was the sharp increase in perceived anti-white bias: Among whites, it shot up from 1.8 to 4.7.

White Americans, in short, thought that anti-white bias was a greater societal problem by the ’00s than anti-black bias.

The researchers described the pattern—which did not vary markedly with regard to age or education levels—as evidence that white Americans see race relations as a zero-sum game, in which one group’s gains must be offset by another’s loss.

My friend, Professor Ange-Marie Hancock of the USC Political Science department, would call this an example of Leapfrog Paranoia, which is the mistaken belief by one group that they are going to be surpassed in status by another group which they previously had perceived to be their inferior. Leapfrog paranoia generally leads to or is coupled with Movement backlash which is where the movement for progress by the inferior group experiences backlash as the currently superior group portrays itself as the victim precisely because there has been progress by the previously (and currently) inferior group. One obvious example of this is fundamentalist Christians saying that "militant homosexual activists" are persecuting them for their beliefs and forms of worship when LGBT activists are asking for equal access to civil liberties and civil rights without discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in the public sphere.