It’s true that bias against African-Americans is less overt now than 40 years ago, when blacks moving into white neighborhoods were greeted with bricks through their picture windows. But studies indicate that prejudice today is swimming below the placid surface. And it’s a short step from bias to discrimination.
In February, a fair housing group reported the results of its testing of real estate practices in Westchester County, a sprawling, affluent area in New York. The county, which is racially diverse but deeply segregated, signed a desegregation settlement three years ago. The fair housing group sent trained “testers”—black, white, and Hispanic—to real estate offices in search of housing. The black and Hispanic testers were discriminated against in 40 percent of the 90 tests and treated equally in 48 percent; 12 percent of the tests were inconclusive.
The unequal treatment often included the steering of black and Hispanic housing seekers to black and Hispanic areas. “Discrimination is not always blatant,” the housing group’s report observed. “It can manifest itself in ways that are more elusive and less quantifiable, yet just as distressing and diminishing of self-respect.”
In October, an Associated Press poll found that in the four years since Barack Obama was elected president, prejudice against blacks had increased slightly, with 51 percent of Americans expressing such bias, up from 48 percent in 2008. The researchers who conducted the survey for the AP—from Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago—also tested for implicit, or unconscious, racial bias, using questions that didn’t focus directly on race. Implicit prejudice against blacks had likewise increased, and a majority of Democrats as well as Republicans had antiblack feelings.
Evidence for the persistence of bias against blacks was also in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Researchers found that African-Americans who looked more stereotypically black—darker skin, broader nose, fuller lips—were more likely to be rejected or excluded by whites than blacks who looked less stereotypically black.
One experiment conducted by these researchers involved Facebook “friending.” Photos of a black man and a black woman were Photoshopped to make them appear either more or less stereotypically black. Fictitious Facebook profiles were created for “Michael Davis” and “Jennifer Davis,” and 1,400 Facebook users in one large U.S. city got friend requests from one of them: “I’m new to Facebook. Working on putting up my info!” White Facebook users were significantly more likely to accept as a friend the Michael or Jennifer Davis who appeared less stereotypically black than the ones who looked more black. Another Facebook experiment by the researchers and a survey they conducted of residents of a college dorm yielded similar results.