Lynn Vavreck writes:
I just heard the Carter interview about Obama and racism. Simon Jackman and I have a bit of evidence on this from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. These are data from white, registered voters nationwide about stereotypes of different groups. You can see, roughly a third of the people think blacks are inferior to whites on lazy v. hardworking and similarly on intelligent/unintelligent:
[click for larger version of the table]
This, of course, doesn’t answer the question about whether Carter is right — but, it does provide some systematic evidence for his claim that many Americans don’t think African Americans are “qualified” (his words) to lead this country.
Some people would take these data as evidence of racism, but I have a more positive spin. The table gives the average rating for whites, and for southern whites, and from these you can back out the implied rating for non-southern whites. And we’re lookin good. We’re as intelligent as Asians and almost as hardworking! In the words of a famous non-hardworking, non-southern white: Woo-hoo!
Of course I don’t buy this–no way are non-southern whites as hard-working and intelligent as Asian Americans–I mean, c’mon. But it’s good to know that white people, at least, still think this. Now I want to see Lynn and Simon break down their respondents by where they live. Do southern whites themselves think they are lazier and dumber than non-southern whites??
P.S. The question stem reads:
Now, some questions about different groups in our society. Rate each group on the following scale, where “1” means you think almost all of the people in that group are “lazy”; and “7” means that you think almost everyone in the group is “hardworking.”