According to a recent study conducted by researchers Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington at the University of Pennsylvania, racism during the Trump presidency has gone down compared to racism during the Obama presidency.
This is a major narrative destroyer for the far-left media. Check out what the Spectator had to say:
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. 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.
In their abstract to the report, Hopkins and Washington state that President Trump used “explicit, negative rhetoric” to target racial minorities. They also ask “did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms?”
Check out the full abstract below:
In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans’ expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric’s capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that prejudice can behave like an issue attitude: rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can respond thermostatically to changing presidential rhetoric and policy positions.
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