Is Obama Bad for Racial Equality?

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You may remember from the other day, the Al Gore’s Giant Fraggin’ Mansion Effect. Or, as it’s alternately known, moral self-regulation.

This is a concept where people who are satisfied that they are “good,” will act bad. People primed to think positive thoughts about themselves will give less to charity; perhaps those pleased with their “green” Earth Day activities won’t feel bad about polluting a couple days later.

As I said before, basically, we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that non-advantageous goodness.

And, so, here’s a new permutation of this idea: A couple new studies suggests that white people who voted for Barack Obama may be so satisfied with their anti-racist credentials that they… act more racist.

Here’s BPS Research Digest describing one of the studies:

Daniel Effron and colleagues presented dozens of predominantly White undergrad students with one of two scenarios that would reveal their favouritism towards White people: one was a hiring decision, the other related to the allocation of funds to communities. Crucially, the students were asked to make their choices about the hiring or funding either before or after they had declared whether they planned to vote for Barack Obama, in what was then the upcoming Presidential election.

Students who declared their intention to vote for Obama before making the hiring/funding decisions subsequently showed more favouritism towards White people than did students who made their decisions first.

It may sound a little odd, but with the idea of moral self-regulation in mind it makes perfect sense. If you think you’re essentially doing a black person a favor by not discriminating against them, then a white Obama voter may think he or she has done quite enough for black people already in the last year.

Of course, I’m not saying this is admirable. But it certainly fits the theory. And the people making this calculation are almost certainly unaware that they’re doing so.

As for the other study:

In a separate study, Cheryl Kaiser and colleagues compared the support of dozens of predominantly White undergrad students for anti-racist social policies ten days prior to, and one week after, the election of President Obama. They found that support for anti-racist social policies – for example, encouraging diversity in business – was lower after Obama’s election compared with before. The students also stated that America had made more progress towards racial progress, and they expressed more support for meritocracy, when asked after Obama’s election compared with when they were asked before.

Whatever one’s views on the policies in question, this would seem to demonstrate the same effect.

Now, despite the fact that I’m willing to buy a moral self-regulation effect here, I wouldn’t buy the premise that Obama will be bad for racial equality overall. First of all, the mere fact of his election has to be marked on the racial equality ledger (there I go, morally self-regulating). Second of all, the priming effect on African Americans, particularly school-age children, has to be substantial — though I haven’t seen any big studies on this yet. Replacing typical cultural messages of racial inferiority with a new reality (a black man is president) seems a lot more powerful to me than any effects cutting the other way.