By Kelly Virella
Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama told ABC News in May that he didn’t think his daughters would need affirmative action.
“I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any [college] admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged,” Obama said. “We should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”
His statement and his historic achievement have become rallying cries for affirmative action foes around the country. I wonder if they’re aware of the results of a landmark 1981 study by social psychologists John Dovidio and B.B. Kline. They found that the more qualified black people are for admission to a college, the more likely white evaluators are to underestimate the capabilities of those black applicants.
When Dovidio and his colleagues did a similar study in 1999 and again in 2002, they got the same results. The irony was, in all cases, that even white people who weren’t overtly racist or prejudiced—as measured by a reliable test—preferred well-qualified white candidates over blacks with the same qualifications.
In the 1981 study, Dovidio and Kline asked white college students to review the high school transcripts of three kinds of applicants to their school—those with weak qualifications, those with moderate qualifications and those with strong qualifications. The students’ assessments of each highly qualified transcript depended on the race of the applicant. When students were told a highly qualified transcript belonged to someone black, they rated it less worthy of admission than they did when they were told the same transcript belonged to someone white.
Dovidio and his colleagues found the same results in their 1999 study, when white college students were asked to review resumes for three kinds of applicants to a highly desirable, on-campus job. Their 2002 study showed that white college students would change their admission standards to accommodate the lackluster academic record of white students, but not black people with the same academic record.
“We can’t focus on prejudice as antipathy and hatred today, because most of it is unconscious, but the result is the same,” said Dovidio, a Yale University psychology professor, who is white. “Whether you have unconscious bias, or conscious ones, whites are still getting the jobs.”
Dovidio said that 85 percent of white people in America say they aren’t prejudiced. Tests used to measure white people’s unconscious implicit attitudes towards black people reveal that 80 percent of white people are prejudiced.
"They think affirmative action is unnecessary, in part, because often they don’t know they’re prejudiced, Dovidio said. “Since racism is no longer blatant and since most whites don’t see the operation of racism … they won’t support affirmative action,” he said. “What they want to do instead, is replace affirmative action with color blind ideology … The reality is, America is not colorblind.”
Obama’s children may not need affirmative action, but most people of color, even among the middle class, do, Dovidio said. “Even when you equate for socio-economic status, racism still exists,” he added. “You need to have policies that address that.”
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