No matter how many times America has a national conversation about race, the topic of actual racists rarely seems to come up. That is, racism is usually regarded as a major challenge facing America, but since no one will admit to being a racist and calling someone the R-word is regarded as the gravest possible insult, politicians generally shy away from calling out specific people or groups as fomenting prejudice. [...]
I do think that based on the analysis I've done and based on some analysis more recently, there's no doubt that Trump supporters are more motivated by racially resentful views and negative racial views than Hillary Clinton supporters or [supporters of] previous Republican candidates. That was stuff I started analyzing in the spring during the primary. The people that supported Donald Trump, their views on negative racial stereotypes towards blacks, and negative views of Muslims, and negative views of immigrants was just off the charts. That's a new thing this election cycle. [...]
We've seen those kinds of measures rise since Obama's election in America. So they had kind of gone away or dissipated after the 1960s to the 2000s, but with the election of Obama, we started to see explicit, old-fashioned racism reemerge in American politics and become politically salient. And it was much more likely to be true of Republicans than Democrats. People who hold those racist views would also be more likely to think negative views about things like the economy when [these views] weren't true objectively.
The other thing we started doing as a discipline in the 80s and 90s as explicit racism was declining in American society, we started asking questions that focused on what we called "racial resentment." And so racial views were not about characteristics or individual traits of black people or immigrants or what have you, but rather about how much they deserve benefits, if they should work harder and not blame society for their troubles, if they're being discriminated against. It was this idea to connect it more to government policy. And there's some debate, with some people saying that's not racism, it's political ideology. But I think the results are pretty clear, it's connecting politics to the color of people's skin and judging them as not worthy because of whatever. It depends on the scholar, but people call that symbolic racism or racial resentment.
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