Race effects

As the election approaches I'll be interested to see whether the Bradley effect, the gap between poll numbers and actual election results in races where one candidate is black, is in play. The gap has been a factor in a striking number of major races, especially through the 1980s and '90s, but has not been as clearly at work in more recent elections (though a number of those featured black Republicans, cases where many other weird effects are probably at work).

The Bradley effect is an index of the extent of subjective racism or overt prejudice, but also the degree to which prejudice is masked by political correctness--the result is race-anxious voters who don't want their anxiety to be known. If the Bradley effect is negligible this year on the way to an Obama win, it will be taken by a lot of people as one more sign that we are indeed a colorblind nation. The thing is that this elides over the objective component of racism, or "systematic" or "institutional" racism, in the admittedly tired vernacular of the left. I've written up some of my thoughts on the objective side of racism and the Obama campaign, and what I'll be particularly interested to see is how a possible Obama win will be integrated into the liberal narrative on race in America. It's a narrative that's been in flux--when Stephen Colbert chose colorblindness ('I don't see race. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police call me sir'...) as one of his tropes, he presumed a similar relationship to reality as he found with truthiness. But, especially as Obama went from a player in the primaries to the Democratic nominee, it feels like liberals really believe we're all judging each other according only to the content of our characters.

What's difficult to tell is whether the lack of a Bradley effect signifies more the eclipse of subjective racism, or the consolidated triumph of the ideology behind political correctness. If one is concerned about maintaining the appearance of a non-racist these days, it's much more important to observe PC strictures than it is to actually do or say anything that ameliorates racial inequality or anything like that. Similarly, Don Imus' nappy-headed ho comment arguably constituted, in the popular perception and as a matter of near-consensus, a greater violation of the American idea of racial harmony than did the racialized patterns of suffering left by Hurricane Katrina or the persecution of the Jena 6. In other words, in America these days racially-tinged gaffes are taken as truer indications of racism (or its absence) than any phenomena or patterns that require statistics or insight, rather than just one's ears, to notice.

One of the additional ironies of the Bradley effect is that it's measurement is made complicated by the fact that blacks are typically under-represented by traditional polling means, because of a relative deficit of stable addresses, phone lines, etc. It's almost like the continuing effects of objective racism make it harder to develop measures that might convince people that racism is behind us.