Conceptions of Racial Prejudice: Symbolic Racism Reconsidered

Research on “symbolic racism” has underscored an important paradox in racial attitudes: whites' rejection of racial injustice, in principle, has developed without diminishing resistance to the social policies designed to correct the injustice. Yet despite the currency of symbolic racism in contemporary research on racial attitudes, questions about the meaning of the concept remain unanswered. The results of two investigations reported in this paper indicate that (a) the conceptual and empirical distinctions between symbolic racism and “old‐fashioned” prejudice have been exaggerated, and (b) symbolic racism may be best understood as one symptom of generalized tendencies to derogate out‐groups—tendencies associated with a configuration of personal attributes that reflect commitments to conservative sociopolitical values and conventional standards of conduct. These findings are discussed in reference to the persistence of racial prejudice, as well as its implications regarding exposure to and the effects of interracial contact.