How Racist is America?
Fact-checking organizations have already begun calling out Ron DeSantis for statements he made during the second GOP primary debate last night. One exchange between DeSantis and moderator Ilia Calderón is notable for the way it inadvertently reveals so many forms of racism in the U.S.:
Calderón: “Florida’s new Black history curriculum says, ‘slaves developed skills, which in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.’ You have said slaves developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of it. But many are still hurt. For descendants of slaves, this is personal. What is your message to them?”
Ron DeSantis: “First of all, that’s a hoax that was perpetuated by Kamala Harris. We are not going to be doing that. Second of all, that was written by descendants of slaves, these are great Black history scholars, so we need to stop playing these games."
DeSantis is being criticized for lying about Kamala Harris (Florida's curriculum standards do contain the passage that Calderón quoted) and for misrepresenting Black scholars who contributed to the standards but are on record now as objecting to that passage.
In this exchange you can see the historical foundation of racism in the U.S. (slavery), systemic racism in a contemporary context (the Florida standards), the deceptive language of a powerful racist (Ron DeSantis), and a reminder, from Ms. Calderón, that racism continues to be, among other things, deeply personal.
Along with historical records, personal accounts, and narrative analyses, statistics have also played a role in documenting the prevalence and impact of racism in the U.S. Through statistics we learn more about observable details as well as the underlying psychology. For instance, a study published this June found that when American adults are simply shown a list of names, with no additional information, those with names like Shanice or Tyrone are assumed to be Black as well as significantly less trustworthy, reliable, and productive than those with names like Rebecca or Colin, who are assumed to be white. (This is an improved version of a classic 2004 study that featured prominently in the 2005 best-seller Freakonomics.)
Names may imply racial identity, but far from infallibly (consider Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to earn a medical degree, or Colin Powell, the first African American Secretary of State.) What's disturbing about this study is the stereotypes about trustworthiness and so on that bubbled up once participants inferred the race of each individual based on their name.
Statistics contribute in many ways to the understanding of racism in the U.S. My focus in this newsletter is on the newest cross-national comparisons. When you ask the question "How racist is America?", one way to answer the question is to compare the U.S. to other countries.
U.S. News racial equity rankings
U.S. News is best-known for its controversial rankings of colleges and universities, but the company also makes money by ranking everything from hospitals to cars to countries.
Earlier this month, in their "Best Countries for Racial Equity" report, U.S. News ranked America 73rd in the world. That's 73rd place out of 87 countries reviewed. Not a very stellar performance.
One might ask though: How can you measure the racial equity of an entire country, much less rank one country higher or lower than the next? What does it mean that America is #73, while Lebanon, for instance, is #72?
As it turns out, U.S. News mislabeled its own data. What the organization did was to survey roughly 17,000 people from 36 countries to ask their opinions on racial equity across the globe. Respondents were simply asked whether each country is, in their opinion, "associated" with racial equity. (For more details on methodology, see the Appendix to this newsletter.)
In other words, the U.S. is not 73rd in the world in actual racial equity. We're #73 in perceived equity. Few people in other countries associate racial equity with America.
Are they right about that? Well, yes and no. They're "right" in the sense that racial inequities do exist in every sphere of American life – employment, education, housing, health, criminal justice, etc. But an ordinary citizen in another country is not an authoritative source of information about whether the U.S. is doing better than, say, Uruguay (#74) in something as complex as racial equity.
You may have noticed that I haven't defined "racial equity". U.S. News didn't either. The scholarly definition – and the one that most organizations seem to assume – is that racial equity is achieved when a person's race creates no advantages or disadvantages for them. Thus, racial equity can be contrasted with racial privilege and discrimination.
Is that how survey respondents understood the phrase "racial equity"? We have no way of knowing. Still, the U.S. News findings are consistent with earlier data from more reputable sources, such as the Pew Research Center, suggesting that America does have a relatively bad reputation, internationally speaking, for racial discrimination and injustice. So, in the end, U.S. News and Pew findings do tell us something. They tell us that one of our nation's greatest flaws is perceived on some level by citizens of other countries.
As for actual racial equity, I'm not aware of any international comparisons, but there are recent surveys that focus on racial tolerance.
World Values Survey data
In contrast to the U.S. News rankings, which increasingly look like clickbait, the World Values Survey (WVS) is a respected, influential measure. Since 1981, social scientists from around the world have contributed to the creation, translation, and administration of the WVS. The most recent data (2017-2022) were obtained from hundreds of thousands of people representing 64 countries, and data analysis is ongoing.
The WVS contains one question pertaining to racism, specifically racial intolerance: "On this list are various groups of people. Please select any that you would not like to have as neighbors." One group on the list is "People of a different race." (Specific races are not named.)
Obviously a single question can't tease out the different types of racism in a country, much less measure the severity of the problem. But if you had to choose only one question to ask, this is a worthy choice, because the way people feel about others around them is one of the fundamental sources of racial prejudice and discrimination.
Following are the percentages of people in each country who said they wouldn't like to have neighbors of a different race. (Percentages have been rounded to whole numbers.)
This time, the U.S. did relatively well, ranking 6th among the countries surveyed. What should we make of this?
You might be tempted to say that our high ranking here contradicts how poorly we fared in the U.S. News rankings (and in earlier studies by Pew), but there's not necessarily a contradiction, because the surveys measured different things. The WVS survey asks people how they feel about someone of another race living next to them. The U.S. News survey asks people about racial equity in other countries.
Sadly, the U.S. is probably not as racially tolerant, relative to other countries, as the WVS data suggests. I say this for two reasons, both related to methodology.
1. The WVS survey may be prone to social desirability bias.
Social desirability bias is the tendency for survey respondents to answer questions in a way that makes them look good in some sense. Americans know they're not supposed to say they'd dislike having a neighbor of another race, even if they secretly feel that way. On the other hand, in China (a country where I lived for nearly 18 months and continue to frequently visit), racist attitudes are much more freely expressed, and less prone to social desirability influences. China (#21) may have a lower ranking than the U.S. (#6) simply because Chinese participants responded more openly to the WVS survey.
Since 2016, most Americans feel that it's becoming more common for fellow citizens to express racist or racially insensitive views, but doing so still seems like enough of a taboo to raise doubts about the WVS findings. Only 3% of Americans would dislike having a neighbor of another race? That seems inconsistent with what we know about the prevalence of racism in the U.S., including the seemingly endless reports of NIMBY opposition to real estate development that would bring residents of color into close proximity to white homeowners.
2. The WVS survey contains an ambiguous phrase.
The phrase "people of a different race" means different things depending on the country in which the term is used. Ultimately, these differences may underestimate the extent of American racial intolerance.
In multiracial countries such as the U.S., a neighbor of a different race is often just another citizen who belongs to a different racial group. In other countries, a neighbor of a different race is often also a foreigner, and/or different in some other key respect (e.g., religious faith). For instance, roughly 98% of Greek people are of Greek racial/ethnic descent. A Greek person who doesn't want someone of a different race living next door is probably not thinking about race, but rather assuming that the other person is a seasonal worker from another country, an asylum-seeker, or one of the other kinds of foreigners some Greeks treat with hostility. This is xenophobia, not racism, and it continues to be major social problem in that country.
Since ranking systems are by definition relative, overestimation of racial intolerance in some countries means underestimation in others. America may not be as racially tolerant as the WVS data suggest, because some Americans may be suppressing socially undesirable responses on the WVS survey, while in other countries, objections to neighbors of different races may not be racially-based.
What's the answer (and why should we care)?
How racist is America compared to other countries? In my opinion we don't have clear data on that yet. Perhaps we never will, given how hard it would be to assign an entire country a single score on such a multifaceted (and partially concealed) phenomenon.
If we may never know how racist we are, relative to other countries, why bother asking?
If you're U.S. News, you ask the question because it generates revenue. I find that exploitative (though not surprising, given that for roughly a century, American interest in knowing more about Americans has sustained what has become a multi-billion dollar public survey industry).
If you're the World Values Survey, you ask the question as part of a broader effort to create positive change. WVS data on race and other topics has been widely disseminated to the public, to governments, and to international organizations such as the World Bank. I think that's a worthy rationale, even if the current data are questionable.
Understandably, discussions of racism in the U.S. focus on what's happening within our borders. Last week, for instance, the Indianapolis Museum of Art hired a Black woman as its new director, following a controversy over the original job posting, which called for someone who would attract a more diverse audience while maintaining its "traditional, core, white art audience."
At the same time, since racial prejudice and discrimination exist in all societies, it's useful to step back, if only for a moment, and ask how bad the problem is in our country as compared to others. Even if we can't definitively answer the question, it's a topic worth discussing.
Thanks for reading!
Appendix: More on the U.S. News methods
U.S. News rankings are based on proprietary formulas, and thus their website says very little about how each country's racial equity was measured. I reached out to one of their data reporters, Elliott Davis, for more details. Here's his reply:
"Our rankings are based on a perceptions survey of citizens (about 17,000 total) in 36 countries. We ask them whether they associate countries with specific attributes ... one of them being "racial equity." For the content you're referring to -- the best countries for racial equity -- we analyzed which countries got the strongest association with that attribute, specifically based on perceptions from respondents who agreed moderately or strongly with the statement, “A country is stronger when it is more racially and ethnically diverse.” (So, not ALL respondents we reached.)"
In other words, U.S. News measured perceptions of other countries' racial equity among people who seem to value racial and ethnic diversity. This doesn't fully explain how scores were generated, but it's apparently all the organization is willing to reveal.
The "best" country for racial equity was New Zealand, followed by Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway. Two details about this group hint at some limitations of the survey:
(a) Each of these five countries is more than 70% white. Most people don't know the exact demographics of other countries, much less their own. Racial equity may have been attributed to these five countries because at least some survey respondents assumed that their populations are completely white, or so white that inequities would be mathematically negligible.
(b) Each of these five countries was ranked somewhere in the top 12 in the U.S. News "best countries overall" rankings. This hints at what psychologists call a "halo effect." A halo effect occurs when your feelings about something (in this case, a country) tend to be uniformly positive or negative based on limited information. For example, lab studies have shown that more attractive, well-groomed strangers are rated more highly in unobserved characteristics such as intelligence and moral goodness.
In the U.S. News Survey, countries like Sweden may be ranked highly overall (#3) and in racial equity (#4) simply because people have a general impression, based on limited information, that these are great countries. (In fact, Sweden has well-documented problems with systemic racism (workplace inequities, racial profiling by law enforcement, etc.)