Finding Antiracists: Construction of an Antiracism Attitude Scale

ABSTRACT

While there have been many antiracism discussions, an instrument is needed to capture the degree of support of a popularized form of this philosophy. Such an instrument, contextualized to contemporary racial controversies, can be an upgrade from older measures of racial attitudes, such as the racial resentment scale. Furthermore, a scale assessing antiracism differs from previous scales by measuring racial progressiveness or radicalism rather than racial conservatism or overt racism. Exploratory factor analysis of survey data from two samples indicates that five statements—BLM, white fragility, slavery, government request, and blacks deserve—loaded .6 or higher on the first factor for both samples, and these statements have Cronbach’s alphas higher than .8 and explain more than half the variance. Two other statements—white supremacy and racist society—barely missed qualifying for the index, but further analysis with confirmatory factor analysis indicates that their inclusion in the index should be done with caution. Qualitative scale assessment indicates that respondents reflected themes from popular antiracism literature. The scale was tested with a national sample and found to be statistically sound with predictive validity. This scale assesses the degree to which racial attitudes reflect popular antiracism ideals and can assess the prevalence of antiracism.

KEYWORDS:

• Antiracism
• antiracists
• attitude scale
• scale construction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ While white supremacy is often connected to overt racism, some scholars (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Bonilla-Silva 2001; Keisch and Scott 2015; Treitler 2015) have expanded the definition of it to the exploration of social structures that provide advantages of privileges to majority-group members regardless of whether individuals intend to practice overt racism or not.

² In a similar way as academic antiracism has been seen as the action arm of CRT, it can be argued that popularized antiracism has been heavily influenced by CRT’s notions, such as racism being a core part of American society (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Patel 2022) and how the idea of colorblindness is used to divert our attention from racial justice (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Moschel 2007). The closeness of the relationship between CRT and popularized antiracism may account for some of the tendency of some conservative activists to confuse antiracism efforts as attempts to teach CRT (Holcome-McCoy 2022; Sawchuk 2021).

³ This is not to say that there is not a presence of whites endorsing antiracism (Bonilla-Silva 2006; O’Brien 2001; Warren 2010); however, the interests of African Americans are more likely to be at stake given that the animating issues motivating the recent public attention to antiracism are driven by assaults on African American men.

⁴ The organization Black Lives Matters (BLM) has advocated efforts such as defunding the police (Sinanan 2020; Waldron 2020) and abolishing ICE (McKanders 2020; Nishiyama 2022). It is not clear how much average individuals know of such revolutionary efforts, but it is likely that individuals highly committed to antiracism have such knowledge and use that knowledge in their calculation of whether to accept BLM.

⁵ I included open-ended answers from white supremacy and racist society due to their closeness to being placed in the final index and to maximize the qualitative data collected for the analysis.

⁶ Ideally, I would also have included racist society, but since this was not a survey that I commissioned, I needed to limit the number of questions on it. Nonetheless, I personally thank Christopher Bader for allowing me to place these questions in this survey. This phase of the research would not have been possible without his generosity.

⁷ Related tables can be found in Appendix A.

⁸ Nine respondents, or .9 percent of the sample, indicates that they were nonbinary and were marked as 0.

⁹ Age ranged from 18 to 91.

¹⁰ The research was approved by the IRB at the author’s institution.

¹¹ The actual question read: We like to get your feelings toward some of our political leaders and other people who are in the news these days. We like you to rate that person using something we call the feeling thermometer. Ratings between 50 degrees and 100 degrees mean that you feel favorable and warm toward the person. Ratings between 0 degrees and 50 degrees mean that you don’t feel favorable toward the person and that you don’t care too much for that person. You would rate the person at the 50-degree mark if you don’t feel particularly warm or cold toward the person. If you do not recognize the name of that person, then skip to the next slider and leave that particular slider blank.

¹² I considered using a cutoff point of 30 to provide an average of 6.0 on the five questions. However, this would reduce the combined number of high scorers of either antiracism or racial resentment scale to 64. Reducing the lower limit raises the number of individuals who are either high scorers of antiracism or racial resentment scale to 89. According to a two-tail power analysis test (p < .05), including the extra respondents increases the ability to detect small (.151 vs. .12: Cohen’s d = .2), medium (.639 vs. .502: Cohen’s d = .5) and large effects (.959 vs. .881: Cohen’s d = .8).

¹³ Power analysis calculation suggests that with a sample of 133, these results indicate that it is unlikely to be large or medium effect differences between these two groups, but a small effect difference is quite possible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George Yancey

George Yancey is a professor in the Institute for Studies of Religion and the Department of Sociology at Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, atheists, cultural progressives, academic bias, and anti-religious hostility.