Symbolic racism is the expression by suburban whites in terms of abstract ideological symbols and symbolic behaviors of the feeling that blacks are violating cherished values and making illegitimate demands for changes in the racial status quo. In this paper, the correlates of symbolic racism from a sample of seminary students and of voters in a Los Angeles suburb are presented. Measures of symbolic racism predicted voting preferences for a white incumbent over a black challenger in the 1969 Los Angeles mayoralty election, and symbolic racism was itself correlated negatively with sympathetic identification with the underdog and with education. It was positively correlated with Republican party identification and with measures of traditional or conventional religious and secular American values. Symbolic racism was not correlated with measures of occupation, income, tolerance of ambiguity, alienation, social rootlessness, self‐concept, or relative deprivation. It is proposed that symbolic racism rests upon antiblack racial socialization and conservative political and value socialization, and some speculations are offered to account for why symbolic racism has emerged at a time when traditional measures of racism indicate a decline in antiblack prejudice.

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In recent years as public opinion polls have shown a decline in racist responses, white Americans have strongly resisted school desegregation and affirmative action programs. Hence, there has been a debate over the extent to which racism has really declined. The theory of modern racism addresses these issues, distinguishing between old-fashioned racial beliefs recognized by everyone as racism and a new set of beliefs arising from the conflicts of the civil rights movement. The theory proposes that antiblack feeling remains high and has been displaced from the socially undesirable old-fashioned beliefs onto the new beliefs where the racism is not recognized. Three experiments were performed; results showed that, regardless of context, the old-fashioned items were perceived as more likely to reveal prejudice. The results are discussed in terms of their significance for opinion polling and continuing racial conflict in America.

Researchers in American race relations have demonstrated the ambivalence white Americans feel toward black Americans. The prejudiced white behaves positively or negatively toward blacks depending on the context of the behavior, while the less prejudiced white behaves more consistently across contexts. In this study, the ambivalence concept was used to demonstrate the construct validity of a relatively nonreactive scale of racial prejudice-the Modern Racism Scale. Eighty-one white college students were pretested on the scale and then evaluated job candidates with identical resumes (except for a picture of a black or white male) under contexts designed to elicit positive or negative discrimination by ambivalent (presumably prejudiced) subjects. As predicted, when the candidate was black, the Modern Racism Scale was negatively correlated with hiring evaluations in the negative context and positively correlated in the positive context. When the job candidate was white, context and the Modern Racism Scale were unrelated to hiring evaluations.