Social scientists have proliferated competing ‘new racism’ concepts since biological racism lost legitimacy

Evidence

Old-fashioned racism, stereotypes, and negative affect have been familiar features of the racial landscape throughout the 20th century. However, evidence of continuing white resistance to change in an era that has generally renounced both biological theories of racial superiority and legalized racial inequality has generated a variety of descriptions of a “new racism.” All share a component of negative attitudes toward African Americans; they differ in what is involved beyond that, and how they are measured. One family of concepts using very similar measurement includes “symbolic racism” (Kinder & Sears, 1981; Sears & Kinder, 1971), “modern racism” (McConahay, 1986), “subtle racism” (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), and “racial resentments” (Kinder & Sanders, 1996). Other “new racisms,” conceptualized and measured in other ways, include “ambivalent racism” (Katz, Wackenhut, & Hass, 1986), “aversive racism” (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986), and “laissez-faire racism” (Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith, 1997). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3608

Categorization

• XREF: The taxonomy of racism concepts maps onto myriads of measurement debates; connects to the theory/reference-class debates I’ve blogged about. — connects to: Even anti-racist scientists accepted fixed cultural essences of races
• QUESTION: Interesting that symbolic, modern, subtle, and resentment racism are treated as measurement-equivalent but conceptually separate - worth chasing how much they actually diverge in predictive validity.