The civil rights movement replaced overt racism with a subtler symbolic form

Evidence

Another group of researchers has proposed alternatively that the racial attitudes of European Americans are best understood as reflecting a qualitatively new kind of racial prejudice. While different researchers have chosen different labels for this “new racism” (e.g., aversive racism, ambivalent racism, modern racism, symbolic racism, and subtle racism), they are in basic agreement that the new racism plays a significant role in the outcome of political events, including elections, legislation, and policy attitudes held by the mass public. One of the most influential proponents of this school of thought is David O. Sears of UCLA. Sears and his collaborators have argued that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was largely successful in eliminating traditional, “old-fashioned” racism from American society, but that it has been replaced by a new, insidious form of symbolic racism. Symbolic racism is defined as the conjunction of anti-black affect and the holding of traditional American values such as self-reliance, individualism, and the Protestant Work Ethic. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2628

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines symbolic racism as the conjunction of anti-black affect with traditional American values like individualism and the Protestant Work Ethic.
• XREF: Connects to Zelizer’s work on racialized policy feedback and to old-fashioned vs. new racism debates elsewhere in political psychology. — connects to: Racial dog whistles replaced explicit slurs after the civil rights movement — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 89; Civil-rights laws reduced blatant racism but left subtler discrimination intact; Anticolonial and civil-rights movements pursued complementary goals against overlapping racial structures — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 98