White and black Americans hold systematically divergent beliefs about racial inequality

Evidence

These are what we might call external, institutional, organizational aspects of racialization. But racialization is also constituted of sets of attitudes, and beliefs. The ways different racialized groups look at the their world, and understand and explain it, is different. Whites overestimate the proportion of blacks in poverty, and are more likely to explain it in terms of individual failings; whites estimate levels of black/white disparity consistently lower than blacks estimate it (Gandy and Baron, 1998). Whites are more likely to dismiss the effects of past racism and discrimination as irrelevant to the way society works - about two thirds of whites opposed offering an apology to African Americans for slavery; at the same time, African Americans see a direct relationship between past racism and current inequality and discrimination, and almost exactly the same number of them are in favor of an apology. Whites also underestimate the nature and extent of contemporary discrimination; blacks are more likely to estimate it correctly. We might say that not only do blacks and whites live and work in a different world, but their mindsets are in a different world as well. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1849

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general literature on racial perception gaps studied by Norton and Sommers and others.