Measuring Benevolent Racism: Scale Development and Initial Validation

Abstract

Racism has existed in the United States since the country’s founding, although it has taken different forms over time. Psychological research on racism has reflected and captured these changes, with new theories and measures in response to historical events. For example, when Jim Crow laws were prevalent, many Americans expressed Hostile Racism, or overt racial prejudice. Following the Civil Rights era, Symbolic and Modern Racism emerged, which are indirect or covert expressions of racism. Over the past several years, racism in the U.S. has continued to shift. Specifically, the racial reckoning period of 2020 (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate) led many Americans to reconsider their own biases and attempt to be less racist. At the same time, negative views of POC persist. Thus, to capture how uniquely American racism manifests today, we developed a measure of Benevolent Racism, which is defined as seemingly positive attitudes regarding People of Color (POC) that mask underlying beliefs about POC that maintain the status quo. We developed a 30 item measure of Benevolent Racism that assessed beliefs such as the view that White people must protect communities of color, it is acceptable to expect POC to overcome any barrier that they encounter, the country needs POC to fill lower status jobs, POC of color serve as a source of entertainment or emotional comfort to other racial groups, and it is risky to push to racial equity if society is not ready for it. We administered our measure and other established measures of racism and support for hierarchy (e.g., Modern Racism, System Justification, Social Dominance Orientation) to undergraduates at a public university (N = 445) to test 1) whether the Benevolent Racism measure captured variation in attitudes and 2) whether the Benevolent Racism measure was distinct from existing measures 3) whether the factor structure of our Benevolent Racism measure matched our theoretical grouping of subscales. Means for the samples were roughly at the midpoint of the 7-point scale (Sample Mean = 3.48), and there was variation in participants’ responses (SD = 0.63, Min = 1.60, Max = 5.00). In addition, the Benevolent Racism measure had only small correlations with established measures of racism and support for hierarchy (rs < .20), indicating that Benevolent Racism captured a related but distinct construct. Further, our exploratory factor analysis suggested that the future iterations of the scale may require a more parsimonious factor structure and a reduced number of items. Accordingly, future research will build on the initial validation of the Benevolent Racism measure, aiming to confirm factor structure and item clarity. Subsequently, future work will examine how Benevolent Racism is related to willingness to live amongst, employ, befriend, or otherwise engage with POC. It may be the case that people with high levels of Benevolent Racism are willing or even eager to do this as long as their interactions uphold a racial hierarchy. In addition, future research could examine the effects of Benevolent Racism on POC.