Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

In the first appendix of the book, the authors examine studies of racial attitudes over the past century. They do so in order to demonstrate why scientists believe racism—although perhaps harder to see and less overt—still exists in modern society. The earliest studies into discrimination begin in the 1920s, when sociologist Emory Bogardus found that over half of his respondents did not want to come into any contact with several “races” (170)—an umbrella term Bogardus used for 40 different nationalities, ethnicities, and racial groups. Another test a few years later from Louis L. Thurston found similar “attitudes” (175)—a psychology term just then coming into use—among white male respondents, who answered that they preferred Americans over 19 other groups. A chart created by the authors combining the findings from both Bogardus and Thurston shows that attitudes toward the least-liked groups, which included “Negro,” “Turks,” “Hindu,” “Japanese,” and ”Chinese,”(174) were particularly negative. In the late 1920s, E.D. Hinckley’s “Attitude Toward the Negro scale” (173) reaffirmed these findings, although it exclusively centered on African Americans.

Research into racial attitudes after the 1950s began to shift, as it came to focus primarily on “Black-White relations” (175). Researchers administered the same survey questions every year between 1960 and 2000 to track changing attitudes.