Are We Making The Grade?: An Analysis of the Effects of Racial Bias in Attitudes Towards Funding Public Schools

Recent studies have shown that racism has morphed over time from being based on biology to being based on racial stereotypes. This new form of racism allows a person’s racist attitudes to be much more easily hidden, even to the person acting upon those attitudes. This thesis investigates a more specific situation about whether racial stereotypes affect beliefs in school policy. Through survey responses, this study tested two hypotheses: that survey respondents with low levels of measured racial resentment would be willing to put their own tax dollars into a school with Black students in order to help the school succeed, and that White survey respondents would be more likely to want to close a Black school than Non-White respondents would be. The survey provided unexpected results, including a much lower than expected racial resentment level among all 297 respondents. Over-all, the hypotheses were consistently disproven. One possible explanation is that this particular survey did not ask respondents about their views on racial inequality, but on inequality in general. One of the biggest takeaways from this study is that the concept of inequality itself seems to have also morphed over time. Respondents proved to associate inequality with difference in socioeconomic differences rather than with racial differences