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Is a pro-Romney ad racist? Five questions to ask yourself

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Is a pro-Romney ad racist? Five questions to ask yourself
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Is a pro-Romney ad racist? Five questions to ask yourself
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In the presidential election, it’s not a matter of whether racism will appear in campaign messaging, but when. President Obama is running for reelection with the support of the majority of black and Latino voters. Mitt Romney is challenging Mr. Obama with an almost exclusively white constituency behind him. Both candidates will raise and spend unprecedented amounts of money on political advertisements, as will their respective parties and allied super PACs.

A crucial question is: How will we know when pro-Romney ads are potentially racist? It’s not always so easy to recognize.

Reasonable people will disagree about whether an ad appeals to race in an innocuous or outright racist way. This is why we developed the Index of Racist Potential. It is based on the content of more than 1,000 political advertisements we analyzed that were sponsored by candidates in federal election contests from 1972 through 2006 and that included at least one candidate of color (black or Latino). The index measures the degree that a given ad has the potential to evoke – consciously or unconsciously – voters’ stereotypical attitudes about people of color, regardless of the intent of the candidate or campaign team.

From the ads we analyzed, we found that black candidates certainly “use” race (directly or indirectly) in their ads, but they don’t reinforce widely held negative racial stereotypes about whites or flame fear of minorities. In other words, “race” may be present in the ad, but that presence isn’t “racist.”

Our index is based on the presence or absence of fairly objective content that appears in an ad. To determine whether a television or Web ad this presidential election season would score on the higher end (more racist) of our index, ask yourself these five sets of questions.


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Our Index of Racist Potential measures the degree that a political ad has the potential to evoke – consciously or unconsciously – voters’ stereotypical attitudes about people of color, regardless of the intent of the candidate or campaign team. To determine whether a political ad this presidential election season would score on the higher end (more racist) of our index, ask yourself these five sets of questions.


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By Charlton McIlwain and Stephen M. Caliendo, July 23, 2012
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