Social Desirability Bias and Non-White America

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I thought some might find this interesting.

A frequent problem in survey research is that people have a tendency not to answer truthfully about their views if these views are not socially accepted. This is known as Social Desirability Bias, which makes it difficult to accurately gauge public opinion on controversial subjects. However, some techniques have been developed in an attempt to eliminate (or at the very least alleviate) this problem. One approach - referred to as a list experiment - involves the following (taken from the first link below):

Anyway, the results are quite interesting (Survey among White Non-Hispanic Americans, N=1,028, margin of error is +/- 3.1 percent):

Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ns/362023/
http://publicreligion.org/2014/05/in-th ... n-the-u-s/
http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-conte ... pline1.pdf (see page 4 for exact wording)

Obviously, the discrepancy between direct and indirect responses as to anti-white sentiment in the above figure is highest among Born-Again Protestants and Southerners, but it is also interesting to see that Democrats are actually slightly more likely to demonstrate indirect Anti-White sentiment than Republicans, despite being less likely to do so when asked directly.

Please discuss.

Is being uncomfortable with a non-white majority indicative of anything tho? People may be uncomfortable for different reasons, I don't think it necessarily means they're racist.

If we go to any country, and poll the citizens, "Would it bother you if your dominate race was no longer dominate?" We would expect most of them to emphatically answer, "YES".

One might think an invading army took over, or a natural disaster wiped out the dominate race. So, asking a white person if ".. an America where most people are not white would be a concern" - you would think the response would be 100% "Heck yeah, what happened?"

Of course, Americans are told that concern for their race/culture/language is racism, so they learn to keep their opinions to themselves , or risk being accused of being racist.

Any way you slice them (directly or indirectly), peckerwoods and fundies are gonna be a problem.

Peckerwood-Fundies can be a real nuisance at times.Tend to have big litters,so I doubt there will be a shortage of them any time soon.They breed like Dugga..er,I mean rabbits.

It is a bit ironic though, considering European Americans are not native to the area.
And I don't think most Americans think of some disaster that causes a non-white majority US, but of immigrants/minorities and their descendants.

I think a white person who's prejudiced against white people might answer no. Whether or not such a person exists is something I don't know. With so many people there's got to be at least one.

And how much of this could be attributed to people just having no comprehension skills?

"An America that is not mostly white?"

I could see a whole railroad system full of people in America who would not understand what those six words mean. To a bunch of people that is an ambiguous string of syllables because of the way it is phrased.

I am Caucasian but I would much rather, if allowed my preference, to live in a community surrounded by nothing but Asians and Hispanics than Caucasian Americans. I would incorporate African Americans into my preferential list were it not for the fact I don't think African Americans and Hispanics can coexist peacefully. I can coexist with anyone but Caucasian Americans make me very uncomfortable.

The majority of Hispanics in the USA self-identify as 'white'. Would you have a problem around them too ?

Most Americans were born in America, so they are native to America. Arguing that partial European ancestry makes one non-native does not make sense.

Most Americans (black, brown, white, mixed, American Indians) have some European ancestry.



Possibly, but generally Americans are not that intellectual.

We have tv shows like "Duck Dynasty", "American Idol", "Honey Boo Boo" ...

Last edited by LoveNotHate on 26 May 2014, 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And Anthropology, Government, and anything Forensics list them as white/Caucasian also. That is, unless they're Afro-Brazillian (black ancestry essentially) or a South American indigenous tribe, then they're just listed as black or Native American.

I don't care how they self identify on a survey> I care how they live and how they treat other human beings. I have lived in Hispanic communities before and have Hispanic inlaws. Far more civilized and respectful than most predominantly Caucasian neighborhoods I have lived in. Most Hispanics I know are very proud of their heritage and I think would put "white" on a survey out of peer pressure.

And most Hispanics I know understand English very well, but do not speak English perfectly and rather than deal with impatient, insensitive Americans treating them like little children because their enunciation is not flawless, they would rather play dumb and just look at those Americans as ignorant a**holes.

Language? Culture? Race?

How many different versions of English are there now? How many different national/regional abnormalities? How about the fact that English absorbs languages like a sponge?

Culture? Which culture is "American?" Is it the Anglo-Saxon version? Irish? Slavic? German? Which group of white people's culture is right? American culture absorbs every wave of immigrants and always will. Yet every time a new group starts coming to the US, we have the previously mistreated wave joining the old guard in the preservation of our culture crap.

White as a race is absurd. It is a conglomeration of many different genetic lineages squeezed into one group based on the tone of their skin (same for all the other races). You have hispanics, white hispanics, and caucasian whites. Where exactly does one become the other? Same for black. African (of some drastically different genetic lineages), Carribean, Brazilian, Australian aboriginal. Even many "blacks" in the US who have had genetic testing and discovered that they have only a tiny percentage of "black" DNA, all squished together. And "asian" as a single race? Don't even get me started on that one. There are so many "mixed race" people, and so many more "mixed race" couples. What race are they?

You would think at this point, we'd know enough about genetics to put the idea of skin color as a separate race to bed.

Telling apart Germans and Jews is like trying to differentiate penguins, and yet they still managed to find differences. Most people don't think, "Hey, we are all the same 'underneath' in our DNA".

America is divided up by class, race and culture, then possibly language. I find it hard to believe you would deny this, so I take your questions as rhetorical.

"White flight"/"Black flight" / Ethnic enclaves / Racial crime / Racial Discrimination / Language discrimination are all part of America.

People generally want to be around other people who are like them.

So, I disagree with your statement that "American culture absorbs every wave of immigrants and always will". That only worked because it immigrated people of common race and culture. Now it is immigrating people with different races and culture. So the country is segregated by these new differences. This should be evident, since black people were not integrated with whites. White people flee if a neighborhood becomes too black.

I also disagree with you statement that "English absorbs like a sponge". If it absorbs so fast, then how come Americans on their phone have to dial "1 for Spanish"?

I'm talking about the difference between the way people see things and about the way they actually are.



So again I ask, which culture is the "American" one?



So is that the culture you so deperately want to preserve?



So the majority of those of German background are the only ones who eat sauerkraut? Are you seriously contending that St. Patrick's Day has not been totally absorbed into American culture? You do realize that these waves of immigrants had extemely different cultures, don't you? And as for race, you should remember that the category "white" used to be much more exclusive. "Whites" in the US have consistently broadened the definition to include more and more people as their majority seemed to be threatened. Among those who were not always considered white: Anyone not Anglo-Saxon of British origin, Catholics (that's right, a group with different religious beliefs were briefly considered "not white"), Germans, European Spanish, Italians, Greeks, various Arabic and northern African groups, Irish, Jews from every place in the world, Eastern Europeans (despite the fact that this is where the term "caucasian is derived from), Aryans from northern India.

Don't worry, in another few generations, all hispanics will be considered white, and then they will join you in the fight to preserve white culture from the invading (fill in the blank) wave of immigrants.

And just for the record, the U.S. Census definition for white is "a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."

I have lived in plenty of places where black and white lived together quite peacefully (usually in the working class, in between upper middle class and lower class neighborhoods areas of cities). Yes, sometimes there are splits, but it is usually based on socio-economics rather than race. If "white trash" families started moving into a middle class neighborhood, you'd see just as much "white flight." The only people I have ever heard of who flee from a neighborhood because there are too many blacks are not doing so for any other reason than pure bigotry, no matter how they dress it up.



The English language has more words than other languages because it absorbs parts of others over generations. Have you ever watched the national spelling bee? Did you noticed how they will ask for the language of origin? Yet the words are still English. It is estimated that the English language grows by 8500-25,000 words each year (depending on which studies you use), and many of those words are "borrowed words" from other languages.

Immigrants speak their own language; their children are bilingual; their grandchildren cannot communicate with them.

Where I live now is on the edge of "Slavic Village." There are some older Slavic people here (I rent from one), but 70 years after it became the Slavic Village, it is a mix of all kinds of different demographics. There are plenty of black families, plenty of white familes, a smattering of southeast Asians and Chinese, a few large hispanic families, and even a fairly large group of Muslims from the same Afghani village scattered throughout that have been coming over in little packets as they get their visas approved. There were some issues with vandalism and threats when those "terrorists" first showed up, but it has calmed down now that people have discovered that they are just normal working stiffs like the rest of us.

Yesterday there was a huge cookout in two of the side by side empty lots a few blocks away, and the people there were definitely not all the same color. Your perceptions of what makes up a culture are ignoring generational history, the present day, and the future. Are there still different groups? Of course there are, but the lines get blurred over time, and that is not such a bad thing. There is no culture that is pure throughout time; it is always evolving, always changing. Trying to cling to some unchanging glorious past instead of remembering and learning from it is folly.