President Obama made headlines earlier this week when he said the n-word in the aftermath of recent racial violence in Charleston. The president’s premeditated purpose in using the inflammatory slur was to help make the point that there is more to racism than just overt expressions of racial prejudice and discrimination.
Or as Obama put it: “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
The president’s comment implied that it’s rare for white Americans to still use the n-word — a suggestion bolstered by the fact that just about everyone now knows it’s unacceptable to say it in polite society. Only 8 percent of whites said there’s “nothing wrong” with using the n-word in a December 2006 CNN/ORC survey.
There have also been several high-profile examples over the past 20 years of white people facing public sanctions — at least temporarily — for using this word (i.e., Mark Fuhrman, Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Laura Schlessinger, Mel Gibson, Paula Dean, Riley Cooper, Donald Sterling and members of a University of Oklahoma fraternity). These incidents illustrate that white Americans’ use of the n-word is not just unseemly in contemporary society, but can sometimes have real consequences.
Nevertheless, a large number of Americans, black and white alike, have not removed the n-word from their vocabularies. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s research, for instance, shows that Google searches for the n-word are “fairly common,” with most of those searches “consistently looking for entertainment featuring derogatory depictions of African-Americans.”
The first results in the figure below further indicate that the n-word is not simply the relic of a bygone racist era. As can be seen in the display, nearly half of whites and two-thirds of African Americans in the aforementioned CNN/ORC Poll said they “know people who sometimes use the ‘n word’ to refer to a black person.”
Americans will even admit to using the n-word when directly probed. I asked a nationally representative sample of 1,000 participants in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) how often they had used the n-word over the past five years. The results above show that almost one-third of whites and two-thirds of blacks respectively admitted to using the n-word at least “once or twice” during that time five-year period.
The sensitive nature of this question inevitably underestimates the true proportion of white Americans who still use the n-word. Despite social desirability pressure to be racially impartial, though, many whites still express overtly prejudicial sentiments in surveys.
Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman, for instance, found that about 40 percent of whites openly state that “a little” or more of the economic difference between blacks and whites can be explained by “racial differences in intelligence” and “fundamental genetic differences between the races.” Likewise, results from the venerable General Social Survey reveal that over half of whites would prefer their close family members marry white spouses than African Americans (see results in “supplementary material,” here).
These overtly racist sentiments have increasingly shaped Americans’ political preferences since Obama’s rise to prominence, too (see here, here, and here). In fact, Stephens-Davidowitz’s aforementioned research shows that media markets with the most Google searches for the n-word were especially likely to vote for Hillary Clinton over Obama in the 2008 primaries and to have preferred John Kerry’s 2004 Democratic candidacy to Obama’s 2008 presidential bid.
To be sure, Americans have come a very long way in their support for racial equality. And, as Obama astutely observed, there is much more to racism than these explicit measures of racist beliefs. Yet survey data suggest that the country still has a long way to go in eliminating overt expressions of white racial prejudice like using the n-word.
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Michael Tesler is assistant professor of political science at UC Irvine, co-author of “Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America,” and author of the forthcoming book, “Most Racial: Politics and Race in the Obama Era.”
