These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice

I keep reading headlines like Racism Plummeted After Trump's Election.

I have long since learned to be skeptical when a headline writer claims something "plunged" or "plummeted." I click through and I find that there was a decline of, say, 2%. A decline, yes. But not a plunge.

I have been seeing these type of headlines for some weeks now. OK. Enough already. I'll look. What does the research say?

From The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans' Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey by Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington. From the Abstract.

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that prejudice can behave like an issue attitude: rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can respond thermostatically to changing presidential rhetoric and policy positions.

And the accompanying graphic.

Click to enlarge.

Well, holy smokes. That probably does constitute a plunge. Depending on which line you are looking at, that is a 15-50% decline in prejudice.

Of course, it was all hogwash in the first place. Card-carrying DNC journalists and other Mandarin Class bitter clingers were so steeped in magical thinking that within a month of the election they were claiming rises in racism, long before one could expect to see it in data. For the droning heads, because they thought Trump and America were inherently racist, therefore it must be true. And because Trump was a racist, that racism, like cooties, would magically infect others and racism would rise.

And what are we to make of "expression of prejudice" in some longitudinal survey? I want to see whether there is a rise in manifested racism, not just some mealy-mouthed expression. But demonstrated racism is quite hard to define and, if defined objectively and concretely, even harder to measure. And pleasantly rare. Instead, we rely to a far greater extent on imputed racism by those seeking to find it. Some sort of critical theory version of the observer effect but where the act of seeking something causes it to come into being. The Finder Effect perhaps.

So we end up in some sort of Samuel Beckett theater of the absurd nightmare, waiting for Godot to manifest some racism while Vladimir and Estragon talk, talk, talk. And Godot never (or at least rarely) manifests. Despite all the talking.