CVK
The Washington Post recently teamed up with Stanford University to study how racial cues affected people’s willingness to grant aid to Katrina victims. Here’s MoJo Blog’s round-up of the major findings:

People were willing to give assistance to a white victim, on average, for about 12 months, and they were willing to give the same amount of aid to an African American person for about 11 months. A darker-skinned black victim was selected to receive $100 a month less, over a shorter period of time, than a light-skinned white person. Participants who read an article on looting were the least generous toward African Americans.

You can read details about the study’s methodology and findings at The Washington Post. What I found particularly interesting was the effect of skin tone. The study’s subjects were shown photos of either a white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian person - each one was either lighter-skinned or darker-skinned (click here for a PDF of how they manipulated skintones.) Here’s what they found:

When the hurricane victim in the news was a dark-complexion white, the amount of assistance for hurricane victims actually increased. Perhaps well tanned whites are perceived as vigorous, fit and attractive, thus putting our respondents in a more favorable state of mind concerning hurricane victims in general. But for every other ethnic group — blacks, Hispanics and Asians — the effect of skin color ran in the opposite direction. When people saw a dark-skinned black, Hispanic, or Asian, they recommended lower levels of financial assistance.

The final conclusion of the study was dead-on. It doesn’t matter how liberal you are, how well-educated you are, what a diverse city you live in, you’ve internalized racial stereotypes to such a degree that you’re not even aware of them. And when media coverage of a major disaster like Katrina contains all kinds of racial cues, there’s no way you won’t be influenced by them:

The effects of the racial identity of individual hurricane victims on the prescribed level of government assistance for all victims are suggestive of what psychologists call the “automaticity” of stereotyping. People cannot help stereotyping on the basis of ethnicity despite their best efforts to act unbiased and egalitarian. As we noted at the outset, this particular sample of participants consisted of highly educated individuals who located themselves toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. Many of them live in and around the nation’s capital, one of the more racially diverse and cosmopolitan areas of America. We suspect that this group would score at or very near the top of most measures of support for civil rights and racial equality. Yet their responses to Katrina were influenced by the mere inclusion of racial cues in news media coverage. The fact that this group awarded lower levels of hurricane assistance after reading about looting or after encountering an African-American family displaced by the hurricane is testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life.