The Development and Validation of a Subtle Racism Scale in South Africa

Abstract

Research on the concept of symbolic or modern racism has shown that transparent and obvious measures of traditional racism no longer adequately reflect racial prejudice in many American sub-populations. There are indications that this may also be the case for certain segments of the white South African population, particularly in the case of university students who have been the typical subjects of research on prejudice. Traditional measures of prejudice may also be viewed as offensive by subjects and elicit antagonistic reactions. The present study therefore set out to develop and validate a new, more indirect, and subtle measure of anti-black racial prejudice designed to overcome these problems. The results (N = 217) indicated that the Subtle Racism scale was unidimensional, highly reliable, and showed powerful associations with a number of validity criteria. It clearly outperformed a more traditional measure of racism in all respects.