Prejudice Incidence and Estimated Exposure to Prejudiced Authorities in the United States

Analysts have debated why substantial declines in the estimated proportion of persons prejudiced against women and blacks has not been accompanied by large declines in key indices of race and gender socioeconomic inequality.  Some analysts contend the measures of prejudice are flawed, and this has spawned an exciting effort to measure prejudice unobtrusively. While accepting the research on implicit prejudice, I note that the sociological debate has presumed that the incidence of prejudiced attitudes is the appropriate focus of analysts attention.  I submit, however, that using the measured incidence of prejudiced authorities and accounting for the social organization of exposure to those authorities produces better estimates of the exposure probability.  Data limitations made it necessary to focus only on women and blacks, but the methods used can be applied to any group for which measures of prejudice exist. The results of the analysis indicate that, with levels of prejudice obtained for the year 2012, African Americans are almost certain, and girls are even more certain, to encounter authorities prejudiced against them. After presenting the findings, the implications of the findings for a thorough-going asymmetry of experience are noted.  It is suggested that this asymmetry, and the doubt as to others’ sincerity it fosters, undermines prospects for positive societal response to the problem posed by prejudice as well as any effort to inhibit the transformation of prejudice into discrimination.