Blacks and Hispanics perform better on cognitive tests in counties with more Republicans, more White people, and more “implicit racism”, a study has shown.
The new research, conducted by Emil Kirkegaard from the Ulster Institute for Social Research, used county-level data from the United States to examine Black-White and Hispanic-White cognition gaps, and produced findings contrary to the predictions of the systemic racism model.
“US counties with more Republican voters should have larger racial gaps, as the Republican share is believed to be indicative of anti-Black sentiments in the population,” the systemic racism model predicts, according to the study.
“These are considered to be causing lower Black performance via stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, and various other kinds of overt and covert discrimination.
“For the same reason, there should be a negative association between the Black average test score and the Republican voting share. Counties with higher anti-Black racism scores on the Implicit Association Test should have larger racial gap.
“Counties with a larger White % of the population should have larger Black-White gaps, as [according to systemic racism theory] Whites are the ones responsible for the oppression of non-Whites.”
However, instead of confirming these predictions, Kirkegaard’s analysis found smaller gaps in counties with more Republicans, more White people, and more “implicit anti-Black racism”.
“This is unexpected because of the well-studied associations between left-wing attitudes and pro-non-European attitudes (“anti-racist” in the terminology of systemic racism writers),” the study stated.
According to the study, the findings may be explained by post-slavery migration trends where Blacks who moved out of the south self-selected for “human capital traits”, or by Blacks in more northern states being relatively higher in European ancestry.
Another possibility highlighted in the study is that Republicans preside over institutions which are more effective at raising cognitive ability than those controlled by Democrats.
“These results can be seen as an example of a lower-performing ethnic group adopting the dominant group’s culture and this being a net benefit to them. This would be the ‘within society’ version of beneficial cultural colonialism,” the study noted.
