On Sunday, the alt-right (white supremacists, racists) tried to hold a rally across from the White House. It was a huge failure. Only a couple of dozen of them showed up for the rally, while thousands of counter-demonstrators came to oppose them. One might get the impression that the white supremacists and racists compose only a very tiny minority in this country.
But don't be fooled. The truth is that many people in the United States support those vile views, even if they do not show up at the rallies or openly profess the views.
After the demonstrations in Charlottesville a year ago (when hundreds of white supremacists and nazis clashed with those who opposed them, and one life was lost), the University of Virginia Institute for Family Studies did a survey to find out just how strong the support for these alt-right people was in this country. They surveyed 3,038 non-Hispanic Whites, asking them three questions to rate on a scale of 1 to five. One meant disagreement and 5 mean agreement. The questions were:
Is your race important to your identity?
Is it important that whites work together to change laws unfair to whites?
Do whites face discrimination in the United States?
The Institute for Family Studies concluded that those people who scored high on all three questions either were involved in white identity (white supremacist) or sympathized with the white supremacist view. How large was that? About 6% of the country's white population. That may not sound like much, but considering the U.S. has a white population of about 198 million, it translates into about 11.9 million people.
That's a frightening number. But it's even worse than that. While they rated only those that scored high on all three questions as having white supremacist views, there were many more that scored highly on one or two of the questions. About 28% scored high on question #1, about 38% scored high on question #2, and 27% scored high on question #3. One would have to conclude that many of these people have at least a latent level of racism.
One thing the study does is show why racism has been so hard to stamp out in this country. It is because millions of citizens cling to those racist views.
The charts above, from the Institute for Family Studies, give a demographic breakdown of the white supremacist sympathizers.
