To really understand racism and prejudice in America, a young Pennsylvania researcher would travel south to where she felt she could see it, hear it, and feel it. “For much of the U.S. public the Deep South, and especially Mississippi, represents the most racist region in the United States,” according to Von Bakanic, associate professor of sociology. So for her studies about racial attitudes, Mississippi would be Bakanic's "ground zero." She was especially interested in the area near Neshoba, Miss. where the infamous murder of three black men had taken place in 1964.

Bakanic says that even though racial prejudices are present in all areas of the country, Mississippi is a place where it is considerably more noticeable. “The way in which I could see the prejudices was different, I was an outsider,” she said. This is one reason why Bakanic formed a team of researchers to help with data gathering in her study of the difference in the way black and white people interpret questions about race. She based this study on the fact that black and white people experience race relations from different social positions.

Bakanic set up interviews for her team of researchers to ask community members of both races three specific (closed-ended) questions about segregation. Based on their level of agreement or disagreement to these questions Bakanic broke the respondents up into four categories from strong support of segregation to no support. Her results showed that 73 percent of respondents had no support for segregation, but based on recorded comments, this group used more racist terms than those who supported segregation. “Even if their comments had been pointed out as racist sentiments, they would probably not have recanted their opinions or understood what others judged to be racist about the comments,” Bakanic says.

The results of her study found that while there has been a considerable shift in views on racial matters since the 1960s, whites and blacks still hold divergent views about race relations. Bakanic also found that in response to remembering the violent history of the area, whites found it threatening while black people in the community found it reassuring that racial terrorism could not occur again.

Bakanic says that what she found most surprising about her research was how people viewed being prejudice as a bad thing and would say they were not prejudice, but their comments and stories showed to be grounded in prejudice. She says, “People don’t want to be prejudice and so they go into a sort of denial of their prejudices and they really come to believe that they are not prejudice.” She is fascinated by the psychological way that people can deny being prejudice at the same time as espousing it.

Bakanic shares her work with her students and even has them work on it with her. In a recent Methods Sequence course her students were able to conduct an online experiment to study prejudices through rating their own prejudices and answering timed-response questions about racial issues. The results surprised the students and drew their attention to their own prejudices, which led to a greater number of biases to be reported by the students.

She says that from her work she would like to see “that people would understand the role of prejudice and that perhaps we could get people to want to get rid of their prejudices or at least control them.”

Bakanic’s work has not been limited to racial prejudices, she has also studied gender and class prejudices as well as homophobia and ageism. She is currently writing a book on prejudices as well as writing a paper about Hispanic stereotypes. She is also involved in a study with MUSC’s Crime Victim’s Center concerning gender attitudes toward one another in relation to sexual assault.

For more information about Dr. Von Bakanic, please visit her website at: http://www.cofc.edu/~bakanicv/