A Comparison of White and Indian Student Attitudes Toward the Negro

It is important for students of race prejudice to know the attitudes of various racial groups towards other racial groups. Ideally, comparisons should be made between the attitudes of each group toward itself and toward each other group in the experiment, but this is not always feasible because of the lack of satisfactory techniques for study, or because comparable groups of subjects are not satisfactorily represented in any available population. For this last reason it is often impossible to determine the attitudes of various racial groups toward only one race, while the lack of comparable scales for measuring attitudes of each group toward each other group prevent satisfactory comparisons even where the problem of selection of subjects is not so formidable. The study reported here cannot claim to have overcome either of these difficulties, although a beginning in inter-race attitude studies has been made. Where the larger Indian boarding schools are found it is sometimes possible to make Indian and white comparisons, but even in such cases it is rarely possible to obtain a large group of Negroes of the same age and school background for comparison. In the present study of attitude toward the Negro data are available on more than one hundred Indian and more than one hundred white students in Lawrence, Kansas, but on only a few Negroes. The data were collected in 1934, the subjects being 105 students from Haskell Institute who were studying Problems in American Government, and 110 white students from the Lawrence High School who were taking Problems in Civil Government. The attitudes of the thirteen Negro high school students taking the same course as the white students were also obtained.' All students were in the same school grade and of very similar age. The Indian students came from various regions of the country; the other two groups were residents of the community and natives of a small territory in the Middle West. The Thurstone scale for measuring Attitude Toward the Negro was employed for the study. The statements composing the scale and their numerical values are as follows

Biology · White (mutation) · Critical Race Theory in Education · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · School Choice and Performance · Social Psychology