How Party and Place Shape Americans' Views On Discrimination

Younger white people are much more likely than older white people to say that black people face a lot of discrimination. Most Republicans reject the idea that black people do. Black people are the racial group least likely to support same-sex marriage but the group most opposed to laws that would allow businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people. These are just some of the findings in a massive new study on American attitudes about how Americans perceive discrimination, from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies attitudes about culture and public policy.

Over the course of 10 months in 2016, the researchers surveyed 40,000 people on their attitudes about discrimination — a typical poll sample might have about 1,000 respondents — which gave them enough data to sketch a more pointillist picture of how Americans see one another. (They could, for example, isolate the views of Latinos in the Southwest who self-identify as conservatives.)

What the researchers found is that it's often very difficult to untangle people's views about racial issues from the influence of the two major political parties. They