Ask people a blunt question about race, and a striking number will not say yes and will not say no. Presented with the statement that some racial or ethnic groups are born more intelligent than others, or that some cultures are simply better, they reach for the safety of the middle category: “neither agree nor disagree.”
We tend to read that answer as neutrality, the absence of prejudice. In national surveys of 4,137 people in the United States and the Netherlands, published in International Sociology, we found that it is closer to the opposite. The silence in the middle can be an easily overlooked form of what we term “ambivalent racism,” which quietly helps keep inequality in place.
Counting racism
Motivated by the public reckoning around racism in the wake of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, we set out to document biological and cultural racism on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 2020.
We found that biological racism was expressed by one in four American respondents, and roughly one in ten people in the Netherlands. These respondents agreed that some racial or ethnic groups are born more intelligent or more hardworking than others. A further one in three Americans, and roughly a quarter of the Dutch, expressed cultural racism, agreeing that certain cultures are simply better than others. Adding up these blatant forms of racism, we saw support for at least one of these views among roughly 45% of Americans and 31% of the Dutch.
Then there are the people in the middle. Another quarter of Americans, and fully a third of Dutch respondents, chose “neither agree nor disagree.” Count them in, and a majority in each country espouses blatant or ambivalent racism.
What the middle category hides
The middle category is easy to dismiss as the answer of people who have not thought about the question or would rather not say. Our data suggest something else. Respondents who chose the middle category took about a minute longer to finish the survey than those who rejected the racist statements outright. A minute is a long time in a questionnaire. We read it as a sign of someone caught between two things they believe at once.
We call this ambivalent racism: the simultaneous pull of a real belief in egalitarianism and a belief that some groups are less capable or less deserving. The person is not indifferent towards the question; they are divided by it. “Neither agree nor disagree,” read this way, actually means “both agree and disagree.”
The ambivalent were not the usual suspects, either. In the United States, we found that ambivalence is more common among people with lower levels of education and income and among political independents. Ambivalent cultural racism is more common among Black Americans, while ambivalent biological racism is more prevalent among Muslims.
Why ambivalence matters
Most importantly, ambivalent racism is strongly associated with beliefs about inequality. Across both countries, people who expressed racist beliefs, blatant or ambivalent, were less likely to see disparities in the first place, more believing that theirs is a meritocratic society, and less supportive of government action to combat inequality.
In the United States, ambivalent racism was an especially strong predictor of opposition to income redistribution and to anti-discrimination policy. That is the quiet work that ambivalence accomplishes. Someone who holds egalitarian beliefs and prejudice at the same time can, in good conscience, refuse to see the gap between rich and poor as a problem worth solving, and withhold support from the policies meant to close it, without having to own up to blatant racism.
Their ambivalence does the justifying; it lets people keep an egalitarian self-image while quietly declining what equality would require.
Tolerance, meritocracy, and the space between
The two countries flatter themselves in different ways. The United States tells a story about meritocracy, in which talent and effort pave the path to success. The Netherlands tells a story about tolerance and egalitarianism, embellishing its colonial past. Ethnic and racial inequalities are seen as obstacles for individuals to overcome, things of the past, or, in the case of the Netherlands, not recognized at all.
The stronger a society’s belief in its own fairness, the more prejudice may retreat into a place where no one has to say it aloud. Unsurprisingly, ambivalent racism was most common in the Netherlands, the more self-consciously tolerant of the two.
What the middle could become
It would be easy to read our findings as bleak, but they also point to an opening. The people who pick the middle category are not committed racists. There is no reason to dismiss their belief in equality, but it is in tension with something else they carry. That tension could be resolved.
What can resolve it, research hints, may be contact with its reality: seeing how much a person’s race and ethnicity shape their resources and opportunities, rather than assuming the playing field is level and the winners simply worked harder.
How people explain inequality is a starting point for what they are willing to do about it. The people who chose the middle category have not fully made up their minds. That is why the way we talk about race and inequity, in our classrooms, on social media, and in politics, counts for so much.
About the authors
Jonathan J.B. Mijs is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Boston University. His work combines longitudinal data analysis, survey experiments, qualitative field work, and computational methods to study how people understand, explain, and feel about inequality and meritocracy.
Leping Wang is a post-doctoralresearcher at the Center for Research on Inequality and Health at Vanderbilt University. Her work draws on population-level longitudinal analysis, global comparative approach, and qualitative interviews to examine how family relationships, social networks, and the institutions governing families, employment, and social welfare distribute cognitive health, psychological well-being, and financial resources over the life course across the United States, China, and Europe.
Read more
Wang, Leping and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2026. “Ambivalent, biological, and cultural racism and the legitimation of inequality: Original cross-national survey evidence from the United States and the Netherlands.” International Sociology 41(4): 503-33.
Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Anna Dominique Herrera Huang and William Regan. 2024. “Confronting racism of omission: Experimental evidence of the impact of information addressing misperceptions about ethnic and racial inequality in the United States and the Netherlands.” Du Bois Review 21(1): 1-23
Mijs, Jonathan J.B. 2023. “Learning about inequality in unequal America: How heterogeneity in college shapes students’ belief in meritocracy and racial discrimination.” Research in Stratification and Social Mobility 85: 1-13