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.
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