There is some limited evidence to suggest that the less racist whites seem to be, the more likely they are to allow themselves to develop racist attitudes. One 2009 Stanford study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that whites were significantly more likely to claim racist beliefs if first given an opportunity to say that they had voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Unrelated studies on the effect of moral self-licensing all seem to suggest a deeply cynical possibility: the less racist people think white people are, the more comfortable
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