I've been conversing with friends about this study today, and thought I'd share with Hubski, too:

This is a story from October, but there's an interesting correlation that isn't explicitly discussed as a potential causal relationship in the article. An AP study found an increase in both explicit and implicit racism toward blacks in Obama's first term. However, this spike correlates with a sharp drop in blacks' socioeconomic status, with blacks suffering much more from the "Great Recession" than did white or Hispanic families.

It's been posited, including by the President in his 2008 campaign, that poverty is a greater source of prejudice than simply skin color. One conservative friend, in discussing this study with me, suggested that the higher rate of racism in Republicans is due to conservatives' class prejudices more than direct racial prejudice: In other words, conservatives perceive blacks as being poor--something that has become more true in the past four years than it was in 2008--and then tend to assign negative stereotypes which conservatives associate with poverty to blacks, such as laziness.

Do you think there's a causal relationship between changes in a racial group's economic status and changes in social prejudice against that group?