"I am not a racist but ...": mapping White college students' racial ideology in the USA

Survey-based research on Whites' racial attitudes in the USA has characteri zed their views as either 'tolerant' or 'ambivalent', We argue that surveys on racial attitudes have systematically underestimated the extent of preju dice in the White population. The legal and normative changes created by th e civil rights movement of the 1960s brought a new racial ideology ('color blind racism'), with new topics and a new form. These matters were examined by collecting survey and interview data from college students in three uni versities. The main findings were that White respondents appear to be more prejudiced in the interviews than in the survey, use a new racetalk to avoi d appearing 'racist', and that the themes and arguments that they mobilize are congruent with what other analysts have labeled as 'laissez faire' or ' competitive' racism.