Are racist assholes racists who happen to be assholes, or are they racist because they are assholes?
This is an important question! That assholery and racism are associated is something that doesn't need a citation - (but here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.02.005 - students with more self reported 'dark triad' traits also had more prejudice) are some anyway), but this . And if you we're just trying to avoid racists / assholes in our lives (as we should) then I suppose that's good enough. But if we're trying to be anti-racist, to build a good, free, and egalitarian society, then the causal relationship is important.
If on the other hand, racist assholes are racists because they are assholes, then the racist, too, will always be with us. For thousands of years prophets have thundered against assholery to little effect, so I'm not holding my breath on moral progress for humanity in general.
Then, there is of course option C: racist assholes are racists first and then become assholes.
The causal mechanism there seems straightforward; people becoming their masks, a creeping dehumanization as a person learns how easy it is to be indifferent to the suffering of others, to inflict thoughtless and casual cruelties...
But I'm skeptical of this for a few reasons.
1) since Americans are much less racist today than we were in the past. When I was born most Americans explicitly disapproved of interracial marriages. Now almost no-one disapproves. If the causal arrow went the other way, we'd see much less assholery in American life. This does not appear to be the case.
2) People are great compartmentalizers. White people frequently have an experience of socially interacting with bigoted relatives (witness the perennial "how to deal with your racist uncle this Thanksgiving" articles) who are nevertheless interpersonally caring and loving - to some people.
Instead suspect the second case is true, and here is my reasoning in the utmost brevity: haters gonna hate.
And we are lazy, we humans. When we think we first reach into our box of heuristics, and seldom reason carefully. We like to essentialize and generalize. People more like the asshole require more elaborate explanations for why they suck, but for members of the outgroup a set of tropes and justifications for prejudice are ready made. So when an asshole wants to hate someone who happens to be Black, they don't hate that person as an individual, but do the cognitively easier thing, the simpler thing, and hate them because (or perhaps 'because') they are Black. Thus the racist, like the misogynist and the anti-Semite, might be forced into hiding by social pressure, but will always be with us.
That anyway is my theory. But what of the evidence? Two papers I've stumbled across inform my thinking here, though neither get at the question directly. And suppose unless IRBs are going to start approving railroad spikes through the brain really good experimental evidence is going to be hard to find.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_202073-1.pdf examines how popularizing anti-immigrant rationales (e.g. "immigrants commit more crimes" from Lott 2018 [n.b. Lott is a crackpot]) leads to "anti-minority behavior". They examine and reject the hypothesis that popularizing these rationales is persuading people to prejudice (consistent with my theory) and instead find that the articulation of rationales reduces the "social cost" of prejudiced behavior. E.g. "Wow I didn't know there were so many of us haters, let the freak flag fly."
That's also consistent with my theory, but consistency, of course, is not enough.
The paper that got me thinking about all this was "Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism" by Carney and Enos. They found people who have negative attitudes towards racial minorities have (different) negative attitudes than those they have towards other groups.
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