Antiracism and Nonracism Scale

Abstract

The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale, developed by Jennifer LaCosse, Danielle Krusemark, Jennifer Foltz, and E. Ashby Plant (2023), is a psychometrically validated 10-item self-report instrument designed to differentiate between passive nonracist orientations and active antiracist behavioral intentions among White individuals. Historically, psychological literature on prejudice reduction conflated the absence of racial animus with proactive opposition to systemic racial inequality. The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale resolves this conceptual confound by partitioning racial belief systems into two empirically distinct, five-item subscales: Antiracism, which assesses endorsement of proactive, public, and collective responsibility to challenge systemic racial discrimination toward Black individuals; and Nonracism, which measures individual-level commitment to personal egalitarianism, avoidance of racial stereotyping, and refraining from overt discrimination.

The scale was developed and validated across multiple independent cohorts of White American undergraduate adults. Exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that reducing an initial 14-item pool to a balanced 10-item structure accounted for 62.06% of the total variance across both factors. Confirmatory factor analysis verified that a two-factor latent model demonstrated superior fit compared to an omnibus unidimensional model. Reliability estimates using McDonald’s omega (ω) evidenced strong internal consistency for both the Antiracism subscale (ω = .86) and the Nonracism subscale (ω = .82). Validation analyses established that while both subscales positively correlate with pro-Black attitudes and internal motivation to respond without prejudice (Plant & Devine, 1998), the Antiracism subscale uniquely predicts perceived societal discrimination and verified behavioral commitment to social justice collective action. Items are administered on an authentic 9-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree).

Keywords

Antiracism Beliefs, Nonracism Beliefs, Racial Discrimination, Racial Inequality, Social Change, Attitudes, Race and Ethnic Discrimination, Racial and Ethnic Attitudes, Social Issues, Social and Interpersonal Measures, White Allyship, Psychometrics

Authors

The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale was conceived, developed, and psychometrically validated by the following intergroup relations researchers:

• Jennifer LaCosse, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, United States. (Correspondence: Pettengill Hall, 2 Andrews Rd., Lewiston, ME 04240; Email: [email protected]).
• Danielle Krusemark, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, United States.
• Jennifer Foltz, M.S. — Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, United States.
• E. Ashby Plant, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Antiracism and Nonracism Scale is to provide researchers, organizational consultants, educators, and social psychologists with an empirically grounded, psychometrically robust tool capable of dissociating nonracist beliefs from antiracist beliefs. Historically, social psychological research on intergroup relations has centered predominantly on negative racial attitudes, examining explicit prejudice, implicit bias, modern racism, and symbolic racism. When positive or nonprejudiced orientations were examined, they were traditionally conceptualized as low scores on prejudice inventories or as passive endorsements of universal equality and colorblind ideology.

However, sociopolitical developments, intergroup theories, and contemporary racial justice scholarship have highlighted a critical theoretical distinction: the passive refraining from personal prejudice (“nonracism”) does not equate to an active, behavioral commitment to dismantle institutional, interpersonal, and structural racism (“antiracism”). Prior measurement tools frequently introduced construct-irrelevant variance by grouping passive tolerance, social desirability, awareness of privilege, and direct social action under a single undifferentiated construct. This conflation restricted empirical inquiry into why many individuals who genuinely reject racial prejudice nevertheless fail to intervene against racist systems, policies, or interpersonal offenses.

The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale directly resolves this theoretical gap. Its dual-construct design allows investigators to examine the cognitive, motivational, and normative antecedents that propel an individual from a state of passive non-prejudice to active racial justice advocacy. In research settings, the tool enables experimental and longitudinal evaluations of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs, intergroup contact interventions, and social justice educational curricula. In organizational and institutional contexts, the scale provides a quantitative metric to assess whether campus climates or corporate cultures are fostering proactive allyship versus superficial, performative compliance.

Psychological Construct

The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale operationalizes two distinct yet related latent constructs that govern how dominant group members orient themselves toward racial equity and discrimination against Black Americans:

1. Antiracism (Proactive Intervention and Collective Responsibility)

The construct of Antiracism is defined as an individual’s belief that members of the dominant racial group (specifically White individuals) bear an ethical and behavioral imperative to actively, publicly, and persistently confront racial inequality and discrimination. Antiracism extends beyond intrapsychic attitude change to encompass outward-facing, pro-social disruption of racism. It encompasses three core operational elements:

• Active Promotion of Systemic Parity: The conviction that passive acceptance of legal equality is insufficient, requiring intentional effort to ensure equitable treatment across societal domains.
• Intragroup Confrontation and Socialization: The belief that White individuals have a distinct responsibility to educate, communicate with, and challenge other White individuals regarding nonprejudiced beliefs and racially discriminatory behaviors.
• Public and Vocal Opposition: The endorsement of vocal and behavioral confrontation of racism, rejecting silent disapproval in favor of proactive, overt opposition to racist remarks, policies, and practices.

2. Nonracism (Personal Egalitarianism and Abstention from Bias)

The construct of Nonracism represents an individual’s commitment to maintaining a personal standard of egalitarianism characterized by the avoidance of overt prejudice, stereotyping, and discriminatory acts. Nonracism is fundamentally defined by personal abstention and self-directed behavioral regulation:

• Abstention from Pejorative Expression: Personal refusal to engage in derogatory verbalizations or overt racial hostility toward Black individuals.
• Rejection of Stereotypic Generalizations: Endorsement of the principle that relying on racial stereotypes is inherently unacceptable.
• Principle of Fair Treatment: Adherence to the core tenets of distributive and procedural justice, affirming that individuals should experience equal opportunities in institutional settings such as education and employment.

While nonracism serves as a necessary developmental and cognitive foundation for unbiased behavior, it lacks the outward, corrective behavioral impetus captured by antiracism. A nonracist individual may uphold an internal norm of fairness without feeling an obligation to speak out when witnessing discrimination against others.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Antiracism and Nonracism Scale integrates foundational principles from social cognitive psychology, self-determination theory, and intergroup allyship models:

Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice

A primary theoretical foundation of this instrument is Plant and Devine’s (1998) model of Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice (IMS) and External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice (EMS). Plant and Devine established that individuals regulate prejudice due to internalized, authentic personal values (IMS) or external social pressures and fear of negative evaluation (EMS). The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale builds upon this paradigm by examining how internalized egalitarian motivations translate into proactive behaviors. While high IMS is sufficient to drive personal nonracism (suppressing personal bias to align with one’s self-concept), active antiracism requires an additional motivational component: the expansion of one’s self-regulatory goals to encompass external intergroup accountability and systemic change.

White Racial Identity Development and Antiracist Allyship

The distinction between nonracism and antiracism aligns with psychological models of White racial identity development, such as Helms’ (1990) White Racial Identity model, and contemporary sociological formulations of antiracism (Kendi, 2019). In Helms’ framework, advanced stages of racial consciousness involve transitioning from a colorblind or passive acknowledgement of race (“Pseudo-Independence”) to actively abandoning racist entitlement and working collaboratively to confront societal oppression (“Autonomy”). The scale translates these theoretical stages into quantifiable psychological variables, capturing the qualitative leap from passive personal neutrality to active systemic confrontation.

Social Identity and Intergroup Collective Action

The instrument draws upon van Zomeren et al.’s (2012) social identity model of collective action, adapted to advantaged-group allyship (Radke et al., 2020). When advantaged group members (such as White individuals) perceive injustice directed at an outgroup, their behavioral response is dictated by whether they view intergroup inequality as structural rather than idiosyncratic. Nonracism treats prejudice as an individual character flaw that must be personally avoided, whereas antiracism conceptualizes racism as an illegitimate group hierarchy demanding collective, cross-racial mobilization.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Antiracism and Nonracism Scale was established by LaCosse et al. (2023) across multiple psychometric investigations examining construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was confirmed through statistically significant, theoretically coherent associations with established racial attitude and motivational inventories:

• Inter-Subscale Association: The Antiracism subscale correlated positively and moderately with the Nonracism subscale (r < .58), demonstrating that while the constructs share common conceptual roots in racial fairness, they remain statistically non-redundant.
• Internal Motivation (IMS): Both the Antiracism and Nonracism subscales exhibited robust positive correlations with the Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale (Plant & Devine, 1998), reflecting that both belief systems stem from deeply internalized egalitarian values rather than superficial compliance.
• Pro-Black and Anti-Black Attitudes: The Antiracism subscale demonstrated significant positive correlations with pro-Black attitudes and significant negative correlations with explicit anti-Black attitudes, verifying that active antiracist beliefs are intrinsically aligned with favorable intergroup affect.
• Perceptions of Discrimination: Both subscales correlated positively with the Perceived Discrimination in America scale, confirming that individuals high in these constructs possess heightened cognitive awareness of systemic racial discrepancies.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the scale demonstrated clear discriminant validity against potential social-evaluative confounds:

• External Motivation (EMS): Antiracism scores were entirely unrelated to the External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale (Plant & Devine, 1998), confirming that endorsement of proactive antiracism is not a function of social conformity, compliance, or external sanction avoidance.
• Fear of Negative Evaluation: Antiracism was uncorrelated with general fear of negative evaluation scales, proving that responses on this inventory reflect genuine ideological convictions rather than impression management or self-presentation biases.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The Antiracism subscale displayed strong predictive utility in behavioral and real-world criterion paradigms:

• Identification of Injustice: Individuals with elevated Antiracism scores were significantly more likely to identify subtle and systemic racial disparities as severe societal problems requiring immediate redress.
• Social Action Engagement: High Antiracism scores uniquely predicted self-reported and verified behavioral participation in social justice campaigns, campus petition drives, anti-discrimination initiatives, and proactive intergroup confrontations, outperforming general nonprejudice measures in explaining active allyship variance.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Antiracism and Nonracism Scale employed advanced latent reliability modeling rather than relying solely on traditional estimates such as Cronbach’s alpha, which often assumes tau-equivalence and may underestimate or overestimate composite reliability in multi-factor scales.

McDonald’s Omega (ω)

LaCosse et al. (2023) computed McDonald’s omega coefficients to assess the internal consistency of both latent dimensions:

• Antiracism Subscale: Demonstrated an internal consistency coefficient of ω = .86. This reflects strong latent factor saturation, confirming that the five items consistently capture White individuals’ perceived obligation to proactively confront discrimination and promote systemic parity.
• Nonracism Subscale: Demonstrated an internal consistency coefficient of ω = .82. This confirms that the five items assessing personal abstention from prejudice, refusal to stereotype, and adherence to equal treatment exhibit solid structural coherence.

These values fall well above the accepted academic threshold of .80 for basic research and psychological evaluation, indicating low levels of measurement error and strong item homogeneity within each subscale.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the Antiracism and Nonracism Scale was established through sequential exploratory factor analyses (EFA) followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across independent White American participant samples.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Scale construction began with an initial pool of 14 items (seven potential antiracism items and seven potential nonracism items):

• Antiracism EFA: Initial exploratory analysis on the seven candidate antiracism items accounted for 54.25% of the total variance. Factor loadings and item-total correlations revealed two weak, ambiguous items. Removing these two underperforming items significantly improved the model, with the final five items accounting for 66.67% of the total variance.
• Nonracism EFA: Similarly, initial exploratory examination of the seven candidate nonracism items accounted for 46.97% of the variance. Elimination of two cross-loading or conceptually redundant items elevated the total variance explained by the final five items to 57.06%.
• Combined 10-Item EFA: An omnibus EFA conducted on all ten retained items demonstrated a clean, robust two-factor latent solution. No significant cross-loadings above .30 were detected, and the two correlated factors collectively explained 62.06% of the total variance.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm structural integrity, structural equation modeling was conducted to test the latent factorial independence of the constructs. Due to survey administration constraints in the subsequent replication sample, a 9-item specification was modeled:

• A two-factor model specifying separate, correlated latent dimensions for Antiracism and Nonracism was directly pitted against a one-factor model forcing all items onto an undifferentiated “racial attitude” construct.
• The two-factor model provided an outstanding, statistically superior fit to the data compared to the unidimensional model (Δχ² tests confirmed significant degradation in fit for the one-factor model).
• This verified that antiracism and nonracism represent structurally distinct constructs that should not be combined into a single composite score.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Antiracism and Nonracism Scale
• Developers: Jennifer LaCosse, Danielle Krusemark, Jennifer Foltz, and E. Ashby Plant (2023)
• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale
• Item Count: 10 items total (5 items in the Antiracism subscale; 5 items in the Nonracism subscale)
• Administration Format: Electronic questionnaire (can be adapted for paper-and-pencil testing)
• Target Population: Adults (18+ years of age), specifically developed and validated among White Americans
• Response Format: 9-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree)
• Subscales:
  • Antiracism (Items 1–5): Assesses proactive beliefs regarding White individuals’ obligation to confront racism, share nonprejudiced values, and advocate for racial equality.
  • Nonracism (Items 6–10): Assesses personal standards regarding the avoidance of prejudice, rejection of stereotyping, and commitment to institutional fairness.
• Scoring and Computational Rules:
  • Item 10 (“In some situations, it is okay to discriminate against Black people based on race”) is reverse-coded: Recode 1 → 9, 2 → 8, 3 → 7, 4 → 6, 5 → 5, 6 → 4, 7 → 3, 8 → 2, 9 → 1.
  • Calculate the Antiracism Subscale Score by taking the mean of Items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Higher scores reflect greater proactive commitment to confronting racism.
  • Calculate the Nonracism Subscale Score by taking the mean of Items 6, 7, 8, 9, and the recoded Item 10. Higher scores reflect stronger personal commitments to non-discriminatory conduct.
  • Subscale scores should be examined separately to preserve factor independence; an omnibus composite score is not recommended.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Antiracism and Nonracism Scale was published in 2023 in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. In accordance with standard scientific conventions, the scale is available free of charge for non-commercial, academic, empirical, and educational applications. No licensing fees are required for scholarly use. Commercial utilization, integration into proprietary corporate assessment batteries, or broad commercial redistribution requires explicit permission from the lead author and copyright holders. Researchers using this instrument should cite the original validation study (LaCosse et al., 2023).

References

• Helms, J. E. (Ed.). (1990). Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Greenwood Press.
• Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World.
• LaCosse, J., Krusemark, D., Foltz, J., & Plant, E. A. (2023). Antiracism: Development and validation of a measure designed to identify White Americans who proactively fight to end discrimination toward Black Americans. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 26(1), 180–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211048886
• Plant, E. A., & Devine, P. G. (1998). Internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 811–832. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.811
• Radke, H. R. M., Kutlaca, M., Siem, B., Wright, S. C., & Becker, J. C. (2020). Beyond allyship: Motivating advantaged group members to engage in collective action against social inequality. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 24(4), 307–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868320918698
• van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (2012). On four goals of social protest: Broadening the conceptualization of collective action. Journal of Social Issues, 68(1), 180–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2012.01764.x

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)