Poll: Most Americans are racist

Barack Obama's two-day campaign blitz travels through eight states with stops in Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia (AP)

Not only have racial attitudes in America not improved since the nation elected its first black president in 2008, according to a poll conducted by Associated Press, the US has become more racist.

The survey used combined questions which explicitly asked people to define their racial attitudes, with questions designed to explore implicit attitudes about race. In both cases the results revealed that racial prejudice had increased slightly.

51 per cent of Americans express explicitly anti-black attitudes compared with 40 per cent in 2008. The survey also found that Republicans were more likely to be openly racist than Democrats (79 per cent compared to 32 per cent), while implicitly racist attitudes were equally evident in both parties.