Moral Licensing In The United States

Good deeds reframe bad deeds. Moral Licensing - justifying actions that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic by doing good deeds in the past – has been documented in various domains in our lives. Revisionist History showed that several examples of moral licensing existing in politics, and I was curious about whether moral licensing also affected supporters of Barak Obama – the first African American president in US history.
Case 1 – Election of the first African American President
America’s president – the most powerful in the entire world – is the face of America. Since Declaration of Independence, the seat was only for whites. Since Barak Obama was first to brake that ‘tacit agreement’, I thought that there must be a moral licensing in there: support for Barack Obama just before the 2008 election could license people to make ambiguously racist statements.
To test this there was an experiment conducted among supporters of Obama. Supporters were
This obvious result is actually the cause of the failure of affirmative action- by moral licensing, affirmative policies make a clear division between "the privileged minorities among minorities" and "un-privileged majorities among minorities". This is mainly caused by moral licensing since policy makers' real purpose is to neutralize minorities' demands for equality, not fulfill them. For instance, if you look at the areas where affirmative action was implemented - college admissions, corporate hiring, government office jobs. etc – you’ll notice that most of them aren't really things that will help you if you've never graduated from high school. Moral licensing is the most effective evidence that proves that prejudice still remains in our unconsciousness. The only way to overcome moral licensing is being aware of these ‘unconscious prejudice’ and striving to open the door of our