along racial lines. Elites do this by employing implicit racial appeals, language and imagery that
make subtle or indirect references to race and racist tropes. For Mendelberg, language and
imagery constitute a crucial feature of post-civil rights racism, since white Americans’
ideological commitment to the norm of racial equality prevents them from being explicitly racist
in the ways that were common prior to the civil rights era. Thus, post-civil rights racism relies
on framing and implicit racial appeals to give shape to white racial resentment, which, when
activated, reinforces the existing racial hierarchy.
In contrast to the symbolic racism argument, Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza
maintain that it is wrong to equate
“Whites’ attitudes toward public policies dealing with blacks with their attitudes
toward blacks themselves. Making this fundamental mistake has been misleading
twice over. On the one side, it has encouraged an impression that the nature of
racial prejudice has changed, although it has not, and on the other side, it has
reinforced a conviction that the shape of racial politics has not changed, even
though it has.”
According to Sniderman and Piazza, the content of post-civil rights racism does not differ
from pre-civil rights racism and attempts to reconceptualize racism by making it
synonymous with core values in the American creed, such as liberal individualism, divert
necessary attention away from the fact that old-fashioned, explicit racism persists in the
current political climate. For these authors, irrationality and fear of difference lie at the
heart of both past and present racisms. They describe post-civil rights racism as “an
unreasoning aversion to others whose appearance or background or religion or manners
differ from the majority,”
thus linking racism to individual psychological dispositions
and feelings of ill will toward others.
The debate between the proponents of symbolic racism, on one hand, and old-
fashioned racism, on the other, coalesces around the role that liberalism plays in defining
28
Convention