Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: White racial resentment, derived from research on symbolic racism, has substantial effects on opposition to racial policies in a number of studies. However, its nature remains unclear. Resentment could derive from racial prejudice or stem from ideological principles – two very different bases for white opposition to contemporary racial policy. To assess the nature of racial resentment and its political effects, we examine data from a CATI survey of 760 white New York state residents that included an experimentally altered college-scholarship program along with measures of racial attitudes. The experiment manipulated the scholarship program beneficiaries’ race and socio-economic class. The impact of racial resentment was assessed separately for black and white recipients to determine whether racial resentment conveys opposition to programs targeted at blacks but not whites in line with the prejudice hypothesis, or has a stronger ideological component that drives opposition to the program regardless of recipient race. The data yield two key findings. First, racial resentment conveys racial prejudice. Racially resentful individuals were more opposed to programs targeted at black than white students. Second, racial resentment means different things to liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, the nature of racial resentment is less clear cut. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice, but is not well explained by ideological factors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: White studies acknowledge that for the most part, “whiteness” has been invisible since it has gone unmarked, assumed, and considered normative. Whites are able to treat race and race relations as apolitical and still navigate society successfully. However, due to the history of the South as a region with pronounced racial conflict and integration between “opposing groups” (blacks and whites), Southern whites may have more “race consciousness” about being white than whites in other regions of the United States. To address this question, I conducted forty-two semi-structured, in-depth interviews with rural, Southern whites in Mississippi. The data for this analysis are drawn from questions about what it means to be white, what it means to be a white Southerner, and what it means to be white in local communities. For some, being white is taken for granted while for others it is recognized as a status of at least past, if not current privilege and prejudice. In fact, whites can hold both positions. This complex understanding of whiteness is in contrast to generalizations about white attitudes, because many of the respondents do admit that they and/or other whites have benefited from past and current segregation and discrimination. However, the broader the context (being white in general vs. being white in the South vs. being white in their communities) the more likely the respondents were to acknowledge advantages of being white, while they were more likely to deny having white privilege the more specific the context.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In a recent paper on gender attitudes, Rosenstein (2005) finds that an interaction exists between individual and group threat, such that when only one type of threat is included in a model, it acts as a proxy for the omitted threat. Consequently, when a model includes only one type of threat, the findings may lead to erroneous conclusions. The frequent use of threat in studies of racial attitudes requires that we determine if a similar phenomenon occurs in this context. The models presented in this paper demonstrate that such interactions are relevant in the context of race. This leads to the conclusion that any analysis of racial attitudes that includes one type of threat should also include the other type of threat.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Several studies have examined trends in whites’ racial attitudes in the United States. Most of these studies have found trends toward greater racial tolerance. Although much of this positive change has been attributed to the replacement of older, less tolerant whites by younger, more tolerant cohorts of whites in the U.S. population, there have been few empirical investigations of young whites’ racial attitudes. The lack of investigation of recent white youths’ racial attitudes is somewhat surprising given that there is some reason to believe they may not follow past trends towards liberalization. Young whites today “came of age” during an increasingly conservative era that many have speculated has had a negative effect on their racial attitudes. Yet despite widespread speculation, little systematic research bears on young whites’ racial attitudes per se. This study explores these issues by examining changes in young whites’ racial attitudes as well as changes in the social determinants of their racial attitudes using both traditional and contemporary measures of racial attitudes. Data are drawn from a nationwide, longitudinal survey of white high school seniors (i.e., Monitoring the Future Survey, 1976-1998). Although I find a liberalizing trend for traditional measures of racial attitudes I do not find a similar pattern for contemporary forms of racial antipathy. In addition, I find that the social determinants of young whites’ traditional racial attitudes have been remarkably consistent over time, whereas the influence of the theoretically relevant social determinants on contemporary racial attitudes has diminished over time.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: One of the on-going controversies in the racial politics area has been the explanation for white’s continuing reluctance to support policies to improve the status of blacks in the U.S. despite substantial reductions in the percentage of Americans who endorse racist sentiments. One group of researchers have argued that the lack of support for concrete policies to remedy racial inequities is a reflection of a new type of prejudice that has been variously labeled symbolic racism, modern racism, racial resentment, or laissez-faire racism. Others researchers have advanced the alternative position that opposition to these racial policies is a function of political ideology and values: many Americans reject government policies they believe to be too liberal or contrary to values like individualism or limited government. Most of the research on the determinants of racial policy preferences has used correlational designs that compare measures of prejudice and values in multivariate analyses to assess their relative predictive power. Criticism of the measures used in these studies has hindered progress toward a resolution of this debate. In addition, most studies only assess support for liberal policy options. Therefore, conservative opposition to these policies cannot easily be distinguished from prejudice.

In this paper we will report on the results of a new national study of racial policy preferences. The core part of this study involves a series of CATI experiments that simultaneously vary the ideological justification for policies and the beneficiaries of the policies. In each case, we offer randomly assigned groups of respondents liberal and conservative solutions for racial inequities in a an aspect of American life (education, jobs, etc.). For each policy option we also manipulate the question to suggest that blacks or some other group (women, poor people, the disabled) will mostly benefit from the proposed program. This will allow us to directly examine the extent to which values and prejudice affect support for government action. The study also includes a number of measures of racial attitudes. In combination with the policy experiments, this will allow us examine the usefulness of these measures of racial attitudes (and political values) in explaining support for government programs. This combination of experimental and multivariate analysis will provide a strong basis for evaluating the competing explanations for racial policy preferences and move the debate beyond limitations of current research designs.