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April 26, 2004
Racial Resentment
I was just passed this last night. It's a paper entitled Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principle or Prejudice?. I've saved a copy here. Download file
The abstract is quite enough, for I am familiar with the details, having done my amateur research on the web for many years.
White racial resentment – a form of new racial prejudice – is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but 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 the reactions of 760 white New York state residents to an experimentally altered college-scholarship program. Program beneficiaries’ race and socio-economic class was varied and the impact of racial resentment assessed separately for black and white recipients to determine whether racial resentment produces greater support for the program when targeted at blacks than whites in line with the prejudice hypothesis, or has a stronger ideological component that drives opposition to the program regardless of recipient race. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: 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, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to raceconscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans and we suggest that researchers explore other ways in which to assess the political effects of racial prejudice across the ideological spectrum.
In other words, racism has a political component. Which is to say that the thought that some people articulate in their politics is indeed racist. And it comes as no surprise to me in the least that white liberals are showing their true colors. Lest anyone doubt the subtlety here, the experimenters put it in language appropriate to a 46 page paper, while I cut to the chase for the purposes of blogging.
Disentangling Principles from Prejudice: Major Hypotheses Continuing disagreement over the meaning of racial resentment, and the origins of white opposition to race-conscious programs more generally, demands a less contentious method of studying racial attitudes. We adopt an experimental survey design that allows us to test whether racial resentment is a measure of general prejudice by examining whether it conveys racial discrimination in support of a college scholarship program. We test two key hypotheses. First, we examine the resentment-as-racism hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts that racially resentful whites will be less supportive of programs targeted at black than white students, confirming the prejudicial nature of resentment. Second, we contrast this with the resentment-as-ideology hypothesis which predicts high levels of program opposition among the racially resentful regardless of the program beneficiaries’ race, challenging the role of racial resentment as a measure of racial prejudice. Third, we examine patterns of program support and the origins of resentment separately among liberals and conservatives to determine whether resentment is broadly ideological for conservatives and racially tinged for liberals, as a further challenge to the resentment-as-prejudice hypothesis.
It has been a while since I've eyeballed affirmative action, but I was talking about the politics of racial resentment six years ago in my somewhat famous syllogism in the 'Angry White Math' series.
If enough people get to understand this, I think it will be yet another proof that we are not beyond racism, and that African Americans will have yet another reason to abandon the Democrats.
UPDATE: Link fixed.
Posted by mbowen at April 26, 2004 08:07 AM
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� What I'm reading today from Prometheus 6
Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs:Principles or Prejudice? (PDF) by Stanley Feldman and Leonie Huddy of Stony Brook University, was brought to my attention by Cobb a while back. He drew an interesting conclusion from the... [Read More]
Tracked on August 3, 2004 08:13 AM
Comments
Your link to the document doesn't work. Neither does your political assessment here, but...
Posted by: P6 at April 26, 2004 09:14 AM
..that's never stopped me before...
Posted by: Cobb at April 26, 2004 09:44 AM
Clarifying:
I have always been hoping that Conservatives and/or Republicans would hew closer to the principles and logic of Thomas Wood than to the grandstanding of Ward Connerly. Wood's example proves the rule. But I also think that the colorblind principle itself is flawed and does little to help an anti-racist agenda which is needed. But I'd rather see it applied as a principle than having people follow their gut with the kind of nonsense we are all familiar with like "My dad marched with Dr. King" or "We've always been good to black people". So my fight is against blackpeopleloveus.com kind of liberalism, but it is not meant to excuse conservatives from the same standard.
I expect principled conservatives to concede to black Republicans some amount of racial patronage in various forms of Affirmative Action in defiance of pure racial neutrality. Right now black Republicans don't constitute a significant enough critical mass.
I don't believe that some Republicans and Conservatives aren't above using racial resentment for its own sake or for the sake of colorblind principles. But I don't think it fair or accurate to suggest this is the singular Conservative modus operandi. Again Wood's example proves it. It seems to me that the only way to insure that racial resentment doesn't gain a permanent foothold is to 1) make public this finding and 2) integrate both parties and inoculate against it.
However if the only goal in that is to spare Affirmative Action, I'm not sure it's worth it.
Posted by: Cobb at April 26, 2004 12:37 PM