UCLA Recent Work

We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Survey. They indicate that such opposition is more strongly rooted in racial antagonism than in non-racial conservatism, that whites tend to respond to quite different racial policies in similar fashion, that racial attitudes affect evaluations of black and ethnocentric white presidential candidates, and that their effects are just as strong among college graduates as among those with no college education. Second, we present evidence that symbolic racism is consistently more powerful than older forms of racial antagonism, and its greater strength does not diminish with controls on non-racial ideology, partisanship, and values. The origins of symbolic racism lie partly in both anti-black antagonism and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, and so mediates their effects on policy preferences, but it explains substantial additional variance by itself, suggesting that it does represent a new form of racism independent of older racial and political attitudes. The findings are each replicated several times with different measures, in different surveys conducted at different times. We also provide new evidence in response to earlier critiques of research on symbolic racism. Race relations in the United States have had a long history, but one that is marked by significant discontinuities over time. The period of slavery was followed by the brief but radically 3 different window of the Reconstruction. The Jim Crow system that developed over the following century legalized racial segregation and discrimination, especially but not exclusively in the South. The civil rights revolution effectively ended that two-caste system of race relations, replacing it with a universal system of formal legal equality. Nevertheless, considerable racial inequality remains in many areas of the society, such as in income, wealth, educational attainment, health, vulnerability to crime, and so forth. The demise of Jim Crow was accompanied by a sharp decline in the prevalence of its supporting belief system, sometimes described as “old-fashioned racism,” incorporating both a biologically-based theory of African racial inferiority and support for racial segregation and formal racial discrimination (McConahay, 1986). This theory of white racial superiority has now largely been replaced by general support for the abstract principle of racial equality (Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1985; Sears & Kinder, 1971). However, there is much evidence that whites do not fully support the implications of these general principles of equality. They have often strongly opposed policies implementing that general principle, such as busing or affirmative action, leading to what Schuman, et al. (1985) have called the “principle-implementation gap.” Similarly, black political candidates have had greater success in recent years, but still seem to have unusual difficulty in attracting white support. This seemingly paradoxical combination of widespread acceptance of the idea of racial equality, mixed with continued resistance to change, is our starting point.