JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.252.67.66 on Tue, Whites' explanations for the black-white gap in socioeconomic status are examined using General Social Survey data for 1977 to 1989. While there has been a significant decline in the percentage of whites attributing the gap to innate inferiority of blacks, individualistic explantions of the gap still predominate. Most individualistic explanations stress lack of motivation among poor blacks, and are widely held among whites who otherwise express little or no traditional prejudice. Whites' explanations for the racial economic gap influence their attitudes toward government policies to improve the status of blacks, independent of sociodemographic characteristics and prejudice. These results help explain a paradox of contemporary racial attitudes, and suggest that white public opinion has reached an era of stable acceptance of the black-white economic gap.
Research on contemporaryAmerican race relations frequently notes a paradox (Bobo 1988; Jackman and Muha 1984; Pettigrew 1985; Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Schuman and Bobo 1988). On the one hand, white Americans increasingly endorse racial equality in principle (Dovidio and Gaertner 1986; Firebaugh and Davis 1988; Schuman et al. 1985).On the other hand, whites show little or no support for policies and programs aimed at alleviating racial inequality. The paradox exists despite the fact that many whites acknowledge that such inequality results from a history of racial prejudice and discrimination.To explain this paradox, some scholars argue for the persistence of widespread racial animosity on the part of whites. The "symbolic" or "modem" racism perspective proposes that many whites continue to harbor strong antipathy toward blacks. While this may be subtler than hostility based in traditional prejudice, it is still important in shaping white opposition to black political candidates, equal opportunity programs, and other efforts to promote racial equality (McConahay 1986; Sears 1988). Oth-* Direct all correspondence to James R. Kluegel, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801.I would like to thank Lawrence Bobo and the anonymous reviewers of ASR for helpful comments, criticisms and suggestions concerning earlier versions of this paper. Responsibility for all conclusions, of course, rests solely with the author. ers argue that we must also look to individual or group economic self-interest (Bobo 1983; Pettigrew 1985) to understand contemporary racism.
My previous work suggests that whites' beliefs about the causes of the economic gap between blacks and whites play an important role in sustaining this paradox (Kluegel 1...
