Antiblackness as a Logic for Anti‐Immigrant Resentment: Evidence From California

Abstract

Drawing on data from a novel survey of Californians, this article examines the relationship between anti‐immigrant resentment and antiblackness. Over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in research on anti‐immigrant resentment, as well as a steady growth in public opinion literature on antiblack bias. Nonetheless, there are almost no studies that examine the relationship between these types of attitudes. Using two different measures of anti‐immigrant resentment and three different measures of antiblack bias, we find that antiblackness among those Californians surveyed was significantly and robustly correlated with anti‐immigrant resentment. Our findings suggest that even in a state where there is a relatively small black population and where there is little overlap between the categories of “black” and “immigrant,” attitudes toward blacks may be shaping attitudes toward immigrants. The findings suggest a need to move beyond dyadic theories of othering and in doing so, to think more critically about how the racialization of one group can shape the racialization of other groups.

Cultural Cartography with Word Embeddings

“…As the bottom panel shows particularly well, engagement with immigration and race cultural dimensions in contemporary U.S. news media appears to follow similar trends: when news media engage "immigrant" more relative to "citizen" in their discourse, so too do they engage "black" more relative "white." This trend is also in line with the above analysis using historical embeddings from 1880 to 2000, again pointing to the remarkable temporal stability of "citizen" and "white" as the unmarked categories of U.S. public discourses on cultural citizenship and race (Brekhus 1998) and/or the historical persistence of the "immigrant-as-nonwhite" vs. "citizen-as-white" symbolic boundary (Mora and Paschel 2020;Sáenz and Douglas 2015) .…”

“…"citizen-as-white" has been an enduring cultural structure in U.S. public discourse and attitudes (Mora and Paschel 2020;Sáenz and Douglas 2015) . 27 A more in-depth analysis of these data with the "marked-unmarked" framework might benefit more from a keyword absence/presence method, since a category's "unmarked" status is, by definition, signified by its absence.…”

Election 2020

“…In our previous article (Mora and Paschel 2020), we made two predictions about the 2020 election. First, we suggested that race would be an important factor in the election and called for an analysis that sees the linkages between policy positions and ideologies rooted in racism.…”

Finding voice in a year of collective trauma: Case study of an online photovoice project with youth

“…Given the fact that nearly a quarter of U.S. Latinos self‐identify as Afro‐Latino, Afro‐Caribbean, or of African descent with roots in Latin America (López & Gonzales‐Barrera, 2016), increased attention to anti‐Blackness has led to important self‐reflection, organizational assessment, and calls to action among Latino‐specific organizations. Emerging research with marginalized subpopulations offers important considerations for antiracist praxis—for instance, Afro‐Latinos experience discrimination from other Latinos at a similar level (and sometimes more) than non‐Latinos (López & Gonzales‐Barrera, 2016), and anti‐Black bias is associated with anti‐immigrant and indigenous biases among Latinos (Mora & Paschel, 2020).…”