Community Influences on White Racial Attitudes: What Matters and Why?

Abstract

Tracing the roots of racial attitudes in historical events and individual biographies has been a longstanding goal of race relations scholars. Recent years have seen a new development in racial attitude research: Local community context has entered the spotlight as a potential influence on racial views. The race composition of the locality has been the most common focus; evidence from earlier decades suggests that white Americans are more likely to hold anti-black attitudes if they live in areas where the African American population is relatively large. However, an influential 2000 article argued that the socioeconomic composition of the white community is a more powerful influence on white attitudes: In low-SES locales, “stress-inducing” deprivations and hardships in whites’ own lives purportedly lead them to disparage blacks. The study reported here re-assesses this “scapegoating” claim, using data from the 1998–2002 General Social Surveys linked to 2000 census information about communities. Across many dimensions of racial attitudes, there is pronounced influence of both local racial proportions and college completion rates among white residents. However, the economic dimension of SES exerts negligible influence on white racial attitudes, suggesting that local processes other than scapegoating must be at work.

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“…Overall, ethnic outgroup attitudes are not related to the socioeconomic status in the neighborhood. This is in contrast to research in the United States that finds that whites report more negative racial attitudes in low socioeconomic status neighborhoods (e.g., Branton & Jones, 2005;Taylor & Mateyka, 2011), but in line with other research in the Netherlands (Gijsberts et al, 2010). Differences in the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage might be due to a larger degree of income segregation in the United States than in most European cities (Musterd, 2005).…”

The impact of local black residents’ socioeconomic status on white residents’ racial views

“…However, findings in earlier related studies do not display systematic patterns (Taylor 1998; Taylor and Mateyka 2011). This much is certain: Given the distinctiveness of these dimensions of racial views and their prominence in the race literature, we would be remiss if we included only a handful of measures and ignored the rest.…”

“…Oliver and Mendelberg’s (2000) interpretation, though not their findings, was challenged in a recent paper by Taylor and Mateyka (2011), who note that Oliver and Mendelberg’s depiction of the white SES findings as a function of economic hardship in the white community is incongruent with their use of educational level as the contextual SES measure. When Taylor and Mateyka pitted the two strands of contextual white SES against each other as predictors of white racial attitudes, education was clearly the stronger influence.…”

“…Contextual education effects exist above and beyond any influence on whites’ attitudes of their own educational achievement: The tendency for whites living in highly educated localities to hold more progressive racial attitudes is seen among well-educated and poorly-educated whites alike. To explain this contextual education effect, Taylor and Mateyka (2011) relied on the interpretation offered in Moore and Ovadia’s (2006) discussion of support for civil liberties. Focusing on high SES residents rather than the bottom of the SES ladder implicated in scapegoating notions, Moore and Ovadia (2006) suggested that where white college graduates are numerically dominant, “institutional and macrosocial means” not dependent on face-to-face interaction promote progressive attitudes.…”

Warmth of the Welcome: Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy in the United States

“…Blumer's conflict hypothesis is associated with Blalock's (1967) power threat hypothesis, which proposes that the larger the size of an out-group, the stronger the sense of threat perceived by the in-group. The hypothesis received empirical support from findings that the proportion of blacks in an area is positively associated with lynchings (Reed 1972), opposition to racial integration (Giles and Evans 1986; Fossett and Kiecolt 1989), racial prejudice, and opposition to affirmative action policies (Quillian 1996; Taylor 1998; Taylor and Mateyaka 2011). It is also supported by research that measures dominant group members' perception of threat to their individual resources, rights, and statuses (e.g.…”