Is ethnic prejudice declining inBritain?Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minorityBritons

Abstract

Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non-white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter-related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from other ethnic groups has declined over time for both white and ethnic minority Britons. For the white majority there are both period and cohort elements to this decline. Secondly, we see some evidence that social distance between the majority and minority groups is reciprocal. Specifically, minorities who experience rejection by the white British feel a greater sense of distance from them. Thirdly, we find that all groups share the perception of the same ethnic hierarchy. We see evidence of particularly widespread hostility towards Muslim Britons from all ethnic groups suggesting that Muslims are singled out for negative attention from many British residents of all other backgrounds, including a large number who do not express hostility to other groups.

Racial discrimination in Britain, 1969–2017: a meta‐analysis of field experiments on racial discrimination in the British labour market

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Attitudes toward transnational intermarriage in China: Testing three theories of transnationalization

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“…While urban diversity is by far the dominant pattern in the UK, over the last two decades suburban and rural areas have experienced a modest but steady growth of ethnic minority populations (Catney, ), a trend mirrored in small‐town and rural USA (Lee & Sharp, ; Lichter, ). For Britain, the mechanisms behind the spatial diffusion of ethnic diversity are fairly well‐documented in the migration literature: dispersal from inner‐city clusters – reflecting upward socio‐spatial mobility (Catney & Simpson, ), increased inter‐racial tolerance (Storm, Sobolewska, & Ford, ) and wider trends in internal migration across the life‐course (Coulter, van Ham, & Findlay, ; Finney, ); and new, direct, immigration flows to non‐metropolitan destinations – in part due to low‐skilled labour demand (Jentsch, De Lima, & MacDonald, ) and asylum seeker dispersal policies (Hynes & Sales, ). While these processes have diversified the ethnic composition of non‐metropolitan places (Catney, ), the segregation literature has not kept pace with that of migration scholars, and a bias persists whereby most studies of ethnic residential segregation are concerned solely with urban areas.…”