Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black–White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006 to 2020

Abstract

The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to groupidentity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black-white inequalities has increased substantially, while prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.

An Exploration of Positive Stereotypes: Legitimating the System and Naïve Challenges to It

“…Based on our findings, we suspect that the positive stereotypes most often associated with system legitimation are those most obviously perceived as "explaining" the socioeconomic position of groups. For example, many are probably aware that the stereotype of Asian Americans as hard working can be used to "explain" why Asian Americans are, on average, in a higher socioeconomic position than other people of color who are negatively stereotyped as lazy (e.g., Burkley et al 2016;Morgan 2022). And many are probably aware that the stereotype of women as nurturing can be used to "explain" the second shift, meaning that women do more domestic labor in combination with their full-time jobs (e.g., Blair-Loy et al 2015).…”

Confronting Racism of Omission

“…American optimism is disproportionately high considering the fact of limited upward mobility, especially for African Americans born into poverty (Alesina et al, 2018;Chetty et al, 2020). Survey research has also shown that while overt racial attitudes are on the decline, a significant share of White adults continue to hold racist beliefs (Bobo 2017), which are becoming more predictive of political behavior (Morgan 2022). The United States is not unique in this regard; similarly stark discrepancies abound across the Atlantic (Çankaya and Mepschen, 2019;Chauvin et al, 2018;Horton and Kardux, 2004;).…”

New Bridges to Build: A Note on the Social Psychology of Race, Racism, and Discrimination

“…Some of the work has taken up matters of public views of protest movements like BLM (Drakulich and Denver 2022; Dunivin et al 2022). Some work has focused on the buildup to Trump’s 2016 success and ongoing ramifications of the Trump presidency for intergroup relations (Bobo 2017; Crandall, Miller, and White 2018; Hopkins and Washington 2020; Morgan 2021; Ruisch and Ferguson 2022). Yet others focus on the politics of immigration (Hout and Maggio 2021; Kusow and DeLisi 2021) and the attitudinal and political effects of changing population composition (Abascal 2022; Maggio 2021).…”