Racial Stasis

The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics

Christopher D. DeSante, Candis Watts Smith

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226643625, 9780226643595
• eBook ISBN: 9780226643762
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Racial progress in the United States has hit a wall, and the rise of white nationalism is but one manifestation of this. Most Americans continue to hope that the younger generation, which many believe manifests less racism and more acceptance of a multiracial society, will lead to more moderate racial politics—but this may not be happening. Overtly racist attitudes have declined, but anti-black stereotypes and racial resentment remain prevalent among white Americans. To add, the shape of racial attitudes has continued to evolve, but our existing measures have not evolved in step and cannot fully illuminate the challenge at hand.

With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials' language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations', the end result is the same.
 

Part I

Lay of the Land

ONE

Nature of the Game: The Racial Stasis Hypothesis

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism exists or not.

—Barack Obama, 2015

We begin with two basic and (what we believe to be) reasonable assumptions. First, race matters in the United States. The America one experiences is largely a function of one’s racial-group membership. In every domain of life that has the potential to produce more dignified living conditions or create more opportunities for success—such as housing (Massey and Denton 1993; Massey et al. 2016; Rothstein 2017; Katznelson 2005; Yinger 1995; Ross and Turner 2005), education (Hannah-Jones 2014; Camera 2016; Bright, Duefield, and Stone 1998; Ross and Turner 2005; Cottom 2017), healthcare (Olshansky et al. 2012), employment (Pager and Shepherd 2008), wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Darity 2011); criminal justice (Alexander 2010; Baumgartner, Grigg, and Mastro 2015), and public safety (Baumgartner, Epp, and Shoub 2018)—people of color, especially Black Americans, are much less well off than White Americans.

As points of fact, the Black unemployment rate has historically been twice as high as that of Whites (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014), a White ex-felon is more likely to get a job than a Black man without a criminal record (Pager 2007), and even though White Americans are more likely to use illegal drugs, Blacks are more likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses (Alexander 2010). And educational and monetary gains do not necessarily mean that Blacks will automatically be better off. For example, the median well-educated Black family with a post-college education has significantly less wealth (about $84,000) compared to their similarly educated White counterparts ($293,100), and this is still less than the $86,200 that the median White family with only some college education has, largely due to intergenerational transmission of assets (Hamilton et al. 2015). While income helps to pay one’s recurring bills, wealth provides families with a safety net to fall back on if they are met with hard times or to rely on for future investments, such as college tuition or additional homes. The average “American experience” for Whites is substantially different than that of other racial groups, especially Blacks.

The second basic premise we rely on is the notion that Whites’ attitudes toward race have markedly changed over the last sixty years. This change is multidimensional. On one dimension, we see that what White Americans deem as socially acceptable expressions of racism has transformed over time. For instance, President Obama received an incredible amount of (negative) attention from the news and the nation when he used the “N-word,” as presented in the epigraph of this chapter. Using the N-word (in public) is no longer allowed, according to most Americans.1 In 2014, Donald Sterling, the longest-tenured owner of an NBA team, was banned from the NBA for life for making racist comments about his team’s Black players and Magic Johnson. Four years later, John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, came under fire for using similar language in a conference call, leading him to step down from his position and apologize for his language. This kind of behavior is considered a clear marker of a person with a racist heart and is thus unacceptable to most Americans today, even though it is well known that many White Americans use this language in private or in all-White spaces.

On another dimension, there has been a shift in racial ideology—the frames of reference we use to explain racial phenomena, such as racial disparities. It used to be the case that Whites’ explanation of racial inequality was rooted in the idea that Whites are genetically or inherently superior to non-Whites (Schuman et al. 1997). Currently and in contrast, White Americans are more likely to rely on a logic of color-blindness to explain away racial disparities (Bonilla-Silva 2014).

Considering that we have seen significant shifts in racial attitudes and a decline in overt racism, it is tempting to believe that we can turn our attention away from race and racism and focus instead on class, culture, or individual behaviors to produce more racially equitable outcomes. But, we think it is important to discern whether what we are seeing today is a sign that racism is on the decline or whether, perhaps, today’s expressions of racism are more difficult to see, even if they are still very harmful. Therefore, we ask a series of questions that are important to scholars of both American public opinion and racial and ethnic politics: Has there been a continuing decline of racial animus among Americans in the United States over the past few decades? Does cohort replacement always lead to higher levels of racial tolerance? Should we expect millennials to be even more racially tolerant than members of previous generations? Have levels of racial animus genuinely changed (declined), or has the manner in which racism is expressed in today’s society changed, leading us to introduce new types of error into widely used “modern” measures of racial attitudes?

We use this chapter to begin to answer some of these questions and lay down the groundwork for our central argument and theory concerning trends in Americans’ racial attitudes. First, we briefly describe three pivotal bodies of literature that each attempt to explain the role of Whites’ racial attitudes in shaping their policy preferences, especially regarding those policies that may exacerbate racial inequity; we put these theories in conversation with one another to illuminate the debate that ensues around discussion of Whites’ racial attitudes. Then, we shift our focus to examining how the nature of Whites’ racial attitudes has shifted over time. Against this backdrop, we outline our central hypothesis—the racial stasis hypothesis—and discuss the implications of our predictions for social scientists who seek to accurately describe and measure an ever-evolving set of attitudes.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave: Racial Attitudes and Politics

The question of whether race matters in American politics is one that can be answered succinctly—the answer is “yes”—but that would be neither a satisfying nor a convincing answer. We would have to consider and elaborate on the history, founding, and ideological bedrock of these United States. We would have to consider the role of race in political ideology, partisanship, and party realignments as well as in candidate evaluations, voting behavior, the extent to which the Supreme Court protects minorities from the tyranny of the majority, congressional representation and behavior, and presidential agendas to begin to answer that question fully. Instead, we will take up a far more manageable question here: Are racial attitudes still a central component of Americans’ policy preferences and issue opinions, and have the ideological nature, structure, and role of these attitudes changed in the last sixty years?

As Vincent Hutchings and Nicholas Valentino explain, “the ensuing debate over the impact of racial attitudes on policy preferences has been among the most contentious in all of public opinion research” (2004, 389), but one thing most social scientists can agree on is that there is a large and persistent gap between the political opinions of Whites and the political opinions of ethno-racial minorities. The largest gap is often between Blacks and Whites; sometimes Latinx people’s and Asian Americans’ opinions mirror Blacks’, while at other times their attitudes more closely resemble Whites’ (Dawson 2012; Hutch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Not All Change Is Progress: An Introduction
• Part I. Lay of the Land
• Part II. Countervailing Forces
• Part III. A Holistic Measure
• Appendix A. Everything You Need to Know about the APC Intrinsic Estimator
• Appendix B. A Brief Note on Factor Analysis
• Appendix C. Interview Schedule and Respondent Demographics
• Appendix D. Supplemental APC-IE Tables
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index