From Sea to Shining Sea? Mapping Anti-Black Attitudes Across the United States

• In Event: Interrogating Racism

Abstract

Countless studies have found that White Americans in the south tend to have higher levels of racial resentment, anti-Black affect, and conservative or negative attitudes toward racial policies like affirmative action and welfare. And yet, explicit racial interactions and riots have been documented across the United States since the inception of the country. It is our belief that emphasizing the extreme ends of the racism continuum and focusing primarily on southerners ignores potentially important variation in White racial attitudes throughout the United States. To this end, we are interested in contextualizing and profiling the full scope of anti-Black animus in the United States. In this paper, we move the literature forward by mapping the counties and cities where Whites’ have the highest levels of racial animus, and further investigate the extent to which these anti-Black attitudes shape their policy opinions and political behavior.

We rely on several national datasets, geographical information system (GIS) mapping, and a plethora of dependent variables to examine White racial attitudes throughout the United States from 1988 to 2016. Using racially relevant dependent variables (i.e. feeling thermometers, stereotype batteries, racial resentment, and biological racism) and geocodes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, American National Election Study, and the General Social Survey will allow us to understand the spatial location of Whites with the most racial animus and anti-Black affect. We will then use these negative attitudes to predict Whites’ attitudes on explicitly and implicitly racial policies (i.e. reparations, affirmative action, welfare, crime), political movements (Black Lives Matter), and voting behavior. It is our hope that this research provides the literature and broader public with a a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which racial bias and discrimination persist throughout time and across the country.

Authors

• Camille Danielle Burge, Villanova University

• Princess H Williams, Amherst College