Mapping White Racial Attitudes from Sea to Shining Sea

• In Event: Putting White Racial Attitudes in Context

Abstract

A common narrative that dominates discourse relating to race-relations in the United States is that White southerners tend to have the highest levels of racial animus towards African Americans. Countless studies have found that White Americans in the south tend to have higher levels of racial resentment, anti-Black affect, and conservative/negative attitudes on racial policies like affirmative action and welfare (White 2014; Sears & Valentino 2005; Glasper 1994.) 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 endeavor to understand the geographic contexts that foster anti-black affect, locate counties and cities where Whites’ have the highest levels of racial animus, and investigate the extent to which these anti-Black attitudes shape their policy opinions and political behavior.

Several recent works have made forceful arguments about the entrenchment of White southerners’ racist attitudes being inextricably linked with legacies of slavery. Perhaps the most convincing argument comes from Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics. The authors contend, “Southern Whites who live in areas where slaveholding was more prevalent are today more conservative, cooler towards African Americans, and more likely to oppose race-related policies that many feel could potentially help blacks” (14). While Deep Roots only uses two measures from the racial resentment scale to analyze racial attitudes at the state-level, Watts Smith, Kreitzer, and Suo (2019) examine the racial resentment battery in its entirety from 1988 to 2016 at the state-level. By focusing on racial resentment measures at the state-level, both Deep Roots and Watts Smith et al. (2019) overlook important variation in racial attitudes on more localized levels. Moreover, focusing solely on the racial resentment battery provides an incomplete understanding of the full scope of racial animus.

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 (CCES), the Collaborative Multi-racial Post-Election Study (CMPS), American National Election Study (ANES), and the General Social Survey (GSS), 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), movements (Black Lives Matter), and voting behavior. It is our hope that this research provides the literature and broader public with a greater understanding of the ways in which racial bias and discrimination persist across time throughout the country, even after the passage of national civil rights legislation.

Authors

• Camille Danielle Burge, Villanova University

• Princess H Williams, Amherst College