Disfavor or Favor? An Assessment of What Whites' Racial Attitudes Mean

• In Event: How Race Structures Attitudes & Behavior

Abstract

White Americans’ racial attitudes—although long recognized to be an animating force in American politics—have become an urgent focus for public opinion research. Numerous recent studies document that whites’ racial attitudes influence political judgments more than they used to, and explore the reasons for this shift.

The present research is motivated by a recurrent ambiguity in this array of findings: with very few exceptions, scholars interpret an association between a racial attitude and a judgment as prejudice against blacks. However, because research designs seldom make clear what judgments represent racial neutrality, such associations could also be interpretable in an inverted way, as favoritism for blacks -- or as a mixture of prejudice and favoritism.

We designed (and pre-registered) an approach that allows us to assess the extent to which racial attitude measures reflect prejudice against minorities versus favoritism for minorities. In Wave 1 of our study, we measured racial attitudes in a national sample of white Americans. Several weeks later, in Wave 2, respondents were invited back for a seemingly unrelated study. Wave 2 featured a conjoint survey experiment that identified participants’ racial preferences in evaluating candidates for political office. This approach allows Wave 1 racial attitudes to be considered against a standard of racial neutrality, defined as the race of the candidate having no effect on judgments about job candidates.

We find that the most widely-employed racial attitude measure, the Racial Resentment scale, captures both negative prejudice (at high levels) and favoritism (at low levels), and that the net effect of the favoritism component exceeds the net effect of the negative prejudice component. That is, contrary to the scale’s title, it measures sympathy for blacks at least as much as resentment toward them. This finding is at odds with how the scale is routinely interpreted, and calls for much greater caution in using results from Racial Resentment studies to characterize Americans as harboring animus.

Our study includes a number of secondary analyses that elaborate on this finding. Because our sample is stratified by age, we are able to consider generational differences in interpretation of the Racial Resentment questions. We also examine differences in how the Racial Resentment scale applies to political versus nonpolitical judgments. We examine how the Racial Resentment scale applies to evaluations of other racial groups. And finally, we examine three other racial attitude measures that are conceived as complements to the Racial Resentment scale: anti-black stereotypes, white collective guilt, and white identity.

Authors

• Alexander Agadjanian, University of California, Berkeley

• John M. Carey, Dartmouth College

• Yusaku Horiuchi, Dartmouth College

• Timothy J. Ryan, UNC Chapel Hill