Racialized Perceptions of Financial Decline and Emerging White Racial Solidarities: Findings from new National Survey Data

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Ten: Racialized Ideologies, Epistemologies, and Social Discourses

Abstract

Interest in the intersections of racial ideology with financial and racial positioning in the United States has been reinvigorated in recent years. This paper uses recently collected (2024) national survey data from the American Mosaic Project (wave 3) which contains novel measures of both racial ideology and subjective financial position to ask: What racial attitudes predict perceptions of worsening financial situations by race? In course, we join–and develop via a specific emphasis on perceived “change” in financial position–recent movements toward operationalizing “affective economic (in)security” as a mechanism that can better capture the "emotional weight” connecting attitudes and economic anxieties than approaches that rely on strict material metrics (e.g. raw income, wealth). In correspondence with data on such conventional economic markers, we do find that white Americans rate their current finances as better than their minority counterparts. However, contrary to raw economic data, whites are more likely to report worsened finances in the five years (2019-2024) before our data’s collection, and whites report more pessimism regarding their immediate forecasted financial futures (2024-2029). We therefore conceptualize and run multivariate regressions on these (past and future) subjective perceptions of financial change as a cultural, rather than material, position while including a host of traditional objective economic metrics as controls. Findings show that perceptions of financial insecurity are uniquely driven by racialized content for whites on a number of measures such as feeling a sense of shared racial fate, white racial connection, duty to support one’s racial group, as well as perceptions of racial victimization, among others. Results, though preliminary, promise significant import for literature on rising white racial consciousness by indicating nerve centers upon which white racial solidarities may be emerging in the 21st Century.

Authors

• Jason Torkelson, University of Minnesota - Duluth

• Evan Gunderson, City University of New York - Graduate Center

• Vikash Singh, Montclair State University