![]() But critics have argued that these questions can sometimes muddle the difference between racial animus and other beliefs, like economic conservatism (which is sometimes expressed as a belief that anyone can make it if they really try, and government aid thus isn’t necessary) or belief in a just world. Instead, they ask if respondents agree or disagree with statements like, “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough if blacks only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”Īdvocates of “racial resentment” as a concept view this as reflecting the coded ways that racism is expressed in the modern era, as distinct from “old-fashioned” overt racism more common in the 1960s and earlier. ![]() While “racial resentment” might sound like a euphemism for straightforward racism, such studies are not asking people things like “do you think whites are the superior race” or even “do you think black people are genetically inferior” in some way. Also a matter of contention is the use of “racial resentment” scales to measure racial animus. That’s not necessarily because of an essential link between the two it could just be that, in the words of conservative writer Ben Howe, “the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people,” even though there are nonracial reasons to hold those views about taxes.īut the fact of the correlation makes it difficult to determine what’s driving what. ![]() People in the US who express conservative attitudes toward government spending are also likelier to score high on measures of racial resentment and prejudice. The most difficult task in doing this research has always been disentangling opposition to welfare attributable to racial prejudice from opposition attributable to straightforward conservatism. Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare in 1994 and Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare in 1999 credited racial factors - in particular, stereotypes of black people as lazy and overly dependent on government aid - with substantially reducing support for welfare spending since the war on poverty began in the 1960s. Wetts and Willer are hardly the first scholars to argue that racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution in the US. Both experiments found that showing white Americans data suggesting that white privilege is diminishing - that the US is becoming majority nonwhite, or that the gap between white and black/Latino incomes is closing - led them to express more opposition to welfare spending. The authors conducted two different experiments to see how white Americans’ attitudes toward nonwhite people affect their views on welfare spending. That’s a crucial conclusion from a newly released study by Berkeley sociologist Rachel Wetts and her Stanford colleague Robb Willer in the journal Social Forces. White people become significantly less likely to support welfare programs when told that black people might benefit from them.
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