CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN?

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Eibach ◽  
Valerie Purdie-Vaughns
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Racial Polarization ◽  
Black President

AbstractBarack Obama's election as the first Black president of the United States has stimulated much discussion about progress toward racial equality in the United States. Opinion surveys document that White Americans reliably perceive the rate of progress toward racial equality as greater than do Black Americans. We focus on two psychological factors that contribute to these diverging perceptions: (1) the tendency of White Americans and Black Americans to adopt different reference points to assess racial progress, and (2) the general tendency to frame social change as a zero-sum game in which Black Americans' gains entail losses for White Americans. We review research examining how these two factors contribute to racial polarization on the topic of progress toward equality. We also draw on excerpts from Barack Obama's speeches and writings to demonstrate that he often frames issues in ways that, our research suggests, has the potential to substantially bridge these racial divisions.

Questions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The U.S

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.

scholarly journals Infectious Disease Prevalence, Not Race Exposure, Predicts Both Implicit and Explicit Racial Prejudice Across the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian A. O’Shea ◽  
Derrick G. Watson ◽  
Gordon D. A. Brown ◽  
Corey L. Fincher
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
United States ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Disease Rates ◽  
Prejudicial Attitudes ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

What factors increase racial prejudice? Across the United States, increased exposure to Black Americans has been hypothesized to increase White Americans’ prejudicial attitudes toward Black Americans. Here we test an alternative explanation: People living in regions with higher infectious disease rates have a greater tendency to avoid out-groups because such avoidance reduces their perceived likelihood of contracting illnesses. Consistent with this parasite-stress hypothesis, we show that both White and Black individuals ( N > 77,000) living in U.S. states in which disease rates are higher display increased implicit (automatic) and explicit (conscious) racial prejudice. These results survived the inclusion of several individual- and state-level controls previously used to explain variability in prejudice. Furthermore, showing disease-related primes to White individuals with strong germ aversion increased their explicit, but not implicit, anti-Black/pro-White prejudice. Domestic out-groups, not just foreigners, may therefore experience increased overt forms of prejudice when disease rates are high.

scholarly journals Perceived Discrimination against Black Americans and White Americans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Zigerell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Election ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Time Series Study ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Election Studies ◽  
Series Study

A widely-cited study reported evidence that White Americans reported higher ratings of how much Whites are the victims of discrimination in the United States than of how much Blacks are the victims of discrimination in the United States. However, much fewer than half of White Americans rated discrimination against Whites in the United States today to be greater or more frequent than discrimination against Blacks in the United States today, in data from the American National Election Studies 2012 Time Series Study or in preregistered analyses of data from the American National Election Studies 2016 Time Series Study or from a 2017 national nonprobability survey. Given that relative discrimination against Black Americans is a compelling justification for policies to reduce Black disadvantage, results from these three surveys suggest that White Americans' policy preferences have much potential to move in a direction that disfavors programs intended to reduce Black disadvantage.

The Postracial Delusion

2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (9) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Yasmin Nair
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Past

<div class="bookreview">David Theo Goldberg, <em>Are We All Postracial Yet? </em>(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 200 pages, $12.95, paperback.</div><div class="bookreview">Linda Mart&iacute;n Alcoff, <em>The Future of Whiteness </em>(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 224 pages, $19.95, paperback.</div><p>If we based our understanding of race relations in the United States on the events of the last year alone, it might seem like a racial Armageddon was upon us. Hardly a day seems to pass without a report of yet another black victim of a police shooting. Independent estimates confirm that the prevalence of such incidents has been rising over the past several years.&hellip; What we are witnessing&hellip;is a volatile combination of a rise in violence alongside the increasing visibility of that violence.&hellip; But despite so much evidence that black Americans and other people of color are under attack, nearly half of respondents to a recent Pew survey thought that race was "not a factor at all" in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the same number agreed that the United States has already "made [the] necessary changes" to achieve racial equality.&hellip; And yet&hellip;everywhere there is more evidence than ever that race and its cousin, ethnicity, still define the simple matter of who gets to live or die. Whether in the global refugee crisis, the aftermath of the Paris bombings, or the quotidian ways in which people of color in the United States face the denigration of both casual and institutional racism, one thing is clear: race survives.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

scholarly journals Perceived Discrimination against Black Americans and White Americans

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence James Zigerell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Series ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Election ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Time Series Study ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Election Studies ◽  
Series Study

A widely-cited study reported evidence that White Americans reported higher ratings of how much Whites are the victims of discrimination in the United States than of how much Blacks are the victims of discrimination in the United States. However, much fewer than half of White Americans rated discrimination against Whites in the United States today to be greater or more frequent than discrimination against Blacks in the United States today, in data from the American National Election Studies 2012 Time Series Study or in preregistered analyses of data from the American National Election Studies 2016 Time Series Study or from a 2017 national nonprobability survey. Given that relative discrimination against Black Americans is a compelling justification for policies to reduce Black disadvantage, results from these three surveys suggest that White Americans’ policy preferences have much potential to move in a direction that disfavors programs intended to reduce Black disadvantage.

scholarly journals Chocolate Suburb, Vanilla Power: Race, Space and Civil Unrest in Ferguson

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Chanhaeng Lee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
Majority Group

In this article, I argue that the demographic and political restructuring of city−suburb dynamics in the United States is key to understanding what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014. Ferguson, a once-vanilla suburb where the overwhelming majority of residents were white Americans, was deterritorialized from the 1970s onward into a suburb where black Americans became the majority group. However, the whites, as a demographic minority, were still in control and tried to reterritorialize the black suburb. I maintain that the inevitable result of this disjunction between the chocolate suburb and vanilla power was racial antagonism, which exploded in Ferguson in 2014.

Intra-minority Intergroup Relations in the Twenty-First Century

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Richeson ◽  
Maureen A. Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identification ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
First Century ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Black President ◽  
The U.S

Recent projections indicate that by the year 2050, racial minorities will comprise more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. That is, the United States is expected to become a “majority-minority” nation. This essay adopts a social psychological approach to consider how these dramatic demographic changes may affect both racial minorities and white Americans. Specifically, drawing from theoretical work on social identification, the essay examines the likely psychological meaning (if any) of a majority-minority nation for racial minorities' self-concepts and the resulting effects on their evaluations of members of other racial minority groups. In addition, the potential reactions of white Americans to the possibility of becoming a numerical minority are explored. Drawing on reactions to the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States, the authors conclude by discussing the implications of America's shifting racial demographics for the U.S. racial hierarchy.

scholarly journals Death of family members as an overlooked source of racial disadvantage in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 915-920 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Umberson ◽  
Julie Skalamera Olson ◽  
Robert Crosnoe ◽  
Hui Liu ◽  
Tetyana Pudrovska ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Nationally Representative

Long-standing racial differences in US life expectancy suggest that black Americans would be exposed to significantly more family member deaths than white Americans from childhood through adulthood, which, given the health risks posed by grief and bereavement, would add to the disadvantages that they face. We analyze nationally representative US data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (n= 7,617) and the Health and Retirement Study (n= 34,757) to estimate racial differences in exposure to the death of family members at different ages, beginning in childhood. Results indicate that blacks are significantly more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a mother, a father, and a sibling from childhood through midlife. From young adulthood through later life, blacks are also more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a child and of a spouse. These results reveal an underappreciated layer of racial inequality in the United States, one that could contribute to the intergenerational transmission of health disadvantage. By calling attention to this heightened vulnerability of black Americans, our findings underscore the need to address the potential impact of more frequent and earlier exposure to family member deaths in the process of cumulative disadvantage.

Zero-Sum Beliefs of Racial Progress

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Perry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Zero Sum ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Representative Samples

With diversity rising in the United States, do people believe that progress for Black Americans means increased discrimination against White Americans? Despite prior evidence of such “zero-sum” beliefs, a provocative new study by Earle and Hodson challenges this narrative with large, nationally representative samples.

Ignorance of History and Political Differences in Perception of Racism in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 194855062110564
Author(s):  
Ethan Zell ◽  
Tara L. Lesick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Political Realm

According to the Marley hypothesis, White Americans are more ignorant of historical racism than Black Americans, which explains their greater tendency to deny racism in the present. We extended the Marley hypothesis by testing whether it explains political differences in perception of racism among White Americans in the United States. Two preregistered studies measured participants’ knowledge of historical racism as well as their perception of present racism in individual cases and in society ( N = 463). White Republicans had less knowledge of historical racism and perceived less individual and systemic racism than White Democrats. Consistent with the Marley hypothesis, political differences in perception of individual racism were significantly mediated by knowledge of historical racism. These findings suggest that ignorance of historical racism may partly explain why White Republicans perceive less racism than White Democrats, and therefore extend the Marley hypothesis to the political realm.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document