Search Results

This chapter depicts “the real record on racial attitudes” using a wide lens. Recounting results of mid-20th-century surveys as well as trends in the General Social Survey, it shows that formal principles of equal treatment (e.g., in schools and employment) came to be widely endorsed. However, it cautions against concluding that U.S. society became “postracial.” For example, in the 2000s white Americans remain more apt to attribute negative traits to blacks than to whites, reluctant to support interventions to redress persistent black–white inequality, and highly resistant to “special favors” for blacks. The chapter documents rising egalitarianism and dramatic change in some basic assumptions governing black–white relationships, together with little or no growth in reformist and interventionist orientations about racial matters. It highlights numerous “enduring frictions and conflicts that continue to make race such a fraught terrain.”

This chapter examines whether demographics influences white attitudes toward immigration. It asks whether living near heavy concentrations of immigrants and Latinos is threatening enough to produce a reaction by white Americans; that is, whether context is driving at least part of white America's response to immigration. It shows that white attitudes are strongly and consistently correlated with the size and growth of the state Latino population on a range of immigrant-related policies and white partisanship. Whites who live in states with more Latinos are more punitive, less supportive of social welfare and other public services, and generally more conservative than whites in other states. Whites in those same states are also significantly more likely to support the Republican Party.

This chapter looks at activists' experiences in engaging other whites. Activists take on the responsibility of engaging with other white people to change their racialized ideas and practices. White activists face many tensions and dilemmas in trying to influence other whites within a system that perpetuates racism on a daily basis. The chapter starts with a key dilemma faced by all white activists who try to influence others, that is, how to challenge a white person's racism in a way which moves them forward rather than causes defensiveness and retreat. It turns to a close examination of how activists seek to influence other whites in the three different fields of action represented in the study: community organizing, education, and policy advocacy and criminal justice work.

How can white Americans come to care enough about racism that they move from passivity to action for racial justice? This book looked for clues to answer that question by examining the lives and self-understanding of white people who have made that move and became committed activists for racial justice. This chapter brings the pieces together to develop a more integrated explanation, highlighting the broader implications of the findings of this project for advancing racial justice in the United States. It also notes how Barack Obama gave white Americans a chance to support a better future for themselves, for people of color, and for the entire country. The chapter explains how whites can come to support racial justice not just because they should do so, but also because they fully embrace the cause as their own.

During the late nineteenth century, White Americans developed an enduring image of themselves as a superior race with a manifest destiny. They did this by drawing distinctions and observing differences between themselves and other groups of people. With their political and economic power, White Americans had the means to effectively communicate about themselves as a race. In print, delivered to the home, read by the whole family, the racial and religious discourse disseminated by family house magazines and other popular publications helped to produce and replicate the self-referential communication of White Americans.

This chapter introduces a theory that explains how immigration could lead to a broad white backlash that transforms the basic political leaning of much of white America. As anxiety about immigration has grown, white partisanship and politics have become increasingly affected by this issue, with more and more white Americans espousing a less generous, more indignant politics that seeks to punish immigrants who violate U.S. norms, and strives to cut off services and other public goods that could benefit them. The chapter describes a theory of immigration politics and examines how immigration could be reshaping the politics of white America. It argues that far from the country moving away from the use of race/ethnicity as a dividing line, immigration is actually leading to greater divisions and tensions—at least in the political sphere.

Today's activists have not given up on the goal of multiracial community, but they have learned from the experiences of the 1960s to make a more conscious effort to address the inevitable tensions that underlie multiracial work. Nevertheless, the “weight of history and institutions” remains. This chapter discusses how activists attempt to address these challenges and negotiate these dilemmas, looking at lessons learned in building multiracial collaborations capable of working toward racial justice. Activists find that whites can ignore racial differences, working out of color-blind assumptions, and stress becoming aware of and addressing racial differences openly within multiracial collaborations. However, whites can also make the opposite error of essentializing race. They can become so overly self-aware of racial differences that they fail to deal with people of color as fellow human beings and lose their own sense of themselves.

This book examines the ways in which immigration is transforming American politics by focusing on the attitudes and actions of the white population. It offers an explanation of how immigration could lead to a broad white backlash that transforms the basic political leaning of much of white America. It considers how the partisan patterns, electoral decisions, and policy preferences of native white Americans are changing in response to immigration's imprint. It also explores the overall patterns in aggregate white partisanship over the last fifty years and presents historical evidence to show that immigration can fundamentally alter partisan politics as well as racial politics. Finally, the book discusses two mechanisms through which immigration leads to political effects: demographics and news media.

This chapter examines white Americans' partisan preferences. Using data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) and a series of other national public opinion surveys, it shows that white Americans who harbor anti-immigrant sentiments are much more likely than others to identify as Republican. This is true regardless of what other potentially relevant political factors are taken into account, how partisanship is measured, or which survey is used. Importantly, using panel data, the chapter finds that changes in individual attitudes toward immigrants such as African Americans and Latinos precede shifts in partisanship. Similarly, using aggregate data, it demonstrates that the public's views on immigration predict shifts in macropartisanship. These results suggest that immigration is driving individual defections from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

This conclusion summarizes the book's main findings and considers their implications for the areas of race, immigration, and American politics. The results confirm the important role that immigration plays in American politics and also highlight the enduring though shifting role of race in the nation. Where African Americans once dominated the political calculus of white Americans, Latinos appear more likely to do so today. The movement of so many white Americans to the right has wide-ranging ramifications for both the future balance of partisanship and likely trajectory of race relations in the country. With a clear majority of the white population now leaning towards the Republican Party and a clear majority of the minority population now favoring the Democratic Party, political conflict in the United States is increasingly likely to be synonymous with racial conflict—a pattern that threatens ever-greater racial tension.

This chapter examines the implications of white backlash for the policy decisions of state legislatures, focusing on five policy areas: health care, criminal justice, education, taxation, and spending decisions. Using data from the National Association of State Budget Officers as well as a range of other sources, it shows that Latino population size has an impact on policies tied to immigrants and Latinos. In states with larger Latino populations, public goods provision drop significantly, and funds for welfare, health, and education all decline. Once the Latino population passes a threshold, however, policy outcomes become more pro-Latino. These results provide evidence that while blacks continue to represent a threat to some white Americans and their presence affects state welfare spending, Latinos are becoming much more central in the policy-making process.

The most complicated component in king's strategy of style was identification, which Kenneth Burke calls the rhetorical “principle of courtship.” For the first decade of his career, King worked relentlessly to align the objectives of the Movement with the values of moderate-to-liberal white America. His objective was the merger of black aspirations into the American dream. To achieve this, he had to persuade black Americans that his methods signified their best interests, and he had to persuade white Americans that his vision was uniform with their heritage. Due to the increasing influence of television, he laid out his mission of identification before a racially mixed audience.

This chapter examines New York's mixed character in the 1920s. During this decade white Americans sought membership in the Ku Klux Klan, resorted to eugenics and science, pushed for immigration restrictions, and led a drive for segregation to uphold white supremacy. At the same time, others became attracted to the other side of their constructed color line as they tanned, listened to jazz, and danced black-inspired dances. The contradictions generated by these competing impulses stimulated a growing interest in the study of “mixed races” and helped generate a great deal of attention both in and out of New York on the Rhinelander marriage and annulment trial.

In the early 1920s, racial incidents involving white Americans and the black community were nearly always attributed to the Ku Klux Klan. The frequency of racial encounters in Montmartre turned rumor into believable fact, underpinned by the rash of known violent Klan activity taking place in black community members' hometowns across America. When word spread that the Klan was actively seeking to establish itself officially in France by opening a branch in Paris, the government moved swiftly to block this effort, and on 5 January 1923, a French official declared that no secret society having the announced aims of the Ku Klux Klan would be permitted to operate under the existing French laws.

This chapter raises the question of how Barack Obama, an African American, was able to achieve the support of American whites, enough to win not only his party's nomination, but also ultimately the presidential election by a landslide. It argues that Obama's success in American politics is rooted primarily in his “acceptability” as an African American racial representative in the eyes of American whites. By acceptable to American whites, the point here is that Obama was able to achieve his status as racial representative primarily because of categorical rejection, exclusion, and repression of black leaders with agendas that were understood to be in any way radical or as posing a threat to the existing racial arrangement. Obama was the modern-day representative Negro in that he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion.

This chapter explores the rise of the Negro spirituals and the career and the racial-uplift coding of James Monroe Trotter’s book Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878). White Americans first encountered the African American spirituality through music that expressed African American sorrow over their predicament of being slaves. Trotter’s book gave the first comprehensive history of black music in America, focusing on several musicians such as the Georgia Minstrels, Justin Holland, and the Luca Family.