Racial Conservatives Research Articles

Racial Realities

AbstractHow should we conceive of conflicts that seem intractable? Is there any hope of a resolution? We observe impasses between various groups concerning the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the Movement for Black Lives and racial conservatives, and Indigenous voices versus settler colonial states. Some aspects of these impasses can surely be explained by an unwillingness by one or more parties to the conflict to yield any ground. Might there also be room for misunderstanding generated by radically different ways of conceiving the world? According to the different worlds thesis, people come to radically different understandings of the world because they inhabit incompatible conceptual realities. In this article, I endeavor to explore possible ways of understanding the thesis and its potential impact on certain normative practices we tend to take for granted.

Review: Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Review: <i>Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics</i>, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Harlan's Dissent: Citizenship, Education, and the Color-Conscious Constitution

In his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Racial conservatives have argued that Harlan’s dissent should invalidate policies that partially redress the historical injuries inflicted on African Americans. This article contends that the concept of colorblindness misstates Harlan’s central claim. His dissent insisted black Americans are entitled to the full fruits of citizenship. This rearticulation reveals that race-conscious policies, particularly within public education, fulfill, rather than undermine, Harlan’s primary objective of defending black citizenship. The article shows that racial conservatives’ colorblind ideology emerged as a strategic response to their legal defeats over segregated schools and to attack affirmative action. The Supreme Court’s later use of colorblind principles is contrasted with empirical evidence of the efficacy of color-conscious pedagogies within schools. The recent Gary B. v. Whitmer case highlights the linkages between full citizenship and race-conscious pedagogies.

The Trump Presidency, Racial Realignment, and the Future of Constitutional Norms

This chapter in a forthcoming volume, Amending America’s Unwritten Constitution (Cambridge University Press) (Richard Albert, Yaniv Roznai, & Ryan C. Williams eds., forthcoming 2021), asks into the likely implications of the Trump Presidency for the future sustainability of constitutional norms in the United States. It observes that what counts as a persuasive answer to that question turns primarily on why politicians’ respect for constitutional norms has been declining, and it argues that President Donald Trump is more of an effect (and a symptom) than a cause of the decline. Specifically, he is more of an effect than a cause of larger racial and cultural changes in American society that are causing Republican voters and politicians to perceive an existential threat to their continued political and cultural power—and, relatedly, to deny the legitimacy of their political opponents. As illustrated by the conduct of Republicans in Congress and statehouses, it is very unlikely that Republican politicians will respect constitutional norms when they deem so much to be at stake in each election and significant governmental decision. Moreover, Democratic politicians, now that they fully control the political branches, may begin a campaign of retaliation that will include violations of norms. As a result, one should expect continued violations of constitutional norms by American politicians to accomplish partisan goals—what Mark Tushnet has called “constitutional hardball”—at least until the electoral impact of demographic changes in the electorate exceeds the electoral impact of the rural favoritism that is built into the nation’s constitutional electoral processes. The Republican Party has likely been able to hold on to so much power without moderating for as long as it has primarily because of that rural favoritism. At the same time, the results of the 2020 elections indicate that the country is not nearly as liberal as the most liberal members of the Democratic Party may believe, so the party may remain under pressure to stay relatively moderate. Demography is not destiny, as the increase in Latino support for Trump in 2020 suggests, and the education-level divide may continue to play a significant role in party configurations in the years ahead. At some point, however, the Republican Party may face a choice between losing most national elections and significantly broadening its appeal beyond racial, religious, cultural, and economic conservatives. Broadening the tent may again make it possible for the leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the White House, Congress, and statehouses to sustain constitutional norms, but this time while sharing a commitment to racial equality. The sobering historical reality, discussed in this chapter, is that the leaders of the two parties have never been able to sustain norms and work together over a significant period of time when they have been divided over race. Put differently, the racial reckoning in the United States that continues to unfold as this chapter goes to press is likely responding in part to a history in which norm compliance and legislative cooperation among politicians in the two parties came largely at the expense of black people, who were not in “the room where it happened” when fateful compromises were forged.

Beyond Performance: Racial Resentment and Whites’ Negativity Toward Government

We argue that since the 1960s, with increased descriptive representation in elected positions and in key administrative posts, government has become racialized. As a result, white racial conservatives are more likely to be less trusting and feel more threatened by government. The link between racial attitudes and beliefs about government suggests that the decline in public trust may not be simply a response to performance but rather a result of in-congruence in values between white racial conservatives and public institutions. Furthermore, the racialization of government constitutes a path for racial “spillover” in nonracial policy domains. Using a priming experiment and the 1988-2016 ANES we demonstrate a strong negative relationship between racial resentment and various measures of support for government. We also show that racial resentment has indirect effects on several nonracial and racialized policy domains through its effect on government attitudes.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

Ideological Legitimacy, Color-blindness, and Racially Conservative Organizations

AbstractAlthough scholars of racial inequality have investigated the transformation of racial ideologies in the post-Civil Rights Era, comparatively little research has been done on a corresponding transformation in racial advocacy organizing. Using an original dataset, I introduce racially conservative organizations, provide a history of their growth from 1960 to 2000, and estimate their formation in metropolitan areas over three decades to better specify the factors that led to their emergence. Measures of organizational strength, stability, and growth reveal that racially conservative organizations thrived relative to white extremist organizations in the second half of the 20th century, alongside the de-legitimation of explicit racism and rise of color-blind racism. The multivariate analysis indicates that metropolitan areas with increased political opportunities witnessed a greater likelihood of organizational formation among racial conservatives. In the 1970s, threats to dominant group interests emboldened racial conservatives and incited mobilization. However, in later decades, these conditions weakened dominant group interests in a way that deterred collective action. Racially conservative organizations are more likely to form in contexts that provide them with legitimacy to mobilize around racially sensitive issues. The findings challenge past research that conflates racial conservatism and white extremism and assumes that they share the same determinants.

The content of their coverage: contrasting racially conservative and liberal elite rhetoric

ABSTRACT Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that how elites talk about race may shape mass racial attitudes. But current work limits understanding this possibility by not systematically characterizing elite rhetoric on race. To shed light on the nature of racially liberal and conservative elite rhetoric, and therefore the potential for elites to shape mass racial attitudes, I analyze transcripts from two partisan news shows: The Rachel Maddow Show and The O’Reilly Factor. Pairing a case study with text-as-data methods, I provide insight into themes constituting racially liberal and conservative elite discourse. Racial liberals like Maddow emphasize that race matters–racial bias and discrimination still shape nonwhites’ life chances. In contrast, racial conservatives like O’Reilly contend that race does not shape life chances and serves only as an attention-seeking device. Identifying these divides helps shed light on the origins and dynamics of mass racial attitudes.

Cracking the Racial Code: Black Threat, White Rights and the Lexicon of American Politics

AbstractRacially coded language that appeals to racial bias without open bigotry has a long history in the politics of the United States. Politicians intentionally activate the latent racial biases of both racial conservatives and center‐left liberals without explicitly talking about race. Conservative positions on significant policy areas have shifted over time on the basis of coded racial appeals. Fundamental rights are coded as white rights. Government actions to aid the poor or reduce discrimination are coded as black threats. The racial dimension explains the changing positions of American conservatism on gun rights, crime and mass incarceration, immigration, the welfare state, federalism, and economic policy. White racial identity, mobilized by coded political talk, restrains the potential for cross‐racial coalitions and perpetuates the political repression of nonwhite Americans.

Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders, Massive Resistance, and the Supreme Court, 1954–1958

Exploiting a range of archival materials, we argue that state-level variation in judicial backlash to Brown was as much the result of strategic choices by southern political elites as it was the ingrained prejudices of the region's white voters. Presenting case studies of massive resistance in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arkansas, we show that elite agency profoundly shaped the patchwork development of grassroots resistance to integration across the South. These findings challenge the prevailing view that backlash to Brown signaled the unequivocal triumph of racial conservatives. Rather, we argue that the region's response offered individual members of the southern elite significant autonomy to direct massive resistance in their home states. We also argue that southern lawmakers were responsible for the South's embrace of popular constitutionalism post-Brown, and thus that it may not have been “popular” at all. We conclude that studies of judicial backlash would do well to reevaluate the assumption that backlash is necessarily a grassroots phenomenon.

The Tea Party Coalition: Some Racial Resentment, Lots of Economic Resentment

In this paper I argue that the main impulse underlying the tea party movement is a conviction that activist government unfairly rewards the undeserving at the expense of the productive leading them to demand limited government. I say main impulse because racial resentment and other illiberal attitudes also contribute to tea party involvement. But illiberal motives do not play the dominant role that much of the leading research suggests. When tests are properly conducted, preference for limited government is the strongest and most consistent predictor of tea party support. Further I show the tea party is a heterogeneous coalition, consisting of three distinct groups. I find the largest of these subgroups has a strongly libertarian flavor and scarcely a whiff of racial animus. Social conservatives comprise another significant group, with strong preferences for limited government and moral traditionalism, and some racially conservative attitudes. Racial conservatives are a substantial subgroup too, but my analysis shows that they are no less motivated by the issue of limited government than others in the movement. These groups are different from one another but came together in the same movement largely because they shared a belief that the federal government had violated basic fairness in its response to difficult economic times.

THE NEW “SOUTHERN STRATEGY:” IMMIGRATION, RACE, AND “WELFARE DEPENDENCY” IN CONTEMPORARY US REPUBLICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

IntroductionWhile it represents a decidedly shameful chapter in the history of modern democracies, many politicians have discovered that appealing to voters' racial, ethnic, and nativist prejudices can be an effective means of both winning elections and building the necessary political capital to advance preferred legislative agendas. This strategic exploitation of racial discord relies on what is colloquially known as race-baiting, herein referred to as racially divisive (RDAs). In this analysis, RDAs are defined as political statements in which the speaker denigrates a particular minority group, frames that group as a threat to majority group resources or privileges, advocates for special restrictions against that group, or reassures potential supporters of their rightfully superordinate position vis-a-vis the targeted minority. In addition to stoking resentment against particular groups, RDAs may use frame-bridging discourses (Benford and Snow 2000) to create cognitive links between ostensibly race-neutral policies, such as the anti-poverty programs colloquially known as welfare, and non-white populations.Racially divisive appeals are aimed at backlash voters, individuals whose electoral choices are heavily motivated by fear or resentment of minority encroachment and/or the belief that the economic, political and social advancement of historically marginalized groups can only be engineered by taking rights and opportunities away from native-born whites (Hewitt 2005; Hughey 2014). While politicians still sometimes use openly racist discourse to court this constituency, post-Civil Rights-era RDAs are more likely to mobilize coded racial language and the double-speak and face-saving equivocations of color-blind instead (Bonilla-Silva 2013). Although there are plentiful examples of the use of RDAs by both left and right-wing politicians across most national contexts, this research focuses on their use in contemporary US presidential campaigns by candidates affiliated with the Republican Party. This choice is motivated by the GOP's1 well-documented history of mobilizing RDAs, most notably during the so-called a decades-long campaign wherein political operatives systematically exploited white racism to shift the former slave states of the South from a Democratic voting bloc into the solid Republican constituency that they are today (Feagin 2012; Lowndes 2008).In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of the political uses of RDAs and will explore the evolution of these appeals over time. The focus will be on the extent to, and means by which, minority groups are defined as threats to white resources or economic privileges, either by framing them as abusers of tax-funded government benefits, or, as historically been the case with immigrants, by framing them as job stealers. Finally, following the Republican National Committee's formal 2005 apology for the use of the Southern Strategy, and repeated promises to move away from such divisive tactics, I will examine whether GOP Presidential candidates in the 2008 and 2012 election cycles have continued to court racial conservatives by presenting minorities as resource threats. As a corollary, I will examine the extent to which promises to cut government funded anti-poverty programs and other public services are justified through narratives which present benefit programs as primarily benefitting non-whites. If so, I will determine the extent to which these appeals exploit Strategy type anti-black sentiments, or whether they have switched focus to new minority populations made especially salient by increased immigration and demographic trends that are challenging the majority status of Caucasian whites.Politics and Prejudice: Nativism and Anti-Black RacismInsofar as it was a period of historically high immigration, the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries saw a surge in popular nativist movements. …

The political roots of racial tracking in American criminal justice

The race problem in the American criminal justice system persists because we enable it. The tendency of liberals to point a finger at law enforcement, racial conservatives, the War on Drugs, is misguided. Black as well as white voters, Democrat as much as Republican lawmakers, President Obama as much as Reagan, both Congress and the Supreme Court alike; all are implicated. We all are 'The Man'. Whether the problem is defined in terms of blacks' overrepresentation in prisons or in terms of the disproportional use of deadly police force against blacks, not enough of us demand that something be done. The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice is the story of how the race problem in criminal justice is continually enabled in the national crime policy process, and why.

The Public’s Anger: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions Toward Health Care Reform

Pundits and politicians debated whether race was implicated in the rancorous public forums and demonstrations over health care reform. Research suggests that for many white Americans, racial predispositions play a greater role in their opinions on health care than non-racial predispositions. Building on this work, I examine the extent to which anger uniquely activates white racial attitudes and increases their effect on preferences for health care reform. My theory suggests this effect occurs because anger and thoughts about race are tightly linked in memory. Using a nationally representative experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, enthusiasm, or relaxation. The results show that anger uniquely pushes racial conservatives to be more opposing of health care reform while it triggers more support among racial liberals. On the other hand, anger does not enhance the effect of race-neutral principles on health care reform.

Emotional Substrates of White Racial Attitudes

A steep decline in biologically based racial animus over the past four decades has not led to a softening of opposition to race‐conscious policies such as affirmative action. One explanation for this is that a new racial belief system—referred to as symbolic racism or racial resentment—has replaced “old‐fashioned racism.” Another is that nonracial values such as ideology and a preference for small government now drive policy opinions. Our theory suggests that whereas disgust once accompanied ideas about “biologically inferior” groups, anger has become fused to conservative ideas about race in the contemporary period. As a result, anger now serves as the primary emotional trigger of whites’ negative racial attitudes. We experimentally induce disgust, anger, or fear using an apolitical task and find anger is uniquely powerful at boosting opposition to racially redistributive policies among white racial conservatives. Nonracial attitudes such as ideology and small government preference are not activated by any of these negative emotions.

Beyond the Pale: White Americans' Conditional Response to the Norm of Racial Equality

Most political scientists argue that explicit racial appeals are no longer effective in contemporary American politics. According to this view, such messages are rejected because they are perceived as violating the almost universally accepted norm of racial equality. I reexamine this question with an experimental design, embedded in a nationally representative Internet survey in which respondents were randomly assigned to one of eight treatments. The race of the messenger (black or white) and the type of appeal were manipulated, depending on treatment condition. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that explicit racial appeals are not necessarily counterproductive, as black candidates who use explicit appeals generate more support among racial conservatives relative to black candidates who use implicit appeals. The results also suggest that White Americans' response to the norm of equality is contingent on the race of the messenger. That is, when the messenger is also white, respondents are more likely to reject the appeal, but when the messenger is black (with an identical message), they do not find the message offensive. Since previous research related to the implicit and explicit racial appeals has typically focused on white messengers, to date we have been unable to detect that the rejection of explicit appeals is moderated by the race of the messenger.

Obama's race: the 2008 election and the dream of a post-racial America

Barack presidential victory naturally led people to believe that the United States might finally be moving into a post-racial era. Obama's Race - and its eye-opening account of the role played by race in the election - paints a dramatically different picture. The authors argue that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record - and perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. As campaign was given a boost in the primaries from racial liberals that extended well beyond that usually offered to ideologically similar white candidates, Hillary Clinton lost much of her long-standing support and instead became the preferred candidate of Democratic racial conservatives. Time and again, voters' racial predispositions trumped their ideological preferences as John McCain - seldom described as conservative in matters of race - became the darling of racial conservatives from both parties. Hard-hitting and sure to be controversial, Obama's Race will be both praised and criticized - but certainly not ignored.

Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence from California's 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment

Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, whereas most racial conservatives—largely whites—vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican Governor Earl Warren's well-known support for fair employment practices (FEP) legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.

Segregationists Confront American Empire: The Conservative White South and the Question of Hawaiian Statehood, 1947–1959

Legislative and public debate over Hawai‘i”s proposed statehood coincided with the intensification of the African American freedom struggle in the U.S. South as well as the post-World War II rise of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia. To white racial conservatives, these were interrelated threats; each challenged the once-dominant association of whiteness and access to democracy. This article uncovers and analyzes the widespread grass-roots opposition to Hawaiian statehood among white Southerners. In doing so, it casts post-World War II racial conservatism in a new light: by illustrating how segregationists turned their attention to places far beyond the borders of the U.S. South to defend the ideology that legitimated Jim Crow; by highlighting the persistence of a race-based anti-imperialist sentiment; and by exploring segregationist ideas about race, religion, and the right to self-rule.

How Racial Conservatives Curtail Black Opportunities in Higher Education

How Racial Conservatives Curtail Black Opportunities in Higher Education