White Attitudes Research Articles

A rural-urban political divide among whom? Race, ethnicity, and political behavior across place

ABSTRACT Over the past 30 years, the United States has developed a rural-urban political divide, as rural voters have become increasingly reliable Republican voters while long-term patterns of Democratic voting in the largest cities have also consolidated in many smaller cities and suburbs as well. Yet, although 1 in 4 rural dwellers now identify as people of color, research on the rural-urban divide has either mostly centered on the behavior and attitudes of non-Hispanic whites, or assumed that nonwhites have exhibited similar behavior to whites. Does this political cleavage exist among people of color? We find that the growing rural-urban divide is driven primarily by white Americans, while rural people of color differ much less, if at all, from their urban counterparts in voting behavior. In addition to highlighting the need for more research on the politics of rural people of color, our findings raise concerns about the political representation of rural Black Americans and Latinos.

‘I Laid Earl and Clementine on a Chair and Whipped Them’: Child Murder and Criminal Justice in the Jim Crow South

Abstract This article explores a horrific 1945 child murder in New Orleans and argues that the case revealed broader developments in Southern criminal justice in the age of Jim Crow. Ernestine Bonneval tied her young children to an ironing board and lashed them, killing her 7-year-old daughter. The murder generated outrage, with residents demanding severe punishment, even the gallows, for the brutal crime. After a jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge sentenced the killer to one year in the state penitentiary. New Orleanians initially expressed fury at the lenient punishment but quickly conveyed sympathy for the murdering mother and perceived her as the victim of a failed legal system. The shift reflected four wider changes in white sensibilities about the role of the state. First, New Deal programs establishing a safety net during the Great Depression transformed white attitudes toward government authority. Second, Clementine Bonneval’s death became tethered to a national panic over juvenile delinquency, even though the victim was only 7. Third, gender ideals influenced perceptions of women who engaged in criminal violence. Fourth, and most important, Southern whites increasingly encoded violence as an African American behavior. As a consequence, white killers became hapless victims of circumstances beyond their control. The Bonneval murder was reinterpreted within a racialized construction of crime and criminal culpability that produced more aggressive policing and more draconian punishment for African American suspects and fewer arrests, indictments, convictions, and long prison sentences for white killers. Jim Crow, in short, shaped the modernization of Southern criminal justice.

Who Should Be Provided with Pathways toward Citizenship? White and Black Attitudes toward Undocumented Immigrants

Existing studies on attitudes towards immigrants center White public opinion and do not account for the diversity within the immigrant population. I seek to fill these gaps by testing how an undocumented immigrant’s country-of-origin shapes immigrant attitudes among White and Black Americans. Through an experimental survey to 180 Black and 694 White Amazon Mechanical Turk users, I find that White respondents had significantly negative reactions to Nigerian undocumented immigrants relative to Germans, South Koreans, and Mexicans. Yet, this negative sentiment dissipated once the model controlled for cultural similarity. The results demonstrate that cultural attitudes mediate White attitudes towards immigrants, citizenship, and belonging. This study adds to the literature on White and Black attitudes towards immigrants and highlights the enduring role of racialization in influencing both legal and ascriptive notions of citizenship.

Married with children: do intermarriage and children impact political orientations?

ABSTRACT We test the possibility that social contact through interracial marriage impacts racial attitudes. We assume that interracial couples experience intergroup contact that is meaningfully different from same-race couples. Little research examines the impact of mate selection and reproduction on political and racial attitudes. In this paper, we advance the research on the potential impact of mate selection and reproduction on couples’ racial attitudes. Using racialized socialization theory, we test whether interracial couples hold similar views to other multiracial couples compared to same-race couples. A secondary hypothesis concerns whether interracial couples with children hold distinct racial and political attitudes. We use the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). We find that non-Hispanic whites, Blacks, and Asians in interracial relationships are more likely to indicate that these groups experience discrimination compared to their co-ethnic counterparts who are in relationships with co-ethnics. We also find some support for our expectation that having children in an interracial marriage has an impact on the racial attitudes of non-Hispanic whites. Our results contribute to the growing research on the political attitudes of interracial couples as well as the impact of their having children upon their political preferences.

Cowboy Presidents: The Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics

In Cowboy Presidents, David A. Smith examines the ways in which Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush reflected and deployed facets of a “frontier myth” between 1901 and 2009.Smith's volume, based on his doctoral dissertation in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, makes substantial use of materials at the presidential libraries of Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan as well as the collections of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in North Dakota to document his contention that the frontier myth has changed substantially over time since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner first staked a claim on its centrality to American development. In Smith's view, the myth has moved politically in right-wing directions just as has the nation, “shifting from a thesis of liberalism and inclusion to one of conservatism and exclusion” (p. 8), “a profound change that scholars or political analysts have not previously identified” (p. 13).Influenced by historian Brian W. Dippie, whose classic The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (1982) argued that the “vanishing” myth affected political leaders who took myth for fact as they made decisions affecting Native Americans, Smith carries his story through the twentieth century with attention to popular journalism as well as presidential statements, contemporary historiography, and communications studies. Cowboy Presidents has well-chosen illustrations, including apt cartoons, and a photograph of Barack Obama in a cowboy hat.Because Turner focused on the West as the locus of the frontier, Smith pays special attention to the ways the four chief executives offered contrasting presidential visions of the significance of that region during the twentieth century and especially between the 1960s and the 2000s. Roosevelt receives one chapter, raising issues such as the role of government at home and abroad and the importance of protecting the environment; Johnson and Reagan, two apiece—demonstrating successively how each performed more effectively early on and less so toward the end of their terms—Johnson in Vietnam and Reagan with his “reactionary, nostalgic way of understanding America” (p. 137). Bush merits one chapter that stresses failures—Iraq, Katrina, and a faltering economy.An epilogue briefly mentions Barack Obama—citing his Ossawatomie speech and its reference to Roosevelt—and Donald J. Trump “with [his] grievance-based ideology, toxic masculinity, corporate tax cuts, environment-busting, America-first approach to trade and foreign relations . . . ” (p. 217), but Smith does not take into account either the earlier challenges to the frontier myth by William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, or Lloyd Gardner, or the recent work of such influential scholars as Heather Cox Richardson and, especially, Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019).

Inverting the Lens: White Privilege Denial in Evaluations of Politicians and Policy

Public understandings of race in the United States have evolved, at least among some, to acknowledge that whiteness confers privilege. In contrast to the negative racial stereotypes that animate racial resentment, white privilege inverts the lens by focusing on whites and the notion that whiteness confers unearned advantages. Given the centrality of race in American politics, we investigate white privilege denial and whether it matters politically. Our inquiry shows white privilege denial is a distinct racial construct and that nearly half of whites are at least somewhat in denial with nearly one-third rejecting all the white privilege items. We found that white privilege denial is politically consequential, helping explain white attitudes across a range of political attitudes including support for political leaders, parties, and public policy. To capture the range and complexity of racial attitudes among whites, we recommend that studies of racial attitudes in politics include white privilege denial.

Remembering where we're from: Community- and individual-level predictors of college students' White privilege awareness.

Scholars in the field of community psychology have called for more research dedicated to examining White privilege as part of a system of White supremacy in the United States. One branch of this work focuses on awareness of White privilege, yet to date, this research has typically investigated awareness of White privilege at individual levels of analysis instead of also focusing on neighborhoods, schools, and other levels of analysis beyond the individual. In this study, we combine survey and U.S. Census data to explore both individual- and community-level predictors of White privilege awareness. With a sample of 1285 White college students, we found that gender, modern racism, social dominance orientation, and subjective socioeconomic status (SES) significantly predicted White privilege awareness. After accounting for these individual-level variables, we found that characteristics of students' hometowns (defined by zip code) predicted White privilege awareness. Specifically, greater income inequality was associated with higher White privilege awareness, while greater White racial homogeneity was marginally associated with lower White privilege awareness. There was a significant interaction between community-level White racial homogeneity and individual-level subjective SES, such that students with high subjective SES and low White racial homogeneity had the highest White privilege awareness. This study highlights the importance of examining different facets of ecological context in relation to White Americans' racial attitudes.

The politics of pronouns: how Trump framed the ingroup in the 2016 presidential election

ABSTRACT Outgroup hostility and racialized language were the most important predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 election season. Some scholarship argues that outgroup hostility outweighs the importance of white ingroup attitudes. Using a mix-methods content analysis of Trump’s campaign speeches, this paper agrees that outgroup hostility was the primary rhetorical device used by Trump in his speeches in both the primary and general elections. This work goes further and examines how Trump’s rhetoric framed and constructed the ingroup using outgroup rhetoric to connect the two. We argue that immigration and refugees, specifically, were used by Trump as part of the identity story he told about the ingroup and what it means to be an ingroup member. Our contribution rests on the correlation between hostile outgroup rhetoric—especially towards immigrants and refugees—to the framing and defining of the ingroup (through first-person plural pronouns). Further, we connect this rhetorical device to questions about what is at stake for the ingroup (i.e., power). We highlight a rhetorical mechanism that helps explain how hostile outgroup rhetoric is linked to ingroup framing, a contribution that adds to the literature on this topic.

The translation of Watchmen: a job for superheroes?

This case study explores the many challenges that an audiovisual translator must face, conceiving translation as a means for diffusing culture. For that purpose, a case study is carried out on the Spanish translation of the 2019 series Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof. Subtitles have been chossen for this analysis, due to the increasing popularity of this modality in Spain, as in other dubbing countries where a coexistence of dubbing and subtitling has been established (Perego et al., 2014).The study delves into the main translation difficulties posed by this series and is based on an interview held with the translator. In first place, Watchmen is a portray of the contemporary social and political society, digging into themes such as white supremacy, racism, war, and cultural attitudes. These deep historical roots in society may cause a cultural gap that must be overcome by the translator (Botella, 2017).Moreover, references to the comic are not only present in the dialogues —to be conveyed by the subtitler— but also in the visual and auditive signs that converge to create a multisemiotic complex. This study presents a categorisation of the challenges found and the solutions employed, to prove that the translator must be aware of the multiple codes of significance and acquire certain film knowledge. Therefore, to achieve difference and create from the ingenious mind, the translator must perform as a filmmaker or a cineliterate film viewer, rather than from a linguistic mind (McClarty, 2012).

Complicating the Role of White Racial Attitudes and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Some scholars argue that Donald Trump's electoral college victory in 2016 was predicated on his ability to attract racially hostile white voters. Others argue that the increased relationship between whites' racial attitudes and presidential vote choice in 2016 was because racial attitudes and partisanship had become even more aligned following the presidency of Barack Obama. Building on research that shows voters tend to update their policy positions to align with their preferred candidates, we propose a third mechanism that helps account for the strong relationship between whites' racial attitudes and vote choice in 2016. We hypothesize that over the course of the presidential campaign, many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton. To test this argument, we use a unique panel dataset from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign. We find that the strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump's, as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites' immigration opinions. These findings complicate our understanding of the 2016 election by offering direct evidence that Trump's campaign benefited from and catalyzed racial divisions. The results also hold implications for how we study election and campaign effects and the stability of race and immigration attitudes.

Whiteness Scholarship in the Counseling Profession: A 35-Year Content Analysis

We conducted a content analysis of counseling scholarship related to Whiteness for articles published in national peer-reviewed counseling journals within the 35-year time frame (1984–2019) following the publication of Janet Helms’s seminal work on White racial identity. We identified articles within eight counseling journals for a final sample of 63 articles—eight qualitative (12.7%), 38 quantitative (60.3%), and 17 theoretical (27.0%). Our findings outline publication characteristics and trends and present themes for key findings in this area of scholarship. They reveal patterns such as type of research methodology, sampling, correlations between White racial identity and other constructs, and limitations of White racial identity assessment. Based on this overview of extant research on Whiteness, our recommendations include future research that focuses on behavioral and clinical manifestations, anti-racism training within counselor education, and developing a better overall understanding of how White attitudes and behaviors function for self-protection.

Review: Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Review: <i>Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics</i>, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Hiding in plain sight: Dehumanization as a foundation of white racial prejudice

AbstractIn the media, during sporting events, in online forums, and in interpersonal interactions, whites often portray Black people as animals, especially as apes or monkeys. In this essay we consider what contemporary research on prejudice in American politics has to say about these dehumanizing portrayals of Black people. We argue that contemporary political science work has not done enough to understand both the historical roots and the continuing practices of whites' dehumanization of Black people, to the detriment of an accurate understanding of racial attitudes in the United States. To rectify this omission, we draw on the work of historians to map out a brief overview of race‐making and the dehumanizing attitudes that shaped this process. Then, we review political science literature on contemporary white attitudes toward Black people, emphasizing connections between prevailing conceptions of these attitudes and long‐standing processes of dehumanization. We conclude by charting directions for future scholarship; we seek to unsettle the mainstream of a subfield dominated by mild conceptions of racial attitudes.

Ethnonationalism and White immigration attitudes

AbstractIn this article, I explore how much of White Americans' opposition to immigration—opposition that is often grounded in fears of the threat that immigration poses to the robustness of America's national identity—is shaped by ethnonationalism, a set of beliefs concerning which traits are important for being a “true” American. Drawing on data from the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES), I examine how ethnonationalism shapes White Americans' attitudes towards immigrants. I find that ethnonationalism is positively associated with anti‐immigrant attitudes among Whites, with the effect size of my ethnonationalism measure being larger than that of any other variable in my ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. Critically, this includes a number of variables that are already known to be strongly predictive of White attitudes towards immigration, such as Republican partisanship. Beyond anti‐immigrant attitudes, I also find that ethnonationalism also predicts support for policies that would restriction immigration.

The discursive construction of blackness on WhatsApp status posts in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The paper unpacks the discursive construction of black Zimbabwean identities through multimodal WhatsApp status update posts by Zimbabweans on the WhatsApp social media platform. Cognisant that WhatsApp constitutes part of the public sphere where public discourses are generated and shaped, it explores and interrogates how status update content provoke and inspire identity discourses that perpetuate unequal racial relations that we argue are rooted in colonialism and its legacies. It deploys netnography to collect data through online participant observation over a one-year period. Theoretically, the data analysis deploys Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Coloniality to demonstrate that the analysed posts generate meaning through interactions across multiple modes and that racial stereotypes articulated in the data texts are rooted in notions of Western colonial hegemony. The paper argues that the WhatsApp status posts constitute semiotic modes that articulate and disseminate ideological value-positions that ridicule blackness and extol white racial supremacy. It is concluded that hidden in the status posts are white racial hegemony and negative attitudes against black racial identity, widely consumed and which, if left unchallenged, undercut what anti-colonial struggles sought to correct.

The Context of Immigrant Reception in the American South

Past research has shown the Southern United States to have more conservative immigration attitudes compared to more established immigrant destination states. However, it is unclear whether or not the places that immigrants have arrived share these conservative attitudes and how this impacts the reception of immigrant groups. Analyzing the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I find that U.S.-born White attitudes toward immigration are less conservative in zip codes where immigrant-origin groups in the South are most likely to live, often by substantial margins. This indicates that immigrant-origin groups in the South are likely to encounter Southern Whites with a more liberal orientation than Southern Whites more generally. The implications for how these attitudes compare to established immigrant destination states and counties are addressed in detail, as are Southern Black attitudes toward immigration. Regardless, on various questions approximating racial experience/understanding, immigrant-origin groups in the South do not report more negative feelings than those in established destinations and report more positive feelings in some cases, although these results could also indicate a lower awareness of racial issues. Overall, these findings point to a context of reception in the South that is likely more positive than past research on Southern immigration attitudes has implied.

Trends in Attitudes of Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics toward Intermarriage in the Twenty-First Century

No study has simultaneously compared attitudes of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics toward intermarriage over time. This study offers a comparative analysis of the changes in attitudes of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics toward intermarriage with different racial or ethnic groups in the twenty-first century, using nationally representative samples from General Social Surveys 2000–2018. Our trend analyses reveal that whites’ support for intermarriage with minorities has generally increased, albeit at a relatively lower level; blacks’ support for intermarriage with Asians, Hispanics, and whites has been quite stable at a relatively high level; Asians’ and Hispanics’ support for intermarriage with other minorities has generally shown an upswing trend with some minor fluctuations, but their support for intermarriage with whites has gone in the opposite direction with oscillations. The results of our generalized linear ordinal logistic regression models show that either including or excluding control variables, whites’ attitudes have become generally more supportive of intermarriage with minorities, blacks’ support for intermarriage has displayed an undulated pattern, and Asians’ and Hispanics’ support for intermarriage reveal diverse patterns depending on the group to intermarry with. The findings indicate a general trend of narrowing intergroup social distances as well as some increases in social distance between certain groups in the United States in the twenty-first century.

Religious Ideology, Race, and Health Care Policy Attitudes

AbstractUsing two national general population and one clergy survey, we examined racial differences in the association between religious theology and health care policy attitudes. We find that controlling for religious faith, political partisanship, and social-demographic characteristics, religious theology more strongly associates with White health care policy attitudes than it is for Blacks and Hispanics. Whereas theologically liberal Whites are more likely than their conservative counterparts to support universal healthcare and/or Obamacare, we observed no such relationship among Blacks and Hispanics. This is true of both the general population and clergy.

Race politics research and the American presidency: thinking about white attitudes, identities and vote choice in the Trump era and beyond

AbstractHeeding the call of the special issue, we look at the past decade's advances in public opinion studies of our understanding of the relationship between white racial identities, attitudes, and presidential voting preferences. Following a short review of developments in the literature during the Obama years, we critically evaluated four theories explaining whites' support for Trump: racial resentment, xenophobia, sexism, and white identity. Using data from three ANES studies, we test the relative explanatory power of all four approaches in predicting a vote for Trump during the 2016 Republican primary, the 2016 election, and intent to vote for him in 2020. The results suggest that xenophobia had the most consistent effect across all models, followed by racial resentment and sexism. White identity appears to have influenced voting for Trump in the primary and it could also have an impact in the 2020 election, but its effect in the 2016 general election does not appear to have been consistent with theoretical expectations. Finally, we use these results to think critically about the state of the field and propose new questions and challenges for research.

Interregional and intraregional variability of intergroup attitudes predict online hostility

To what extent are intergroup attitudes associated with regional differences in online aggression and hostility? We test whether regional attitude biases towards minorities and their local variability (i.e. intraregional polarization) independently predict verbal hostility on social media. We measure online hostility using large US American samples from Twitter and measure regional attitudes using nationwide survey data from Project Implicit. Average regional biases against Black people, White people, and gay people are associated with regional differences in social media hostility, and this effect is confounded with regional racial and ideological opposition. In addition, intraregional variability in interracial attitudes is also positively associated with online hostility. In other words, there is greater online hostility in regions where residents disagree in their interracial attitudes. This effect is present both for the full resident sample and when restricting the sample to White attitude holders. We find that this relationship is also, in part, confounded with regional proportions of ideological and racial groups (attitudes are more heterogeneous in regions with greater ideological and racial diversity). We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these relationships, as well as the dangers of escalating conflict and hostility when individuals with diverging intergroup attitudes interact. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley &amp; Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology