Racial prejudice and attitudes toward affirmative action

Theory: We examine the relationship between blatant racial prejudice and anger toward affirmative action. Hypotheses: (1) Blatantly prejudiced attitudes continue to pervade the white population in the United States. (2) Resistance to affirmative action is more than an extension of this prejudice. (3) White resistance to affirmative action is not unyielding and unalterably fixed. Methods: Analysis of experiments embedded in a national survey of racial attitudes. Some of these experiments are designed to measure racial prejudice unobtrusively. Results: Racial prejudice remains a major problem in the United States, but this prejudice alone cannot explain all of the anger toward affirmative action among whites. Although many whites strongly resist affirmative action, they express support for making extra efforts to help African-Americans.

[1]  Ronald de Sousa,et al.  The Structure of Emotions , 1987 .

[2]  D. O. Sears,et al.  Prejudice and Politics: Symbolic Racism Versus Racial Threats to the Good Life , 1981 .

[3]  H. Tajfel Experiments in intergroup discrimination. , 1970 .

[4]  J. Dovidio,et al.  The aversive form of racism. , 1986 .

[5]  Sandra L. Wood,et al.  With Malice Toward Some: Refining the Model – The Role of Antecedent Considerations as Individual Differences , 1995 .

[6]  J. Krosnick The role of attitude importance in social evaluation: a study of policy preferences, presidential candidate evaluations, and voting behavior. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  D. Kinder The Continuing American Dilemma: White Resistance to Racial Change 40 Years After Myrdal , 1986 .

[8]  M. Jackman General and Applied Tolerance: Does Education Increase Commitment to Racial Integration? , 1978 .

[9]  P. Devine Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. , 1989 .

[10]  Eliot R. Smith,et al.  Affirmative Action Attitudes: Effects of Self-Interest, Racial Affect, and Stratification Beliefs on Whites' Views , 1983 .

[11]  G. Āllport The Nature of Prejudice , 1954 .

[12]  Diane M. Mackie,et al.  Affect, cognition, and stereotyping: Interactive processes in group perception. , 1993 .

[13]  D. Hamilton,et al.  Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. , 1976 .

[14]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis , 1986 .

[15]  T. Edsall,et al.  Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics , 1991 .

[16]  P. Sniderman,et al.  The scar of race , 1993 .

[17]  J. Krosnick Attitude importance and attitude change , 1988 .

[18]  I. Glasser Affirmative Action and the Legacy of Racial Injustice , 1988 .

[19]  James H. Kuklinski,et al.  Racial Attitudes and the "New South" , 1997, The Journal of Politics.

[20]  M. Jackman,et al.  Education and intergroup attitudes: Moral enlightenment, superficial democratic commitment, or ideological refinement? , 1984 .

[21]  D. Hamilton A Cognitive -Attributional Analysis of Stereotyping1 , 1979 .