This year has seen disturbing flare-ups around issues of race, immigration, and white nativism generally.
Source: Chet Strange/Getty Images News
They ranged from clumsy White House tweets about Jewish “disloyalty” to angry controversies around two Muslim congresswomen, more episodes of police shootings of blacks, all the way to mass murders such as the slaughter of Latinos in an El Paso Walmart (and last year of synagogue-goers in Pittsburgh).
Correspondingly, Americans’ anxieties about race have spiked in recent years. In 2016, 38 percent of respondents told the Pew survey that they thought race relations have worsened; in 2019, 53 percent did.[1] Respondents to the Gallup Poll felt the same surge of concern. The following graph shows the percentage who said that they worried a “great deal” about race relations.[2]
Does the rising tide of worry mean that the nation is descending into a maelstrom of racial conflict? More likely, we are seeing the kind of fearful and angry reaction that major social change often brings.
The Long View: Attitudes
In the very long view, say, a century or so, white Americans’ attitudes toward minorities have improved markedly.[3] Even in the moderately long view, say, the last 30 or so years, racial views have continued to evolve toward inclusion. The graph below is illustrative of attitudes toward blacks. Over a few decades, white respondents to the General Social Survey became much less likely to say that they would object to living in neighborhoods that were half black or to say that blacks were lazier than whites.[4]
On immigration, bitter controversies over Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the southern border without permission have spilled over into divisions over the value of immigration generally (with the administration trying to curtail asylum-seekers and “chain migration” family reunions alike). Yet, more Americans are more welcoming toward immigrants.
The graph below shows the percentage of Pew respondents who, when asked to choose between two statements about immigrants, chose “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents” over “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health [care].”[5] Similarly, Gallup respondents have since the 1990s become much more likely to say that they favor increasing immigration. As well, survey respondents in the 21st century have been less resistant to accepting refugees than were Americans in the 20th century.[6]
Here’s another take: The National Election Survey has for at least 45 years asked Americans to rate how they feel toward various groups on a “thermometer” from zero, cold, unfavorable, to 100, very warm, favorable. The next graph shows how non-Hispanic white Americans rated whites, blacks, and “illegals” (“illegal aliens” before 2000; “illegal immigrants” after 2000).
Since 1964, non-Hispanic whites have become less favorable to whites as a group and more favorable to blacks. Since 1988, they have also become more favorable to “illegals.”
Many scholars of race and ethnicity object to these sorts of survey questions because they are subject to “desirability bias”: People have learned what kinds of answers they are supposed to give. True. On the other hand, dissembling respondents show by their dissembling their sense of which way the wind is blowing.
One alternative approach to using questions that are obviously assessing prejudice is to ask respondents what sorts of policies they might support to repair racial inequality, polices such as affirmative action and compensatory programs. Endorsements of such items have trended downward. However, that downward trend is stronger among black respondents than among white ones, making it hard to treat policy rejections as expressions of racism.[7]
Yet another alternative is to pose questions thought to capture the “racial resentment” whites feel about the demands of black activists: How much do respondents agree or disagree that blacks should get no “special favors”; that “conditions” have made it difficult for blacks to succeed; that blacks need to “only try harder”; and that blacks have gotten “less than they deserve” in the last few years? The trends in answers to these four items are messier, as shown in the next graph.[8] While answers to the classic questions about race have changed greatly, the trends in these items provide no clear message. The takeaway for this blog post topic, however, is that we do not see a rise in “racial resentment” that might match the rise in nativist incidents. Indeed, some survey data show continuing declines in polled racism during the Trump administration.[8a]
The Long View: More than Words
There is much skepticism–some warranted, some not–about surveys. Let’s turn to other indicators of white Americans’ attitudes.
One set is the degree to which minorities are represented positively in popular culture. The recent surge of black Americans to high visibility and applause is striking. Examples: In the 1970s, nonwhites made up only 4 per cent of the nominees for cinema’s Oscar awards and none of the winners of the major awards for film performance; between 2000 and 2015 nonwhites comprised about 15 per cent of both. The story for television’s Emmy award winners is similar. Quarterbacks, the premier and supposedly most “intellectual” players in professional football, have become increasingly likely to be black. Between 2004 and 2019 the proportion of under-represented minorities (bracketing Asians) on the Harvard faculty increased proportionally by one-third.[9] Increasingly, minorities, notably blacks, have become American role models.
(Some might scoff at paying attention to celebrities, but the activists who fought to increase diversity in the mass media, sports, and the academy thought the fight well worth it.)
In another approach, sociologists have long tracked racism in terms of “social distance,” how close majority-group members allow minorities–blacks, Jews, Latinos, whomever–to get to them.
Being neighbors is somewhat close. Ethnic and racial segregation, especially black-white segregation, has been so great and so pervasive that it has largely shaped housing in the United States. Yet black-white residential segregation has slowly declined since it peaked in the 1960s and 1970s.[10] (Segregation trends for Asians and Latinos are more complex, because the growing immigration from 1970s into the 2000s pushed immigrant segregation higher, even as later-generation Asian- and Latino-Americans clearly integrated.) Racial desegregation has been slowed by at least two intertwined developments: increasing segregation by income, especially between suburban communities, and increasing school-district segregation, especially between city and suburb.[11] Still, the residential distance between blacks and whites has been steadily dropping.
The shortest social distance between groups is intermarriage. And that distance has been shrinking. Since about 1960, the rates of racial intermarriage, including black-white intermarriage, have zoomed up.[12] Between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of young black men and women married to whites more than tripled and the percentage cohabiting with whites roughly doubled. [13] (Attitudes about intermarriage, by the way, changed even more. In 1990, 65 percent of white GSS respondents said that they would oppose a “close relative” marrying “a black person”; that percentage dropped steadily to 13 percent in 2018.[14]) Intermarriage of immigrants with native-born Americans is also on the rise.[15]
One must temper appreciation of these trends toward less racism in attitudes, culture, and behavior with (at least) two important qualifiers. One caution is that discrimination against ethnic and racial minorities continues, as is repeatedly documented in every domain from hiring to policing. The other caution is that reductions in discriminatory attitudes and practices are not necessarily followed by equivalent reductions in racial inequality. The past is ever-present. The history of slavery, peonage, a racial caste system, systematic discrimination and segregation over generations produced deep economic and social inequalities that will take generations to redress.
Still, for trying to understand the past year’s trauma, documenting the decline (or at minimum, the stasis) of racism among white Americans contradicts any simple explanation of the racial flare-ups. They did not happen because racism is on the rise. How then could one better account for events that have caused Americans to worry more about race relations in the last few years?
The Last-Gasp Theory
The argument is that these sorts of changes–increasing integration and popular acceptance of minorities–alongside other culture-shaking developments, such as gay marriage, outspoken feminism, and laxer sexual norms, have spurred a fervent reaction among the strongest adherents to earlier standards. Both developments can happen at the same time, that the general population moves on and that the most “traditional” are mobilized by the threats they feel, including the threats of “invasion” and “replacement.” As some have suggested, the election and then the (closer) reelection of Barack Obama may well have pushed some people’s simmering resentment into open rage.[16]
Trump mobilized the most threatened. Here, I do not refer to the great majority of those Americans who voted for him over Clinton in fall, 2016; they were just loyal Republicans. I refer to the Trump core who propelled him to the Republican nomination. Studies show that core to be distinctive in various ways, in their commitment to Christian nationalism, in their defining what it means to be an American in terms of European origin, native birth, and Christian faith, and in their being mobilized by Trump’s 2015 speech calling undocumented immigrants rapists.[17]
Of course, few even in the Trump core would endorse race-baiting and racial violence. But it takes only a few hundred, sometimes only a few loners, to wreak havoc (especially given easy gun availability). The election of Trump emboldened those few and his subsequent language, winks, and nods seemed to be read as tacit permission to act out their fears and anger.
Given the strong trends toward lowering racial barriers evidenced in most of the indicators I discussed–from “thermometer” ratings to intermarriage rates–it looks like the future belongs, as those who feel threatened fear, to the “race-mixers” and the other cultural innovators. Another caution is in order, though: History need not, typically does not, move in a straight line. There is no guarantee that the trends documented at the top of this post will continue. While they do, however, fierce reaction should not be a surprise.
Source: DC Comics
NOTES~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Pew Research Center via iPoll database. Question text: “Do you think race relations in the United States are getting better, getting worse or staying about the same?”
[2] Gallup via iPoll. Question text: “(Next, I’m going to read a list of problems facing the country. For each one, please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all?) How much do you personally worry about…race relations?”
[3] Fischer & Hout, Century of Difference, Ch. XXXXX.
[4] For more, see Moberg et al., “Racial Attitudes in America,” Public Opinion Quarterly, advanced pub., 2019.
[5] Pew Research Center pdf.
[6] Sana, “Americans’ support for immigration is at record highs,” The Conversation, 2019.
7] Moberg et al., “Racial Attitudes in America,” op. cit. These questions seem to also tap feelings of trust in government policies and of confidence in social reform programs.
[8] From the American National Election Survey, items VCF9039 to VCF9042. (For discussions and uses of these items, see, for example, Enders & Scott, “Racialization…”) “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” (reverse-coded); “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class”; “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve”; and “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors” (reverse-coded).
[8a] Hopkins and Washington, “The Rise of Trump,” SSRN, 2019.
[9] Oscars: here. Emmys: Calculated from the male and female best actors in comedy and drama listed in Wikipedia, here. Football: Freedman, “The Year of the Black Quarterback,” The New Yorker. Also here. Harvard faculty: pdf. The increase was from 9 to 12 percent. (What would be parity? Under-represented people are about 30 percent of the total American population. Faculty would, of course, have to be adults with Ph.D.s. In 2015, about 9 percent of Ph.D.s were awarded to under-represented groups.)
[10] Logan & Stults, “The Persistence of Segregation…,” Brown University: pdf.\; Light & Thomas, “Segregation….,” Am. Sociol. Rev., 2019, table 1.
[11] Fischer et al., “Distinguishing the Geographic Levels…,” Demography, 2004; Reardon & Bischoff, “Growth in the Residential Segregation…,” Russell Sage: pdf.
[12] Fryer, “Guess Who’s Been Coming to Dinner?,” Jour. Economic Perspectives, 2007 (figure 1).
[13] Torche & Rich, “Declining Racial Stratification.…,” Soc. of Race and Ethnicity, 2016, Figure 2. . For more, see also Pew, “Intermarriage,” 2017: pdf.
[14] Analysis of GSS item “MARBLK.”
[15] Lichter et al., “Whom Do Immigrants Marry?,” Annals, 2015.
[16] For one discussion of the “Obama Effect,” see Parker, “Race and Politics…” Annual Rev. of Sociol., 2016.
[17] Whitehead et al, “Make America Christian Again….,” Sociol. of Relig., 2018; Sides, “What Makes Someone a Real American,” Monkey Cage, 2017; and Newman et al., “Race, Place, and Building a Base…,” Pub. Opinion Quart., 2018.
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