RACIAL
ATTITUDES
IN THE
1990S
Continuity
and Change
Edited by
Steven A.
Tuch
Jack K.
Martin
Laissez‑Faire
Racism:
The
Crystallization of a Kinder,
Gentler,
Antiblack Ideology
Ryan A.
Smith
Studies of racial attitudes
in the
These contradictory patterns open the door to sharply opposed
interpretations of the real state of racial attitudes and black‑white
relations. Some scholars argue that antiblack racism, although not completely
dead, plays only a delimited and, more important, diminishing role in politics
(Sniderman & Piazza 1993; Roth 1990) and other spheres of social life
(D'Souza 1995). With equal plausibility, some scholars argue that antiblack
racism lives on, powerfully influencing politics (Sears 1988; Kinder &
Sanders 1996), a wide array of other social outcomes (Massey & Denton
1993), and day‑to‑day encounters between blacks and whites (Feagin
& Sikes 1994).
We aim to bring greater theoretical coherence to the hotly
debated question of whether the racial attitudes of white Americans reflect
less racism now than was evident 40 ‑ or even 20 ‑ years ago. We
argue that in post‑World War II
Laissez‑faire racism involves persistent negative
stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks themselves for
the black/white gap in socioeconomic standing, and resistance to meaningful
policy efforts to ameliorate
Our purpose in this chapter is threefold. First, we seek to
clarify the concept of laissez‑faire racism and to distinguish it from
related notions, such as "symbolic racism." Second, we assess the
record of change in whites' racial attitudes in the light of our concept of
laissez‑faire racism. Third, we develop the historical and theoretical
basis for understanding laissez‑faire racism as the core thrust of the
modem
Is Racism an
Appropriate Label?
The social science literature
has put forward many different definitions of racism (Chesler 1976; See &
Wilson 1988). For our purposes, Wilson offers a particularly cogent
specification when he argues that racism is "an ideology of racial
domination or exploitation that (1) incorporates beliefs in a particular race's
cultural and/or inherent biological inferiority and (2) uses such beliefs to
justify and prescribe inferior or unequal treatment for that group"
(Wilson 1973, p. 32). Jim Crow racism readily fits within this definition of a
racist ideological system.. The express aim of the
ideology was the domination and exploitation of African Americans; it mandated
inferior treatment across virtually all domains of social life; and all of this
was justified on the premise that blacks were the inherent biological inferiors
of whites (Fredrickson 1971). Thus, the ideology was manifest in institutional
arrangements, such as separate schools and voting restrictions, a variety of
collective behaviors, such as lynchings, and readily expressed individual
beliefs.
It is less apparent that the modern period is as fittingly
termed "racist." Race relations and the status of African Americans
have changed markedly in the post‑World War II period (Jaynes &
Williams 1989). Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that the
The basis for retaining the term "racism" is
twofold. First, African Americans remain in a unique and fundamentally
disadvantaged structural position in the
The unique structural disadvantage of African Americans is
manifested in several ways. Despite important relative gains on whites recorded
during the 1940s and the 1960s, the black‑white gap in socioeconomic
status remains enormous. Black adults remain two‑and a half times as
likely as whites to suffer from unemployment. This gap exists at virtually each
level of the education distribution (Jaynes 1990). If one casts a broader net
to ask about "underemployment" ‑ that is, falling out of the
labor force entirely, being unable to find full‑time work, or working
full time at below poverty‑level wage rates ‑ then the black‑white
ratio in major urban areas has risen from the customary 2‑to‑1
disparity to very nearly 5‑to‑1 over the past two decades (Eichler
1988). Conservative estimates show that young, well‑educated blacks who are
matched in work experience and other characteristics with whites still earn 11
percent less annually (Farley 1984). Studies continue to document direct labor
market discrimination at both low‑skill, entry‑level positions
(Kirscheman & Neckerman 1991; Turner, Fix, & Struyk 1991; Waldinger
& Bailey 1991) and more highly skilled positions (Feagin & Sikes 1994).
A growing chorus of studies indicate that even highly skilled and accomplished
black managers encounter glass ceilings in corporate America (Fernandez 1986;
Jones 1986), prompting some analysts to suggest that blacks will never be fully
admitted to the U.S. power elite (Zweigenhaft & Domhoff 1991), In contrast
to an earlier era, however, black disadvantage in the modem labor market is
more likely to flow from informal recruitment and promotion mechanisms than
from a blanket racial exclusion or segmentation.
Judged against differences in wealth, however, black‑white
gaps in employment status and earnings seem absolutely paltry (Jaynes &
Williams 1989; Oliver & Shapiro 1995). The average differences in wealth
show black households lagging behind whites by a factor of nearly 12 times. For
every one dollar of wealth in white households, black households have less than
ten cents. In 1984 the median level of wealth held by black households was
around $3,000; for white households, the figure was $39,000. Indeed, white
households with incomes of between $7,500 and $15,000 have "higher mean
net worth and net financial assets than black households making $45,000 to
$60,000" (Start 1992, p. 12). That is, whites near the bottom of the white
income distribution have more wealth than blacks near the top of the black
income distribution. Wealth is in many ways a better indicator of likely
quality of life than earnings ,(Oliver & Shapiro
1995).
Blacks occupy a uniquely disadvantaged position in
physical space, as well. Demographers Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1989)
concluded that it makes sense to describe the black condition as
hypersegregation ‑ a condition wherein a group simultaneously scores as
extremely racially isolated from whites on four of five standard measures of
residential segregation. As contrasted to the conditions of Asian Americans and
Latinos, African Americans are the only group, based on 1980 census data for
large metropolitan areas, to rank as hypersegregated from whites (Massey &
Denton 1993). Although there was some modest decline in the level of racial
residential segregation between 1980 and 1990 (Farley & Frey 1994), blacks
remain hypersegregated (
credit history (
the black middle class, face formidable
obstacles in the search for high quality housing. Such segregation is
consequential. Neighborhoods may vary greatly in services, school quality,
safety, and levels of exposure to a variety of unwanted social conditions
(Massey, Gross, & Eggers 1991). Indeed, a particularly troubling trend is
the increasing overlap among suburban versus urban location, race, and distinct
political jurisdictions. In the extreme case, a largely black inner city (for
example,
The problems of differential unemployment, wage differentials,
disparities in wealth, and racial residential segregation place African
Americans in a uniquely disadvantaged position in
Similarly, the uniquely disadvantaged position of African
Americans means that government policy retrenchments may also have dispropor
adverse effects. For example, it appears that the shift in federal support for
higher education from outright grants and scholarships to loans hit African
Americans particularly hard. There was a sharp decline both absolutely and
relative to whites, in the chances that a black high school graduate would go
on to college beginning in about 1979 and continuing through the mid‑1980s
(Jaynes & Williams 1989; 1 Hauser 1993a). This occurred for both black men
and black women and occurred largely across the class spectrum in the black
community. The trend runs against other evidence of rising black achievement
scores relative to whites and persistently high aspirations (Hauser &
Anderson 1991; Hauser 1993b).
Our second reason for retaining the term racism is that these racial
inequalities exist in a social climate of widespread acceptance of notions of
black cultural inferiority. In the wake of the civil disorders of the 1960s, H.
Schuman (1971) called attention to the pronounced tendency of white Americans
to view the race problem as flowing from the freely chosen cultural behaviors
of blacks themselves. The tendency to deny the modem potency of discrimination
and to see a lack of striving and effort on the part of blacks as the key issue
in black‑white inequality has been confirmed in a number of subsequent
investigations based on regional data sources (Apostle, Block, Piazza, &
Suelzle 1983; Sniderman & Hagen 1985) and national data sources (Kluegel
1990; Kluegel & Bobo 1993; much & Hughes 1996). (With the publication of
works, such as R. J. Hermstein and C. Currants The Bell Curve (1994) and D'Souza's The End of Racism (1995), one could argue that an incipient
biological racism, no longer plainly on the margins, is reasserting itself.) We
review more fully below and in a later chapter the evidence on the prevalence
of belief in black cultural inferiority. The critical point is that sharp and,
in some instances, worsening racial inequalities exist. Rather than
constituting a problem widely recognized as justifying ameliorative social
intervention, however, these conditions are comfortably accepted, if not in
fact actively justified and explained, by many white Americans as a reflection
of the choices blacks themselves have made.
We try to use the term racism in a delimited sense. We argue
neither that racial discrimination is the only factor constraining black
opportunity in the modern period nor that race is as central a factor in the
life chances for any given black individual as it was in the pre‑civil
rights era (
Does Laissez‑Faire Racism Differ from Symbolic Racism?
We are not the first or only analysts to attempt to
conceptualize the changing character of whites' attitudes toward blacks. One
important line of research is that concerning symbolic racism. Although defined
and I
ultimately measured in a variety of ways, the concept of symbolic racism
proposes that a new form of antiblack prejudice has arisen in the
Our concept of laissez‑faire racism differs in two
critical respects from lie theory of symbolic racism as proposed by David Sears
and colleagues (Kinder & Sears 1981). First, the theory of laissez‑faire
racism is explicitly based in a historical analysis of the changing economics
and politics of race in the
We argue that Jim Crow racist ideology reflected the economic
and political needs, as well as the prevailing cultural ideas, of a specific
historical period and set of actors. The setting was the post‑Civil War
South. Tile critical actors were the old Southern. planter
elite. The cultural trend was the rise and scientific legitimacy accorded
notions of biological racism. As the economic and political power of these
historic conditions a and actors waned, as cultural trends turned against
biological racism, and as the power resources of the black community rose, Jim
Crow social structures and, ultimately, Jim Crow ideology were defeated. Rising
from tile collapse of Jim Crow racism, we argue, is laissez‑faire racism.
The latter set of ideas legitimates persistent black oppression in the
Second, our theory of laissez‑faire racism is expressly
rooted in a sociological theory of prejudice. Below we elaborate on H. Blumer's
classic statement on prejudice as a sense of group position (Blumer 1958),
which places a subjective, interactively and socially created, and historically
emergent set of ideas about appropriate status relations between groups at the
center of any analysis of racial attitudes. The framework is one that takes
seriously the imperatives that derive from both the institutionalized
structural conditions of social life as well as from the processes of human
interaction, subjectivity, and interpretation that lend meaning to social
conditions and thereby guide behavior. Symbolic racism, in contrast, was
explicitly premised on a sociocultural theory of prejudice (Kinder & Sears
1981). Such theories place central importance on social learning and the
psychological‑affective nature of racial attitudes (Allport 1954; Katz
1991; Sears 1988).
Under the group position theory, the crucial factors are:
first, a sense among members of the dominant racial group of proprietary claim
or entitlement to greater resources and status and, second, a perception of
threat posed by subordinate racial group members to those entitlements.
Together, the feelings of entitlement and threat become dynamic social forces
as members of the dominant racial group strive to maintain a privileged status
relative to members of a subordinate racial group. From this vantage point, as
the economic and political foundations of the Jim Crow social order weakened,
white privilege had to be justified and defended on new and different grounds.
Jim Crow racist ideology lost its structural supports and, therefore,
eventually lost its persuasive appeal to the mass of white Americans. Whites
still enjoyed a substantially greater share of economic, political, and
prestige resources than African Americans, however, despite important changes
in the magnitude and permeability of the color line. Furthermore, many whites
perceived black demands as threatening incursions on their interests and
prerogatives. Hence, in our argument, laissez‑faire racist attitudes
emerged to defend white privilege and explain persistent black disadvantage
under sharply changed economic and political conditions. It is the sense of
entitlement and threat, as delineated in Blumer's group position theory of
prejudice, that we believe gives us the greatest theoretical leverage in
accounting for changes in whites' racial attitudes in the United States. The
full import of this position we develop below.
PATTERNS OF
CHANGE IN RACIAL ATTITUDES
The longest trend data from national sample surveys may be
found for racial attitude questions that deal with matters of racial
principles, the implementation of those principles, and social distance
preferences. Questions about principle ask whether
The Decline
of Jim Crow Racism
The gradual retreat of Jim Crow racism is seen most clearly in
the trends for questions on racial principles. These types of questions provide
the largest and most consistent pool of evidence on how the attitudes of white
Americans toward blacks have changed. With crucial baseline surveys having been
conducted in 1942, trends for most racial principle questions show a steady
increase among whites in support for principles of racial integration and
equality. Whereas a solid majority, 68 percent, of white Americans in 1942
favored segregated schools, only 7 percent took such a position in 1985.
Similarly, 55 percent of whites surveyed in 1944 thought whites should receive
preference over blacks in access to jobs, compared with only 3 percent who
offered such an opinion as long ago as 1972. Indeed, so few people were willing
to endorse the discriminatory response to this question on the principle of
race‑based job discrimination that it was dropped from national surveys
after 1972. On both of these issues, then, majority endorsement of the
principles of segregation and discrimination have given way to overwhelming
majority support for integration and equal treatment (unless otherwise noted,
all percentages are taken from Schuman, Slash, & Bobo 1985).
This
pattern of movement away from support for Jim Crow toward apparent support for
racial egalitarianism holds with equal force for questions dealing with issues
of residential integration, access to public transportation and public
accommodations, choice among qualified candidates for political office, and
even racial intermarriage. To be sure, the high absolute levels of support seen
for the principles of school integration and equal access to jobs (both better
than 90 percent) are not seen for all principle‑level racial attitude
questions. Despite improvement from an extraordinarily low level of support in
the 1950s and 1960s, survey data continue to show substantial levels of white
discomfort with the prospect of interracial dating and marriage.
Opinions among whites have never been uniform or monolithic.
Both historical research (Fredrickson 1971; Jordan 1968) and sociological
research (Turner & Singleton 1978) have pointed to lines of cleavage and
debate in whites' thinking about the place of African Americans. The survey‑based
literature has shown that views on issues of racial principle vary greatly by
region of the country, level of education, age or generation, and other
ideological factors. As might be expected, opinions in the South more
lopsidedly favored segregation and discrimination at the time baseline surveys
were conducted than was true outside the South. Patterns of change,
save for a period of unusually rapid change in the South, have usually been
parallel. The highly educated are also typically found to express greater
support for principles of racial equality and integration. Indeed, one can
envision a multitiered reaction to issues of racial justice. At the more
progressive and liberal end, one finds college‑educated whites who live
outside the South. At the bottom, one finds Southern whites with the least
amount of schooling (Schuman, Slash, & Bobo 1985).
Age plays a part, as well. Younger people are usually found to
express more racial tolerance than older people. Differences in average levels of
education across generations as well as socialization in more tolerant times
help account for this pattern (Smith 1981).
The transformation of attitudes regarding the principles that
should guide black‑white interaction in the more public and impersonal
spheres of social life has been large and sweeping. Those living outside the
South, the well educated, and younger people led the
way on these changes; however, change has usually taken place within all of
these categories. H. Schuman, C. Slash, and L. Bobo characterized this change
as a fundamental transformation of social norms with regard to race. Robert
Bloomer's (1989) in‑depth interviews with blacks and whites over nearly
three decades led him to reach a very similar conclusion. He wrote: "The
belief in a right to dignity and fair treatment is now so widespread and deeply
rooted, so self‑evident that people of all colors would vigorously resist
any effort to reinstate formalized discrimination. This
consensus may be the most profound legacy of black militancy, one that has
brought a truly radical transformation in relations between the races"
(Bloomer 1989, p. 317).
In short, a tremendous progressive trend has characterized
whites' racial attitudes where the broad principles of integration, equality,
and discrimination are concerned. Those who believe that the
Opposition
to Progressive Social Policy
If trends in support for racial principles are the optimistic
side of the story, then the patterns for implementation questions tell the
first part of a more pessimistic story. It should be noted that efforts to
assess how Americans feel about government efforts to bring about greater
integration and equality or to prevent discrimination really do not arise as
sustained matters of inquiry in surveys until the 1960s. To an important
degree, issues of the role of government in bringing about progressive racial
change could not emerge until sufficient change had taken place at the level of
the basic principles involved.
There are sharp differences in level of support between racial
principles and policy implementation. This is not surprising insofar as
principles, viewed in isolation, need not conflict with other principles,
interests, or needs that will often arise in more concrete situations. The gaps
between principle and implementation, however, are large and consistent in the
domain of race relations. For example, in 1964 surveys showed that 64 percent
of whites nationwide supported the principle of integrated schooling; however,
only 38 percent felt that the federal government had a role to play in bringing
about greater integration. The gap had actually grown larger by 1986. At that
time, 93 percent supported the principle, but only 26 percent endorsed
government efforts to bring about school integration.
Similar patterns emerged in the areas of jobs and housing.
Support for the principle of equal access to jobs stood at 97 percent in 1972.
Support for federal efforts to prevent job discrimination, however, had only
reached 39 percent. Likewise, in 1976, for housing, 88 percent supported the
principle that blacks have the right to live wherever they can afford; however,
only 35 percent of whites said they would vote in favor of a law requiring
homeowners to sell without regard to race.
There are not only sharp differences in absolute levels of
support when moving from principle to implementation, but also differences in
trends. Most strikingly, there is a clear divergence of trends in the domain of
school integration. From 1972 to 1986, when support for the principle of integrated
schooling rose from 84 percent to 93 percent, support for government efforts to
bring about integration fell from 35 percent to 26 percent. It should be noted
that this decline is restricted almost entirely to individuals living outside
the South. Indeed, this trend reverses the multitiered tolerance effect we
described earlier. By 1978, the difference in support for federal efforts to
help bring about school integration between college‑educated whites
outside the South and Southern whites who had not completed high school was
virtually zero.
Several complexities are worthy of note. A couple of
implementation issues do show positive trends. The most clear‑cut case
involves whether the government has a role to play in assuring blacks fair
access to hotels and public accommodations. This may be the only instance in
which parallel questions on principle and implementation undergo roughly
parallel positive change. A somewhat similar pattern occurs in the case of
residential integration and support for an open housing law; however, even as
recently as 1988, barely 50 percent of white Americans endorsed a law that
would forbid racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
Antiblack animus is not the only source of opposition to
government involvement in bringing about progressive racial change. H. Schuman
and L. Bobo (1988) have shown that whites are equally likely to oppose open
housing laws whether the group in question is blacks, Japanese Americans, or
other groups. There appears to be a real element of objection to government
coercion that influences attitudes in this domain. At the same time, Schuman
and Bobo (1988) also found that whites express a desire for greater social
distance from blacks than they do from other groups, a pattern confirmed in
other recent examinations of attitudes on racial residential integration (Bobo
& Zubrinsky 1996; Zubrinsky & Bobo in press).
Level of education, region, and age typically have much less to do with who supports or opposes
implementation of racial change than is true of racial principles. Weak to
nonexistent effects of education and age in particular suggest that we are
unlikely to see much positive change in the future on these issues. Comparatively few trend questions speak
directly to affirmative action policies. Many different questions have been
asked, beginning in the mid to late 1970s. These results point to the
complexity of affirmative action policies themselves and of public response to
them. Support for affirmative action varies dramatically depending on exactly
which type of policy is proposed (Kluegel & Smith 1986; Lipset &
Schneider 1978). Policies that aim mainly to increase the human capital
attributes of blacks are comparatively popular (Bobo & Kluegel 1993).
Policies that lean toward achieving equal outcomes, preferences for minorities
that ignore merit considerations, as powerfully symbolized by the term
"quotas," elicit high levels of opposition among whites (Bobo &
Smith 1994).
CONVENTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF THE TRENDS
Several attempts to explain change in racial attitudes can be
found in the research literature. For our purposes, these attempts can largely
be grouped into one of three categories: demographic lag theories, the
Myrdalian guilt hypothesis, and the cultural turn against biological racism
argument.
Demographic
Lag
Seen in descriptive rather than explanatory terms, the
progressive trend in racial attitudes can be traced to one of two sources.
First, part of the rise in racial liberalism on matters of principle can be
credited to cohort replacement effects. As older, less tolerant individuals
fall out of the population and are replaced by younger, more tolerant
individuals, a progressive trend would result. Second, part of the progressive
trend can be traced to individual change. Persons who once advocated
segregation and discrimination might undergo soul‑searching and a change
of heart, coming instead to see the case for integration and equality.
Research suggests that the process of change itself may be
changing. During the 1950s and 1960s, there is evidence of both a large measure
of individual change and cohort replacement contributing to change. During the
1970s, the relative balance of the two began to change to a more even mixture
of the two. In addition, the distance between younger and older cohorts began
to narrow, strongly suggesting that the engines of change are cooling off. Analyses by G. Firebaugh and K. E. Davis (1988) show that the
mixture of cohort replacement effects and individual change is increasingly
issue specific and region specific. For example, on the issue of racial
intermarriage there has been no evidence of individual change between 1974 and
1984. Furthermore, most of the change seen in the South after 1974 is
attributable to cohort replacement effects. Whatever the mix of forces that
propelled the progressive movement in whites' attitudes on racial principle
issues, it appears to be slowing, particularly in the South.
Despite these patterns there is no evidence of a broad
backlash in racial attitudes. Many have expressed special concern that young
adults, those who underwent critical socializing experiences during the Reagan‑Bush
years, are the source of a racial backlash. Work by C. Steeh and H. Schuman (1992)
indicates no distinctive backward movement among younger white adults, who
continue to be a bit more liberal than their immediate predecessors. What
evidence there is of backward movement is quite issue specific. During the
1980s, most whites, regardless of age, became less supportive of policies
seeming to call for racial preferences for minorities.
There is also little sign that whites' understanding of the
causes of black‑white economic inequality will change in favorable ways.
How whites perceive and explain the black‑white socioeconomic gap is an
important input to whether they will support or oppose policies designed to
improve the position of blacks (Kluegel & Smith 1982,1986).
The more individualistic the attributions made for black‑white inequality
(for example, blacks do not try hard enough), the less open to supporting
government intervention on behalf of blacks an individual is likely to be. The
more structural the attributions made for black‑white economic inequality
(for example, blacks face racial discrimination), the more open to supporting
intervention an individual may be. As Kluegel's cohort analyses (1990) have
shown, however, there has been little or no change in the denial of
discrimination or in the prevailing tendency to attach individual blame for the
black‑white socioeconomic status gap.
These cohort studies are valuable, but they are also limited.
All of these analyses of cohort replacement or individual change as sources of
the sweeping increase in support for racial equality and inequality are not
explanatory. The analyses provide a statistical decomposition of trends, not
substantive accounts of the roots of the change.
Myrdal's
Hypothesis
One possible explanation of the change is Myrdal's (1944)
guilt hypothesis. He proposed that the discomfort and internal tension created
by the ever‑raging conflict in the hearts of white Americans would
increasingly be resolved in favor of racial equality. Any number of direct
efforts to test Myrdal's hypothesis have failed. Even in the 1940s and 1950s,
few whites felt that blacks were unfairly treated (Hyman & Sheatsley 1956;
Williams 1964). Those who acknowledged differences in treatment were quick to
offer justifications for it (Westie 1963). Even more recent and novel tests of
Myrdal's idea produced no support for it (Cummings & Pinnel 1978). The
empirical research literature provides no support for the Myrdalian hypothesis
at the individual level.
To reject Myrdal's guilt hypothesis does not mean embracing
the position that in the main, whites' racial attitudes reflect
undifferentiated hostility toward blacks. First, at a societal level, the
American creed was clearly an important cultural and ideological resource used
by civil rights activists in the struggle for social change. In this more
societal but causally delimited sense, Myrdal's
analysis seems more telling. Second, an argument closely related to Myrdal's
formulation can be called the ambivalence hypothesis. There is evidence of
internal complexity and ambivalence in the views on race held by many white
Americans. Indeed, Katz and Hass (1988) proposed that whites'
racial attitudes are profoundly ambivalent, mixing both aversive and
sympathetic tendencies. The inclination that predominates in thinking is a
function of immediately salient contextual factors. Using college student
subjects in experimental settings, Katz and colleagues have shown that
contextual cues that make individualism, hard work, and self‑reliance
salient will also incline whites to focus on blacks' shortcomings in these
areas. Contextual cues that reinforce egalitarianism and humanism, in contrast,
tend to elicit a more sympathetic response to blacks.
The ambivalence theory, however, fails
to specify whether there is a predominant tenor to whites' racial attitudes,
nor does it well specify how these ambivalent feelings are likely to play out
in concrete social settings. Perhaps most important, the theory seems unable to
explain the persistent and substantial opposition to a range of social policies
aimed at substantially improving the material conditions of African Americans.
The Decline
of Biological Racism
A second substantive explanation of the broad progressive
trend is the possibility that key beliefs in the case for racial segregation and
discrimination suffered a direct cultural assault and quickly eroded. Surveys
showed that popular acceptance of the belief that blacks were less intelligent
than whites went into rapid decline in the post‑World War II period. In
1942, 53 percent of white Americans nationwide expressed the opinion that
blacks were less intelligent. By 1946 this number had declined to 43 percent, a
10‑percentage‑point drop in only four years. By 1956, fully 80
percent of whites nationwide rejected the idea that blacks were less
intelligent; this is rapid change. It is especially telling that this change
occurred well before the height of the civil rights movement and thus
presumably before the larger national climate shifted decisively in favor of
protecting the civil rights of African Americans.
What seemed the bedrock belief in the case for a racially
segregated and discriminatory social order had undergone a precipitous drop in acceptance. Consequently, it is less surprising that support
for racial segregation and discrimination in schools, in housing, and the like
would also gradually decline. Fighting a war against racism, the considerable
contribution of blacks in the war effort, and the continued trend in academe
away from accepting notions of biologically given and hierarchically ordered
racial groupings all contributed to this process of rapid change (Bobo 1988b).
Yet, as an account of the larger progressive trend in racial
attitudes, this explanation is lacking. It begs the question of why popular
acceptance of biological racism, an attitude in its own right, went into
decline. What is more, there are strong grounds to believe that negative
stereotypes of African Americans remain widespread. In 1990 the General Social
Survey employed a new set of questions intended to measure social stereotypes.
Previously, the simple questions drawn from surveys first launched in the 1940s
asked respondents to agree or disagree with blunt categorical statements. Now,
respondents used bipolar trait‑rating scales. Respondents were called
upon to rate the members of several racial minority groups blacks, Asian
Americans, and Hispanic Americans ‑ as to whether they tended to be rich
or poor, hard working or lazy, intelligent or unintelligent, preferring to live
off welfare or to be self‑supporting, and so on. If a respondent wished
to assert no difference between groups, he or she could do so. If an individual
wanted to credit their own group with positive traits and out‑groups with
all negative traits, he or she could do so. Individuals could also offer more
qualified views. Crucially, the format of the questions did not force one to
merely accept or reject a simplistic statement. Measured in this manner,
negative stereotypes of African Americans remain common among whites, and quite
consensually so on some specific traits (Bobo &
Kluegel 1991).
For example, some 56 percent of whites rated blacks as less
intelligent than whites, using the bipolar trait‑rating format (two‑and‑a‑half
times the rate suggested by older, closed‑ended format survey items).
Fully 78 percent rated blacks as more likely to prefer living off welfare than
whites. Largely similar patterns ‑ though not as extreme ‑ were
found in a recent survey in the
Whatever else one might say about the progressive trend in
racial attitudes, it has not brought an end to negative stereotyping of African
Americans. Instead, the character of the stereotypes has changed. What were
once viewed as categorical differences based in biology now appear to be seen
as differences in degree or tendency (Jackman & Senter 1983). Furthermore, these differences in degree appear to be
understood as having largely cultural roots (Bobo 1988b). Thus, we do not
accept the view of declining negative stereotypes about blacks as a crucial
source of the broader shift in views on issues of racial segregation,
discrimination, and the principle of equal treatment. Negative stereotypes
persist.
THE EMERGENCE OF LAISSEZ‑FAIRE RACISM
If these other explanations, including Myrdal's guilt
hypothesis, are not convincing explanations, what then accounts for both the
momentous positive changes in attitudes that occurred between the 1940s and the
present and the persistence of negative stereotypes and opposition to social
policies favorable to African Americans? We believe that structural changes in
the
We do not advance a purely materialistic interpretation that
would, perforce, render popular racial attitudes of little social import. Such
theorizing at once misunderstands the role of human agency and subjectivity and
the highly contingent nature of the critical events and actions that helped to
bring about the shift from Jim Crow racism to laissez‑faire racism. Nor
do we advance a purely ideational account of changing racial attitudes of the
sort advanced in the symbolic racism research. The strictly material and the
strictly psychological accounts are, we believe, needlessly extreme and flawed.
There are inevitable connections between economic and
political structures, on the one hand, and patterns of individual thought and
action, on the other hand. As the structural basis of longstanding group
relations undergoes change, there is a corresponding potential for change in
the ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that had previously been
commonplace and that had wrapped group relations in a cloth of social meaning
and coherence. The collapse of Jim Crow ideology was not the inevitable outcome
of the related demographic and economic shifts that foreshadowed changing
patterns of belief. The political defeat of Jim Crow was a hard‑fought
struggle that required sustained collective action; it also involved deliberate
efforts to transform consciousness in both the black and white communities.
Our analysis of the sources of change in racial attitudes
rests principally on three important sociological works analyzing the
emergence, dynamics, and impact of the civil rights movement. D. McAdam's book,
Political Process and the Development of
Black Insurgency, 1930‑1970 (1982), provides a rich analysis of how
socioeconomic and demographic shifts fundamentally altered the level of power resources
of the black community. Aldon Morris's The
Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change
(1984) reveals in detail the internal organizational dimensions of
strategies used by black communities and leadership as they mobilized the
growing resource base in their own communities for political and economic gain.
J. M. Bloom's book Class, Race, and the
Civil Rights Movement (1987) helps pinpoint the great success of the civil
rights movement as the political defeat of the old planter aristocracy, whose
economic fortunes were most dependent on the Jim Crow strictures that had
locked many blacks in a condition of poverty and agricultural labor. Taken
together, these works provide a rich sociological analysis of how the interweaving
of the economy and polity resulted in changes in the status of blacks and set
the stage for the emergence of a new
Growing
Power Resources In Black Communities
As long as blacks remained a heavily oppressed, poorly educated,
Southern and rural labor force, they were unlikely to be able to mount
effective political resistance to the Jim Crow social order. According to
McAdam, four factors presage the emergence of a sustained and potent civil
rights movement. A series of reinforcing economic and demographic changes led
to expanded political opportunities for blacks. These transformations increased
the potential within black communities to develop stronger indigenous
organizations. When coupled with a more receptive political climate at the
national level in the post‑World War II period, a major transformation of
political consciousness within the black population took shape. The end result
was a sustained and effective movement of protest for social change.
During the Jim Crow era, core institutions of the black
community that would later become engines of the civil rights movement ‑
the black church, black colleges and universities, and organizations such as
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ‑
were fledgling versions of what they would become. From roughly 1880 through 1930, not only did the black church espouse an other‑worldly
theology of waiting for better treatment in the afterlife, but also black
congregations tended to be small, the churches were financially strapped, and
ministers were often poorly educated. Black colleges at the time were sorely
underfunded, providing little more than a high school‑equivalent
education. The NAACP, founded in 1909‑10,
was principally a Northern organization, still crafting its long‑term
legal strategy for change.
The position of blacks as an impoverished and heavily
oppressed agricultural labor force began to shift decisively with the decline
of "King Cotton." Increasing foreign competition, the introduction of
new technologies and of synthetic fibers, the boll‑weevil infestation,
and the declining centrality of cotton to the
According to McAdam, "the factor most responsible for
undermining the political conditions that, at the turn of century, had
relegated blacks to a position of political impotence ... would have to be the
gradual collapse of cotton as the backbone of the southern economy" (1982,
p. 73). When measured by the amount of cotton acreage harvested and the average
seasonal price of cotton per pound, the decline in cotton as the backbone of
Southern economy was enormous. The price of raw cotton took a nosedive
"from a high of 35 cents per pound in 1919 to less than 6 cents in
1931" (McAdam 1982, p. 75). From 1931 to 1955, the price of raw cotton
actually rose; yet during this same period, in an attempt to increase the
demand for cotton, the total amount of cotton harvested significantly decreased.
In addition, with World War I and the cessation of heavy
European immigration, there was a growing need for black labor in the
industrial North. The combination of these and other forces led to one of the
greatest internal migrations of all time. Upwards of 200,000
blacks migrated to the North in the first decade of the century, while the next
decade saw the largest black outmigration at more than 500,000 (McAdam 1982, p.
74). The migration of blacks reduced the number of Southern black farm
operators. From a high of slightly more than 915,000 in 1920, the number of
black farm operators plummeted to a low of 267,000 by 1959 (McAdam 1982, p.
95). Blacks thus shifted from a largely rural and Southern population to a
heavily urban and increasingly Northern population.
These changes had the concomitant effect of altering the
resource base of critical black institutions, such as the church, black
colleges and universities, and the NAACP. The rise in the numbers of blacks in
urban settings had the effect of increasing black economic resources while
reducing the level of intimidation and violence used to repress blacks. Urban
black church congregations tended to be much larger and to have more
substantial financial support, which facilitated the hiring of better trained
and better educated ministers. These forces, coupled with greater political
latitude afforded blacks in urban settings, contributed to a shift in the
theological emphasis within many black churches toward an increasing concern
for justice in the here and now.
The growing success of the NAACP legal strategy, which
initially sought to force Southern states to live up to the doctrine of
separate but equal, had led to important increases in the resource base at many
historically black colleges and universities. Thus, more blacks began to
receive better college‑level educations. In addition, the number and size
of NAACP chapters in Southern states rose as the number of blacks in the urban
South rose. In sum, formidable changes in the power resources within black
communities took place, particularly between the early 1900s and the early
1950s. The economic footing of black communities improved. The institutional
base for political action also increased dramatically.
Mobilizing
Black Power Resources for Change
Morris carefully documents the
patterns of social networks and organization‑building that existed in
black communities. For example, he shows the lines of communication
between the new, better educated group of black ministers, epitomized by Rev.
Martin Luther King. Morris also reviews the high level of internal financing
that supported organizations such as the Montgomery Improvement Association
(MIA), which directed the historic 1955‑56 bus boycott. Internal
networks, a new indigenous leadership cadre, and internal financial support
were essential to the type of local movement center, such as the MIA, that
became a politicized umbrella organization linking a number of black ministers
and their congregations. Morris points, moreover, to the mass base of the
protest movement that King came to spearhead and the extent to which targeted
nonviolent social protest became a genuine power resource in the struggle for
racial change. Critically, Morris documents how the increasing persecution
directed at the NAACP in much of the South impelled the development of new
organizational forms such as the MIA and, subsequently, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. Where McAdam identifies the broad demographic and
economic trends affecting black institutions, Morris shows how these increasing
power resources were translated into concrete organization‑building and
sustained, effective mass protest at the grassroots level within black
communities.
The ability to mount effective campaigns at the grassroots
level within Southern black communities reached its pinnacle after the
Morris's discussion of the emergence and rapid spread of
the sit‑in strategy in the South during the late 1950s and early 1960s
provides a clear picture of the intricate and deliberate formation of black
political networks. Dispelling myths that the sit‑in tactic was an
entirely spontaneous, student‑run operation that originated in
Included in this new alliance were a host of black colleges,
fraternities, and sororities. The emergence and proliferation of the sit‑in
movement involved interaction between black colleges and local movement centers
often based in the church. Many of the student leaders were also church members
and had learned about the civil rights movement and the tactic of nonviolent
protest from their local churches even before sit‑ins were instituted as
a protest strategy. Thus, the organizational base to launch and coordinate sit‑ins
stemmed from the church ‑ with black college students, through their
fraternities and sororities, serving as the foot soldiers.
The actual organization, financing, and spread of the sit‑in
clusters followed an elaborate pattern of coordination among a variety of
groups. Morris provides a vivid description of the sequence:
Organizers from SCLC, NAACP and CORE
raced between sit‑in points relaying valuable information. Telephone
lines and the community "grapevine" sent forth protest instructions
and plans. These clusters were the sites of numerous midday and late night
meetings where the black community assembled in the churches, filled the
collection plates, and vowed to mortgage their homes to raise the necessary
bail‑bond money in case the protesting students were jailed. Black
lawyers pledged their legal services to the movement and black physicians made
their services available to injured demonstrators. Amidst these exciting
scenes, black spirituals calmed and deepened the participants' commitment.
(Morris 1981, p. 759)
Throughout the South, activities such as these served to
create, sustain, and project the new‑found power of a grassroots, church‑based
movement designed to dramatize and change the second‑class citizen status
of African Americans.
Defeating
Jim Crow
To this picture, Bloom (1987) adds critical information
concerning the old white planter aristocracy. He maintains that the principal
political accomplishment of the civil rights movements was the defeat of the
power of the old planter elite. This group benefited most
directly from Jim Crow ideology and practices and were the central
actors in the erection of Jim Crow social arrangements. Correspondingly, it was
this group that played a pivotal role in first launching the White Citizens
Councils (WCCs) in the wake of the NAACP's legal success in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. As Bloom explains: The
impetus, the organization, the leadership, and the control of this movement
rested in the hands of the traditional black‑belt ruling class that had
emerged after Reconstruction. That class was still centered in the black
belt, though in most cases now in small towns. Its members were businessmen and
bankers in these areas, as well as merchants and landlords.... It was the old
Southern ruling class that set state policy. It was, moreover, the Deep South
states of
It was this old planter elite, still heavily located in cotton‑producing
black‑belt areas, that most depended on the Jim Crow social order for
their livelihoods. As such, leadership of the WCCs was often drawn from the
upper classes. The WCCs drew their leadership "primarily from the ranks of
the white community's business, political, and social leadership. ... These are
the same people who made up the 'courthouse cliques' that ran the South, the
'banker‑merchant‑farmer‑lawyer‑doctor‑governing
class"' (Bloom 1987, p. 102).
The WCCs directed both economic and political intimidation at
blacks who attempted to challenge their subordinate status. Indeed, although
the leaders of the WCC were drawn from the ranks of the most respected leaders
of the South, they were not above committing or sanctioning acts of violence
against blacks to protect their interests. Although violence against blacks was
more frequent in an earlier era and more commonly associated with the tactics
used by the Ku Klux Klan, subsequent to the Brown decision, violence against
blacks on the part of the WCCs became an effective tool, particularly in
discouraging blacks from voting. Murders sprang up all over the South, most
noticeably in places such as
Such extreme acts of violence meant that the eventual
dismantling of Jim Crow loomed large in the minds of many whites. In
desperation, some whites embarked upon a campaign of terror. As Bloom explains:
These killings, by no means the only
ones, were acts of terror designed to force blacks back into their place. They
were part of the larger process of violence and intimidation in that
period" (1987, p. 101). One study reported that upwards of 530 cases of
murder against blacks occurred within a three‑year period, between 1955
and 1958. The major effect of such terror was a precipitous drop in registered
black voters throughout the South. For example, in
The efforts of the WCCs and others committed to the Jim Crow
social order did not succeed. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal
victories ‑ victories that crushed the institutionalized basis of the Jim
Crow South. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, the Jim Crow social order, the political power of the older
planter elite, and the arrangements they had created lay in ruins.
The Link to
Mass Racial Attitudes
The declining importance of cotton to the larger
Quite naturally then, widespread cultural attitudes endorsing
elements of the Jim Crow social order began to atrophy and decay under a
relentless attack by blacks and their white allies. Segregationist positions
were under steady assault and increasingly lacked strong allies. We suggest the
end product of these forces, the decline of Jim Crow racism, is seen in the
broad pattern of improvement in the racial attitudes of whites in the
Although monumental accomplishments, the Brown decision, the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 primarily secured
the basic citizenship rights of African Americans. The successes of the civil
rights movement did not end racialized social identities among black or white
Americans (Sheatsley 1966); they did not eradicate sharp black/white
differences in social and economic status (Duncan 1968; Lieberson & Fuguitt
1967; Siegel 1970); and they did not undo nationwide patterns of racial
residential segregation (Taeuber & Taeuber 1965). That is, the enormous and
far‑reaching gains of the civil rights movement did not eliminate stark
patterns of racial domination and inequality that existed above, beyond, and
irrespective of the specific dictates of the distinctly Southern Jim Crow
system.
In the wake of the collapse of Jim Crow social arrangements
and ideology, the new ideology of laissez‑faire racism began to take
shape. This new ideology concedes basic citizenship rights to African
Americans; however, it takes as legitimate extant patterns of black‑white
socioeconomic inequality and residential segregation, viewing these conditions,
as it does, not as the deliberate products of racial discrimination, but as
outcomes of a free‑market, race‑neutral state apparatus and the
freely taken actions of African Americans themselves.
LAISSEZ‑FAIRE RACISM AND THE
SENSE OF GROUP POSITION
This analysis casts studies of racial attitudes in a different
light. Students of prejudice and racial attitudes may have misunderstood the
real object of racial attitudes. The attitude object, or perceptual focus, is
not really the social category of blacks or whites; it is not neighborhoods
or schools of varying degrees of racial mixture. Instead, as Herbert Blumer
(1958) argued, the real object of prejudice ‑ what we really tap with
attitude questions in surveys ‑ is beliefs about the proper relation
between groups. The real attitude object is relative group positions. This
attitude of sense of group position is historically and culturally rooted,
socially learned, and modifiable in response to new information, events, or
structural conditions, as long as these factors contribute to or shape contexts
for social interaction among members of different groups.
I Attitudes toward integration or toward blacks are, fundamentally, statements about preferred positional
relations among racial groups. They are not simply or even mainly emotional
reactions to groups, group symbols, or situations. Nor are they best understood
as statements of simple feelings of like or dislike toward minority groups and
their members, although certain measurement approaches may fruitfully aim at
such specific constructs. Nor, in addition, are they simply perceptions of
group traits and dispositions, although stereotypes are also key dimensions of
prejudice. Racial attitudes capture aspects of the preferred group positions
and those patterns of belief and feeling that undergird, justify, and make
understandable a preference for relatively little group differential and
inequality under some social conditions, or for a great deal of differential
and inequality under others.
By this logic, decreasing advocacy of the principle of
segregation does not mean a desire for greater contact with blacks or even
positive value attached to integrated education. From the vantage point of
position theory, it means declining insistence on forced group inequality in
educational institutions. Declining support for segregated public
transportation does not signal a desire for more opportunities to interact with
blacks on buses, trains, and the like. Instead, it means a declining insistence
on compulsory inequality in group access to this domain of social life.
Under the group position theory, change in
political and economic regularities of social life decisively shape the
socially constructed and shared sense of group position. The sources of change
in attitudes ‑ changes in preferred group positions ‑ are not found
principally in changing feelings of like and dislike. Changes in the patterns
of mass attitudes reflect changes in the social structurally based,
interactively defined and understood, needs and
interests of social groups (Bobo & Hutchings 1996). To put it differently,
in order to have meaning, longevity, and force in people's everyday lives, the
attitudes held by individuals must be linked to the organized modes of living
in which people are embedded (Rabb & Lispet 1962). As such, the demand for
segregated transportation, segregated hotels, and blanket labor market
discrimination increasingly ring hollow under an economy and polity that has
less and less need ‑ in fact may be incurring heavy costs ‑ as a
result of the presence of a superexploited, racially identifiable labor pool.
When the economic and political needs of a significant segment of a dominant
racial group no longer hinge upon a sharp caste system for effective reproduction
of the advantages of race for members of that dominant group, then the
permeative acceptance and effects of that ideology will weaken and take new
form.
A key link between changing structural conditions and the
attitudes of the mass public are those significant social actors
who articulate, and frequently clash over and debate, the need for new modes of
social organization (Blumer 1958). The claims and objectives of the visible
leadership elements of groups presumably spring from their conceptions of the
identities, interests, opportunities, resources, and needs of the group at a
particular time. That is, the direction and tenor of change are shaped in the
larger public sphere of clash, debate, political mobilization, and struggle.
In that regard, following on the heels of the Reagan‑Bush
years, the new system and ideology of laissez‑faire racism would now
appear to be crystallizing. Although a full analysis of the current political
context is beyond the scope of this paper, it is evident that the assault on
affirmative action policies has intensified. The
CONCLUSIONS
The long and unabated record of sweeping change in racial attitudes
that national surveys document cannot be read as a fundamental breakdown in
racialized thinking or in antiblack prejudice. We have witnessed the
disappearance of a racial ideology appropriate to an old social order: that of
the Jim Crow post‑Civil War South. A new and resilient laissez‑faire
racism ideology has emerged and has apparently begun to crystallize.
Jim Crow racism went into decline, in part, because of a
direct and potent assault on it by the civil rights movement. Jim Crow
practices and ideology were made vulnerable by an interlocking series of social
changes ‑ the declining importance of cotton production to the U.S.
economy, limited immigration from Europe, black migration to urban and Northern
areas ‑ all of which dramatically increased the power resources available
to black communities. The economic basis for Jim Crow had been weakened. Its
political underpinnings were gradually undone by the Brown decision, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other political
successes of the civil rights movement.
Because racial attitudes reflect the structural conditions of
group life (Rabb & Lipset 1962), it is no surprise that Jim Crow attitudes
in the mass public ‑ such as near‑consensus support for strict
segregation and open discrimination ‑ all premised on the assumed
biological inferiority of blacks, would eventually and steadily ebb in popular
acceptance. Jim Crow racism was no longer embedded in
African Americans, however, remain economically disadvantaged
and racially segregated despite growing class heterogeneity within the black
community and despite the successes of the civil rights movement. These social
conditions continue to prompt many white Americans to feel both morally offended
and apprehensive about losing something tangible if strong efforts are made to
improve the living conditions of African Americans (Bobo 1983, 1988b).
Furthermore, sharp black‑white economic inequality and residential
segregation provide the kernel of truth needed to regularly breathe new life
into old stereotypes about putative black proclivities toward involvement in
crime, violence, and welfare dependency. Viewed in this light, the gap between
increasingly egalitarian racial principles and resistance to strong forms of
affirmative action are not paradoxical at all. Both are the result of changes
in
The end product of these conditions and processes is the
emergence of a new racialized social order under a new racial ideology: laissez‑faire
racism. Under this regime, blacks are still stereotyped and blamed as the
architects of their own disadvantaged status. The deeply entrenched pattern of
denying societal responsibility for conditions in many black communities
continues to foster steadfast opposition to affirmative action and other social
policies that might alleviate race‑based inequalities. In short, a large
number of white Americans have become comfortable with as much racial
inequality and segregation as a putatively nondiscriminatory polity and free
market economy can produce: hence the reproduction and, on some dimensions, the
worsening of racial inequalities. These circumstances are rendered culturally
palatable by the new ideology of laissez‑faire racism.