Is There Racial Resentment?

Hello folks!  First an introduction; my name is Jamelle and I blog (along with two awesome co-bloggers) over at The United States of Jamerica (if you’d like to know a bit more about me, just check out the “Bio” page over at my blog).  We mostly cover politics, but occasionally we’ll jump into other things (whatever piques our interests).  G.D. invited me to blog here at PostBourgie, and let me say that I’m honored to have the invitation extended to me, and excited to begin posting.  I’ll try to do original content for PostBourgie, but sometimes I’ll cross-post, and this is one of those times.  So, you can find the following post over at my blog too.

Sullivan’s post on white resentment has inspired quite a bit of discussion in various corners of the blogosphere, the most interesting of which is happening over at Ta-Nehisi’s place.  Like quite a few liberals it seems, Coates thinks that “white resentment” is just another term for plain racism:

Racial resentment is just racial grievance—for white people. If it’s absurd to hear Civil Rights era black folks attributing the entire fate of black people to racism, than its just surreal to hear white folks chalking their problems up to Affirmative Action. One doesn’t have to be pro-Affirmative Action to see the hypocrisy in those who say to blacks, heaving under a legacy of hate, “get over it” and then turn to Southern white “resenters,” merely grappling with equality, and say “I understand.”

UPDATE: Just to bang on this racial resentment thing a little harder, I think it’s no mistake that Geraldine Ferraro basically used this same phraseology when making her case against Obama. The whole phrase strikes me as a politically correct term for bigots. Frankly, believing that Affirmative Action actively influences your economic prospects as a white person, is only slightly more logical that believing that gay marriage will somehow affect marriage overall. But I suspect that they’re both proxies for folks  who have a long history of resenting blacks and gays which stretches way past the advent of Affirmative Action or gay marriage.

I agree that, for some number of people, “resentment” is just a politically correct way of describing their bigotry.  But I’m not willing to completely dismiss the idea of “racial resentment,” because there is enough data out there to suggest that it is something different from simple racism.  In 2005, researchers Stanley Feldman and Leonie Huddy attempted to find whether or not racial resentment was predominantly a factor of racial prejudice or conservative ideology.  They tested this by first asking participants to complete a survey intended to gauge their level of racial resentment.  Afterwards, those surveyed participated in two experiments: the first asked participants to gauge their support for affirmative action programs based on race, and the second for programs based on class (and which would predominantly benefit white students.  What they found was:

Among conservatives*, opposition to the program for black and white students increased with rising resentment, making resentment a powerful but nonracial source of program opposition. Moreover, racial resentment was only weakly grounded in overt prejudice among conservatives. Nonetheless, it is difficult to conclude that resentment constitutes a clear measure of ideology among conservatives. Despite its apparently ideological effects on opposition to the scholarship program we found no evidence that resentment was more closely tied to values like individualism and limited government for conservatives than for liberals. Our failure to find concrete evidence of the ideological underpinnings of racial resentment for conservatives may be due to poor measurement of the general values or it may suggest that resentment taps other beliefs for conservatives such as an opposition to race-based programs of any kind.

This conclusion directly contradicts the research performed by Mandelberg and Kinder in the late 1990s and which formed the backbone of the 2000 book The Race Card.  In performing their research, Mendelberg and Kinder “disentangle ideology from prejudice by regressing racial policy views on racial resentment while controlling for individualism and argue that any additional effect of resentment reflects prejudice.”  Indeed, they find that racial resentment is more a factor of prejudice than ideology.  But taken in light of Feldman and Huddy’s research, it’s not clear if that’s actually the case.

I’m inclined to agree with Feldman and Huddy, and this is due in part to a paper I read a few years back (and I forget the title or the authors), which showed that a significant number of whites who opposed programs such as affirmative action also showed significant adherence to norms of equality.  Which suggests that their opposition is driven more by a (I think misunderstood) application of said norms than it is prejudice.  And in the context of the conversation happening in the blogosphere, I think that publius has basically hit in on the nail; there are a significant number of whites who aren’t “racist” (or who at least don’t harbor any significant racial animus) but who oppose these programs out of a very real sense of unfairness.

Unfortunately, for those of us who believe that affirmative action programs  and other means of redress are still necessary, this isn’t terribly comforting news.  If racial resentment is real, then it encourages politicians to either A) take advantage of it or B) shy away from taking steps to deal with the very real legacy of Jim Crow (among other things).  In fact, I’m inclined to say that the era of explicit programs targeted towards African-Americans is over; it’s simply no longer politically sustainable.  Instead, class-based efforts (which aren’t necessarily as effective, but I’ll have a post on that later) and broader sorts of policies (educational reform, urban renewal, etc.) are probably our best bet.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in some cases, sort of misses the point.

*Interestingly, Feldman and Huddy’s research suggests that among liberals, racial resentment is a factor of racial prejudice.

**One last thing, on this point – the “my ancestors were not responsible for slavery” defense – I think Ta-Nehisi basically nails it.

Jamelle

Jamelle Bouie is a writer for Slate. He has also written for The Daily Beast, The American Prospect and The Nation. His work centers on politics, race, and the intersection of the two.

You can find him on Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram as jbouie.