By D. Stephen Voss
Abstract: Modern political-science research on racial attitudes suggests that white conservatism stems from symbolism, prejudice and socialized resentment. The implication, sometimes made explicit, is that racial conservatism has no rational competitive basis; it does not grow out of the social structure of intergroup competition. Evidence for this claim usually appears in two sorts of analysis: (1) survey analysis connecting racial conservatism (e.g., opposition to affirmative action or busing) to anti-black "symbolic" value judgments, and (2) cross-level models showing that racial conservatism does not respond to measures of a white respondent’s "self interest." The enclosed paper questions the extent to which racial conservatism can be passed off to mere psychological orientation. Using data from a particularly valuable racial-issues survey, I show that supposedly symbolic judgments in fact possess an underlying structural basis, one that I term Cultural Backlash. Other researchers missed the geographical structure contained in racial data because intergroup competition does not follow a simple pattern, as statistical models typically assume, but one that interacts with a community’s likely investment in white cultural capital.
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