Comments on Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

1.

In 2003, Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell wrote that (p. 222):

The defining works of White racial attitudes fail to grapple with the complexities of African American political thought and life. In these studies, Black people are a static object about which White people form opinions.

Researchers still sometimes make it difficult to analyze data from Black participants or don't report interesting data on Black participants. Helping to address this, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson have a new book Racial Resentment in the Political Mind (RRPM), with an entire chapter on African Americans' resentment toward Whites.

RRPM is a contribution to research on Black political attitudes, and its discussion of measurement of Whites' resentment toward Blacks is nice, especially for people who don't realize that standard measures of "racial resentment" aren't good measures of resentment. But let me discuss some elements of the book that I consider flawed.

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2.

RRPM draws, at a high level, a parallel between Whites' resentment toward Blacks and Blacks' resentment toward Whites (p. 242):

In essence, the same model of a just world and appraisal of deservingness that guides Whites' racial resentment also guides African Americans' racial resentment.

That seems reasonable, to have the same model for resentment toward Whites and resentment toward Blacks. But RRPM proposes different items for a battery of resentment toward Blacks and for a battery of resentment toward Whites, and I think that different batteries for each type of resentment will undercut comparison of the size of the effects of these two different resentments, because one battery might capture true resentment better than another battery.

Thus, especially for general surveys such as the ANES that presumably can't or won't devote space to batteries measuring resentments tailored to each racial group, it might be better to measure resentment toward various groups with generalizable items such as agreement/disagreement to statements such as "Whites have gotten more than they deserve" and "Blacks have gotten more than they deserve", which hopefully would produce more valid comparisons of the estimated effect of resentments toward different groups, compared to comparison of batteries of different items.

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3.

RRPM suggests that all resentment batteries not be given to all respondents (p. 241):

A clear outcome of this chapter is that African Americans should not be presented the same classic racial resentment survey items that Whites would answer (and perhaps vice versa)...

And from page 30:

African Americans and Whites have different reasons to be resentful toward each other, and each group requires a unique set of measurement items to capture resentment.

But not giving participants items measuring resentment of their own racial group doesn't seem like a good idea, because a White participant could think that Whites have received more than they deserve on average, and a Black participant could think that Blacks have received more than they deserve on average, so that omitting White resentment of Whites and similar measures could plausibly bias estimates of the effect of resentment, if resentment of one's own racial group influences a participant's attitudes about political phenomena.

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RRPM discusses asking Blacks to respond to racial resentment items toward Blacks: "No groups other than African Americans seem to be asked questions about self-hate" (p. 249). RRPM elsewhere qualifies this with "rarely": "That is, asking African Americans to answer questions about disaffection toward their own group is a task rarely asked of other groups"  (p. 215).

The ANES 2016 pilot study did ask White participants about White guilt (e.g., "How guilty do you feel about the privileges and benefits you receive as a white American?") without asking any other racial groups about parallel guilt. Moreover, the CCES had (in 2016 and 2018 at least) an agree/disagree item asked of Whites and others that "White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin", with no equivalent item about color-of-skin advantages for people who are not White.

But even if Black participants disproportionately receive resentment items directed at Blacks, the better way to address this inequality and to understand racial attitudes is to add resentment items directed at other groups.

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4.

RRPM seems to suggest an asymmetry in that only Whites' resentment is normatively bad (p. 25):

In the end, African Americans' quest for civil rights and social justice is resented by Whites, and Whites' maintenance of their group dominance is resented by African Americans.

Davis and Wilson discussed RRPM in a video on the UC Public Policy Channel, with Davis suggesting that "a broader swath of citizens need to be held accountable for what they believe" (at 6:10) and that "...the important conversation we need to have is not about racists. Okay. We need to understand how ordinary American citizens approach race, approach values that place them in the same bucket as racists. They're not racists, but they support the same thing that racists support" (at 53:37).

But, from what I can tell, the ordinary American citizens in the same bucket as racists don't seem to be, say, people who support hiring preferences for Blacks for normatively good reasons and just happen to have the same policy preferences as people who support hiring preferences for Blacks because of racism against Whites. Instead, my sense is that the racism in question is limited to racism that causes racial inequality: David C. Wilson at 3:24 in the UC video:

And so, even if one is not racist, they can still exacerbate racial injustice and racial inequality by focusing on their values rather than the actual problem and any solutions that might be at bay to try and solve them.

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Another apparent asymmetry is that RRPM mentions legitimizing racial myths throughout the book (vii, 3, 8, 21, 23, 28, 35, 47, 48, 50, 126, 129, 130, 190, 243, 244, 247, 261, 337, and 342), but legitimizing racial myths are not mentioned in the chapter on African Americans' resentment toward Whites (pp. 214-242). RRPM page 8 figure 1.1 is model of resentment that has an arrow from legitimizing racial myths to resentment, but RRPM doesn't indicate what, if any, legitimizing racial myths inform resentment toward Whites.

Legitimizing myths are conceptualized on page 8 as follows:

Appraisals of deservingness are shaped by legitimizing racial myths, which are widely shared beliefs and stereotypes about African Americans and other minorities that justify their mistreatment and low status. Legitimizing myths are any coherent set of socially accepted attitudes, beliefs, values, and opinions that provide moral and intellectual legitimacy to the unequal distribution of social value (Sidanius, Devereux, and Pratto 1992).

But I don't see why legitimizing myths couldn't add legitimacy to unequal *treatment*. Presumably resentment flows from beliefs about the causes of inequality, so Whites as a/the main/the only cause of Black/White inequality could serve as a belief that legitimizes resentment toward Whites and, consequently, discrimination against Whites.

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5.

The 1991 National Race and Politics Survey had a survey experiment, asking for agreement/disagreement to the item:

In the past, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their
way up.

Version 1: Blacks...
Version 2: New immigrants from Europe...

...should do the same without any special favors?

This experiment reflects the fact that responses to items measuring general phenomena applied to a group might be influenced by the general phenomena and/or the group.

Remarkably, the RRPM measurement of racial schadenfreude (Chapter 7) does not address this ambiguity, with items measuring participant feelings about only President Obama, such as the schadenfreude felt by "Barack Obama's being identified as one of the worst presidents in history". At least RRPM realizes this (p. 206):

Without a more elaborate research design, we cannot really determine whether the schadenfreude experienced by Republicans is due to his race or to some other issue.

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6.

For an analysis of racial resentment in the political mind, RRPM remarkably doesn't substantively consider Asians, even if only as a target of resentment to help test alternate explanations about the cause of resentment, given that, like Whites, Asians on average have relatively positive outcomes in income and related measures, but do not seem to be blamed for U.S. racial inequality as much as Whites are.

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NOTES

1. From RRPM (p. 241):

When items designed on one race are automatically applied to another race under the assumption of equal meaning, it creates measurement invariance.

Maybe the intended meaning is something such as "When items designed on one race are automatically applied to another race, it assumes measurement invariance".

2. RRPM Figure 2.1 (p. 68) reports how resentment correlates with feeling thermometer ratings about Blacks and with feeling thermometer ratings about Whites, but not with the more intuitive measure of the *difference* in feeling thermometer ratings about Blacks and about Whites.