美国种族主义的社会建构.docx

ContentsForeword 4Executive Summary5Introduction 7The Media and Public Perception of Racism 8The Decline of Racist Attitudes8The Racism Paradox10The Great Awokening11Defying Reality by Stretching Perception 12Black Public Opinion 14Are White Republicans Racist?15Fatal Police Shootings15The Social Construction of Personal Experience 17Personal Experience18Partisan Racial Misperception and Personal Experience of Racism 19Does Critical Race Theory Disempower African-Americans?20Toward Black Resilience 23Coda: Sad and Anxious People Report More Racism25Conclusion 27Endnotes 29plateau, it surged again and rose to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness and speech codes came into vogue. Then, around 2014, there was another upsurge, in tandem with the current period of left-modernist ferment. The use of terms such as racism (or racist/s) took off especially sharply in left-leaning media outlets such as Vox and the New York Times.21A 2018 report, ("Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape/5 published by More in Common, found that Progressive Activists/5 who make up 8% of the U.S. population, are 3.5 times more active than the uexhausted majority“ two-thirds of the population in posting political content on social media.22 While the rise of social media, citizen journalism, and a surge in online partisan websites has been associated with what Matthew Yglesias calls the uGreat Awokening J it is not associated with right-wing populist voting, which is stronger among older and less educated voters who use social media platforms less.23 Many left-modernist ideas have older roots in critical theory, but technological change helped left-modernists organize and spread new moral innovations, such as amicroaggressions/? or causes, such as gender recognition.24To what extent the most recent “Awokening” would have occurred in the absence of social media is an open question. Whatever the case, the Great Awokening has coincided with a large-scale shift to the left in attitudes toward questions of race, diversity, and immigration, especially among white liberals. Thus, partisanship and ideology increasingly affect perceptions of racism. The importance of ideological differences in perceptions of racism is shown in Figure 6, which reveals that among white conservatives, there has been little to no increase since 1995 in the share who think that racism is a “big problem.55 White liberals show the greatest increase, with white moderates in between. The POST-2014 trend (see Figure 2) of perceiving worse relations between whites and blacks is, therefore, less a reflection of statistical reality than of rising consciousness of racism, notably among liberals.Defying Reality by Stretching PerceptionThe split between liberals and conservatives in their perception of racism in society indicates that an indi-FIGURE 6.White Americans Who Say that Racism Is a “Big Problem J by IdeologyHow big a problem is racism in the US today? Is it a big problem, somewhat of a problem, a small problem, or not a problem at all? Percent 'big problem5Source: Washington Post (1995,2009-11); Kaiser Family Foundation (2015, 2020); Pew Research Center (2015, 2017); provided to the author by Zach Goldberg, who compiled the data from a search of news stories in Lexis/Nexis. This chart has also appeared in Goldberg, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakeninq,“ Tablet, Aug. 4, 2020.viduaFs ideology shapes his estimate of the size of the problem. Racism thus contains an important socially constructed component.There are important reasons that egalitarians may find it especially difficult to adjust their perceptions of racism to the reality of its decline. As Alexis de Tocqueville remarked almost two centuries ago in his classic Democracy in America:The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.25In a similar vein, Coleman Hughes, in a pathbreaking 2018 essay, remarks on Tocqueville's paradox as it concerns racial liberalism in America: “It seems as if every reduction in racist behavior is met with a commensurate expansion in our definition of the concept. Thus, racism has become a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy: transformable but irreducible.Tocqueville's and Hughes's observations have now been confirmed scientifically as a variant of a wider phenomenon known as "'prevalence-induced concept change.55 This takes place when people reframe reality to conserve a concept into which they have been socialized. Citing work by Harvard University's Daniel Gilbert, British psychologist Peter Hughes (no relation to Coleman) writes:When participants were shown 8oo human faces on a continuum of threatening to nonthreateningwhen the prevalence of threatening faces was reduced in one group, participants expanded their concept of threat to include faces which they had previously defined as nonthreatening. In a third study, participants were shown 240 proposals for scientific research that were rated on a continuum from very ethical to very unethical. When the prevalence of proposals defined as unethical were decreased for one group,FIGURE 7.Probability of Agreeing that Discrimination Makes It Harder for Blacks to Get AheadVery LiberalLiberalModerateConservativeVery Conservative1Ideology1Very LiberalLiberalModerateConservativeVery Conservative1Ideology16UO3-6B -0 poofaMn White BlackSource: Compiled by the author from the data set for “2016 Racial Attitudes in America Survey,“ Pew Research Center Controls: university, income, age, gender, social media use, contact with whites; survey weights applied; pseudo-R2=.160, N=2,929the group expanded their concept of unethical to include proposals they had previously defined as ethical.27Black Public OpinionMuch of the evidence about perceptions of racism so far comes from national samples, which are dominated by white respondents. Though sample sizes for African-Americans in such surveys are typically small and there are fewer black-only surveys, it is apparent that black opinion is characterized by a weaker ideological divide than exists within white opinion. Data from Pew, for example, show that among blacks, 75% of liberals, but also 55% of the smaller group of conservative blacks, say that discrimination makes it harder for blacks to get ahead (Figure 7). By contrast, 17% of “very conservative? whites and 82% of “very liberal” whites agree. A modest 20-POlNT partisan difference among blacks balloons to 65 points among whites. Since 2016, several surveys show that white liberals place to the left of minorities on questions of race, diversity, and immigration.28There is also a substantially larger ideological gap among whites than blacks when it comes to viewing racism as a serious problem. Pew's 2015 survey, profiled in Figure 8，found that “very liberal” whites evince nearly as much concern over racism (76%) as African-Americans, while moderate (33%) and conservative (11%) whites view racism as a much less important problem. The ideological slope is greatest for whites, with over 60 points separating conservatives from “very liberal“ whites. The incline is less steep among Asians and Hispanics and gradual among blacks, with “very liberal” and “very conservative” blacks only differing 20 points in their assessment that racism is a very big problem (64% vs. 84%).FIGURE 8.Racism Is a “Very Big Problem55 in America, by Race and Ideology (2015)Source: Compiled by the author from the data set for Pew Research Center, Julv 2015 Political Survey; respondents: 1,349 whites, 210 African-Americans, 373 Hispanics and AsiansOriginal Surveys Conducted for This ReportAre White Republicans Racist?Qualtrics (Qualtrics 1)Apr. 20-June 2, 2020N=1770 | 844 black, 926 white respondentsQuestionnaireQualtrics 2Nov. 20-Dec. 1,2020.N=801 | black respondentsQuestionnaireProlific Academics (Prolific 1)July 4-5, 2018N=137 | black respondentsQuestionnaireProlific 2June 15, 2020N=196 | white respondentsQuestionnaireProlific 3Nov. 26-Dec. 10, 2020 N=572 | black respondents QuestionnaireProlific 4Dec. 1,2020N=391 | white respondentsQuestionnaireDetails about the answers to various questions in these surveys are available upon request from the author.*Qualtrics is a survey firm that recruits survey participants according to demographic or other criteria specified by the client. A few firms, such as YouGov, maintain their own panel of users who fill out their surveys for a fixed rate. Qualtrics participants are recruited from market research companies and online, and they are matched on age, gender, and region, in order to provide a reasonably representative sample. Like other survey firms, Qualtrics pays those who take its surveys. For more details, click here.*Prolific Academic is an online survey platform that restricts clients to those who pay survey respondents more than minimum wage. Users advertise surveys at a fixed reward per survey, and the pool of eligible users can opt to take the survey for the wage listed. Prolific samples have not been matched to population characteristics. I use statistical modeling to control for age, education, gender, and other demographic characteristics when assessing relationships between questions. For more details, click here.Another way to appraise how partisanship can skew perceptions about race is to compare white and black responses to the “white Republicans are racist” and “white Democrats are racist” questions fielded in a survey that I conducted on Qualtrics during April 20- June 2, 2020 (see sidebar, Original Surveys Conducted for This Report).Whites and blacks who self-identified as liberal were similar in their agreement that “white Republicans are racist” (64% of liberal blacks, 61% of liberal whites) and in their low level of agreement that “white Democrats are racist"(23% for black liberals, 21% for white liberals). The bigger racial difference was among conservatives, where 10% of white conservatives but 36% of black conservatives said that white Republicans are racist, a 26-POINT difference. When it comes to the statement “white Democrats are racist/5 38% of white conservatives agreed, but only 28% of black conservatives agreed.Responses to this question among African-Americans, as will be explored below, are strongly associated with both national perceptions and reported personal experiences of racism.Fatal Police ShootingsThe likelihood of a young black man dying from a car accident is considerably higher than his being killed by police. Even among young men of all races being killed by police, shootings form only part of total killings.29 Nevertheless, eight in 10 African-American respondents to the Qualtrics 2 survey (Nov. 20-DEC. 1, 2020) believed that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a traffic accident.30 Only one in 10 disagreed.This belief, at variance with reality, is not the result of counting respondents who are unsure of the answer jumping one way: there is a “neither agree nor disagree55 option, but it was chosen by only one in 10 people. Nor is it a matter of educational level. Among the survey?s noncollege graduates, 78% believe that police shootings are a more common cause of death than traffic accidents, but so do 76% of university graduatesonly 14% of whom contest this view. Neither age nor the share of African-Americans in a respondent's neighborhood significantly affected the results.With regard to police shootings, however, political outlook did shape people's perceptions of social reality. For example, Qualtrics 2 found that while 53% of the black Trump voters (64 individuals) believed that police shootings are the leading cause of death for young black men, 81% of black Biden voters (597 individuals) did so, a statistically significant and powerful difference (Figure 9). While education and age made no significant difference in the respondents9 answers to this question, partisan perceptions of racial attitudes played the most important role. Thus, 95% of African-Americans who “strongly agree” that “white Republicans are racist” (22% of the sample) say that police kill more young black men than cars do, while 56% of blacks who ustrongly disagree55 that “white Republicans are racist” say this.31The fact that politics matters more than education or age indicates that ideologically motivated reasoning32 plays a role in governing perceptions of how frequently young black men are shot to death by the police. On the other hand, the fact that 53% of black Trump voters still agreed with the statement tells us that this belief is widespread and not simply a function of ideology.However, this perspective on an empirical question is not unique to African-Americans. Of the 391 WHITE respondents in the Prolific 4 survey (Dec. 1, 2020), 70% of whites who astrongly agree,? that “white Republicans are racist" also believed that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a car accident (Figure 10). This is noticeably higher than the 53% of black Trump voters in Qualtrics 2 and vastly higher than the 15% of white Trump voters in Prolific 4 who believe this.The gap between Trump and Biden voters on the question about fatal police shootings is 28 points among African-Americans (81%-53%) but 38 points among whites (53%15%) in Prolific 4. Education level was not a significant predictor of accuracy on this question. These results echo those that recently found that only about a fifth of liberals but close to half of conservatives gave the right answer to a question on how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Fully 54% of “very liberal" Americans thought that more than 1,000 were killed compared with the actual figure of between 13 and 27.33FIGURE 9.African-Americans: "Young Black Men Are More Likely to Be Shot to Death by Police thanSource: Qualtrics 2; “strong" meaning that respondents answered "strongly agree" to the statementFIGURE 10.“Young Black Men Are More Likely to Be Shot to Death by Police than to Die in a Car Accident”Source: Qualtrics 2 and Prolific 4. Respondents who said that white Republicans are racist "strongly agre