Harris Lacewell 2003 The Heart of The Politics of Race Centering Black People in The Study of White Racial Attitudes

10.
1177/0021934703255596
JOURNAL
Harris-Lacewell
OF BLACK
/ STUDY
STUDIES
OF WHITE
/ NOVEMBER
RACIAL ATTITUDES
2003 ARTICLE
THE HEART OF THE

POLITICS OF RACE
Centering Black People in the
Study of White Racial Attitudes
MELISSA V. HARRIS-LACEWELL
University of Chicago
This piece confronts a serious deficiency in the literature on racial politics.

The defining works of White racial attitudes fail to grapple with the com-
plexities of African American political thought and life. In these studies,
Black people are a static object about which White people form opinions.
This article offers a critique of the field of race politics by outlining the con-
sequences of a failure to seriously include African Americans in theoretical
and empirical analyses of American race.
Keywords: race and politics; African American; American politics
For more than a half century, social scientists have been examin-
ing the contours of American racial opinion. More recently, schol-
ars of race politics have been innovating new techniques for study-
ing the complex ways that White racial attitudes shape national
politics and public policy. Although there is serious, fractious,
ongoing debate within this research, there is also nearly unanimous
consent among these scholars that, to borrow from Cornel West,
race matters. Social scientists may disagree about how or why it
matters, but there is a broad agreement that racial considerations
continue to influence the ways that White citizens think about poli-
tics and policy in America. There is another, far more insidious
agreement among scholars of race politics. It is usually unstated
and implicit, but the consensus exists nonetheless that Black people
don’t matter.
JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, Vol. 34 No. 2, November 2003 222-249

DOI: 10.1177/0021934703255596
© 2003 Sage Publications
222
Harris-Lacewell / STUDY OF WHITE RACIAL ATTITUDES 223
Although the idea that Black people are marginal to the study of
race has been an implicit assumption underlying much of the last
decade’s work on race politics, it has finally been unambiguously
articulated in a 2000 volume on the state of the field. In a chapter of
Racialized Politics, Sniderman, Crosby, and Howell (in Sears,
Sidanius, & Bobo, 2000) assert that
concentrating on the cleavage between Blacks and Whites misses

the heart of the politics of race. There is a political contest over
racial policy because White Americans themselves differ as to what
should be done. If the cleavage over racial politics were fundamen-
tally racial, it would not be possible to assemble a winning majority
in behalf of politics to assist Blacks. On the contrary, just so far as a
coalition is formed across racial lines, racial policies are effectively
contestable. The nub of the analytic problem, it follows is to under-
stand why some Whites favor and others oppose an array of differ-
ent policies to assist Blacks. (p. 272)
This assertion by Sniderman and his colleagues makes explicit a

belief in the irrelevance of Black people to the actual politics of race
and, by extension, to the academic study of race. My project in this
article is not to add another voice to the debate about how and why
race matters. Rather, I offer a critique of the contemporary social
scientific study of race by showing how the omission of Black
agency from the study of race causes researchers to ask the wrong
questions and to fail to interrogate the assumptions on which their
empirical work and conclusions are based.
I am not the first to offer this criticism. Sociologist Larry Bobo
(in Sears et al., 2000) has criticized scholars of race for “thoroughly
marginalizing the opinions of African Americans” and argues that
“ignoring the voices of people of color results chiefly in a severe
underestimation of the role of group interests in the politics of affir-
mative action” (p. 139). Political scientist Michael Dawson (in
Sears et al., 2000) argues that there is a racial structure to the
research community on race that allows researchers of White racial
attitudes to ignore the contributions of scholars of Black public
opinion. In this article, I offer a specific accounting of the ways that
224 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / NOVEMBER 2003
African Americans have been marginalized in the study of race and

suggest the consequences for these omissions.
This article is organized into five sections. First, I give a brief
overview of the contemporary terrain of the study of White racial
attitudes. Second, I offer a diagnosis of the problem of Black
marginalization within this literature. Third, I outline the potential
theoretical and empirical consequences for failing to deal with
African American agency. I then review the shortcomings of cur-
rent scholarship that attempts to incorporate Blacks in the study of
race. And finally, I offer remedies for future research in the field.
THE STUDY OF WHITE RACIAL ATTITUDES
The empirical, quantitative study of American racial attitudes is

rooted in the surveys begun in 1942 by the National Opinion
Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. These
investigations gave social scientists the first systematic, reliable,
iterative source of data on the beliefs of White Americans toward
the issue of race. The research emerging from these early studies
has grown into a body of scholarship now nearly 60 years old. In
these decades, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and
political scientists have engaged in debates about the cognitive
basis of prejudice (Kutner & Gordon, 1964; Linville & Jones,
1980; Tajfel, 1970), the role of stereotypes in attitude development
(Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Sherif, 1956;
Tajfel, 1982), the sources of change in racial attitudes (Adorno,
Frankel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Stanford, 1950; Altemeyer, 1994;
Campbell, 1965), and the contours of Black political attitudes
(Dawson, 1994; Sigelman & Welch, 1991; Smith & Seltzer, 1992;
Tate, 1994). In the most recent decade, many scholars have turned
to questioning the relationship between White racial attitudes and
support for various public policies, which disproportionately affect
people of color in the United States (Bobo, 1988; Brigham &
Weissbach, 1972; Kinder, 1986; Kuklinski et al., 1997; Peffley,
Hurwitz, & Sniderman, 1997; Schuman, Steeth, & Bobo, 1985;
Sniderman, Piazza, Tetlock, & Kendrick, 1991). This policy-
focused study of White racial attitudes is often referred to as the

study of “race politics.”
Scholars of American racial attitudes have been in agreement for
more than 30 years about several features of White public opinion.
The General Social Survey (GSS) from 1940 to 1972 shows a clear
trend toward increasing acceptance of racial integration across sev-
eral aspects of personal interaction including integrated schools,
marriages, and housing. This liberalization of White attitudes is
steady and steep in the first 30 years of GSS measures (Brigham &
Weissbach, 1972; Condran, 1979). This trend of increased support
for integration is paired with a sharp decrease in support of tradi-
tional, biological explanations of racial inferiority.1 These two
trends have continued into the turn of the new century. More
Whites than ever now repudiate old-fashioned racism (Schuman et
al., 1985; Sears et al., 2000; Sniderman & Carmines, 1997).
The puzzle for scholars of race is the fact that there has not been
an equivalent rise in support for liberal racial policies among White
Americans. White support for federal policies to ensure school and
workplace integration has stagnated since the 1960s2 (Sears et al.,
2000). Explaining this paradox is where the contentious debates
arise for scholars of racial politics.
There are several competing schools of thought in the study of
White racial attitudes. First, there are sociopsychological
approaches, including the subtle or ambivalent racism school
denoted by the work of Meertens and Pettigrew (Meertens &
Pettigrew, 1997; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). This approach
argues that White racial attitudes are characterized by a defense of
traditional values, exaggeration of cultural differences, and
absence of positive emotions toward outgroups. The work of
Adorno et al. (1950) and Altemeyer (1994) on the authoritarian
personality is among the psychological approaches. They identify
a constellation of personality characteristics including intolerance,
submissiveness to authority, and cognitive rigidity that is associ-
ated with White racial attitudes. Finally, the work of Kinder and
Sears (1981) and their coauthors has offered the symbolic racism
theory arguing that a blend of anti-Black affect and traditional
American values contributes to White resistance toward affirma-
tive action and other government-sponsored remedies for racial

inequality.
A second set of theories in the study of White racial attitudes
grows out of the tradition of social structural approaches. Among
these theories is Campbell’s (1965) realistic group conflict theory
stating that intergroup attitudes reflect the nature of the relationship
between groups’ material interests and that threat or perceived
threat is the engine of difference in racial attitudes. A second theory
in the social-structural approaches, advanced by Bobo and his
coauthors (Bobo et al., in Tuch & Martin, 1997), is the theory of
laissez-faire racism. Laissez-faire racism argues that forms of dom-
ination are more loosely coupled, complex, and permeable than in
the past, but that African Americans remain uniquely disadvan-
taged and that this disadvantage is accompanied by widespread
acceptance of notions of Black inferiority. Social dominance the-
ory, developed by Sidanius and Pratto (1999), argues that group-
based social hierarchies are reproduced by interaction and rein-
forcement of inequality by individuals or institutions of the domi-
nant group.
The final school of thought in the debate about White racial atti-
tudes are political theories most often associated with the work of
Sniderman et al. (1991), Carmines and Stimson (1989), and their
various coauthors. Their principled politics approach argues that
disagreements over racial policies are often about political rather
than racial attitudes. They argue that the politics of race revolves
around policy agendas and that White attitudes are structured by
the choice sets provided by these policy agendas. For these schol-
ars, prejudice is not a meaningful explanatory variable in White
policy attitudes. Principled political positions explain the bulk of
the variation among Whites.
In the past decade, the debates between these scholars have not
been characterized by friendly intellectual exchange. Rather, race
politics has been a battlefield of vicious criticisms and intense argu-
ment, largely centered on a disagreement between Sniderman and
his colleagues versus the social structural and sociopsychological
researchers. The core of the debate is the question of whether atti-
tudes toward racial policies are structured by principled positions
about the appropriate role of government or by lingering racial ani-

mosity and group interests.
Although the debate rages about measurement of attitudes,
specification of models, and interpretation of empirical findings,
there is an insidious trend compromising the heart of the study of
race politics that has gone largely undiscussed: the stunning
absence of African Americans from the study of race. It is an omis-
sion that substantially plagues the field on all sides of the politics
versus racism debate. Not all scholars are equally guilty of it, but
there is a pervasive failure to deal with Black people in the study of
race and this failure compromises the scholarly integrity of the field
more than many of the more technical aspects of research that
scholars of race debate.
DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM
The problematic position of African Americans in the study of

race politics takes several forms:
• Blacks as irrelevant or invisible

• Blacks as the “other” to White “citizens”
• Blacks as norm-violating, assistance seekers
BLACKS AS IRRELEVANT AND INVISIBLE
African Americans are rendered irrelevant or invisible in the

study of race politics in two ways: (a) through a failure to account
for Black agency in affecting White attitudes and (b) through a
refusal of scholars of race to grapple with the literature on Black
public opinion.
One of the more egregious examples of the invisibility exclusion
occurs in the very well received and regarded work by Carmines
and Stimson (1989). In Issue Evolution, Carmines and Stimson use
a biological theory of evolution to model change over time in the
issue of race in national U.S. politics. They argue that strategic poli-
ticians manipulate issues, politicizing those that benefit the party
and de-emphasizing those that don’t benefit the party. Dissatisfied,

out-parties have a constant motive to overturn the status quo
through the use of issues. They argue that race was important dur-
ing Reconstruction and then disappeared and came to be seen as a
regional issue. The New Deal coalition began to force the Demo-
cratic Party to address the issue of race, but in the 1950s there was a
return to traditional party positions. Then in the 1960s, propelled
by the civil rights movement, the parties staked out very distinct
positions on the issue of race and brought racial politics back to the
center of American politics.
This analysis is a clear example of the race politics literature ren-
dering African Americans irrelevant. The idea that race is only “an
issue” when it is seen as such by national, White political actors
requires blindness to the lives and politics of Black people. Race
was an issue for the millions of African Americans who experi-
enced and resisted the repressive Jim Crow South and the humiliat-
ing, violent Northern and West (Kelley, 1990; Payne, 1995).
Carmines and Stimson’s argument only works if we ignore the
activism of African American elites and masses throughout the
periods they perceive as having no race politics. Local and national
African American organizations worked furiously to secure racial
progress during the 40s and 50s (Kluger, 1975), a period that
Carmines and Stimson label a “return to normalcy” void of a poli-
tics of race.
In their entire book, which is subtitled Race and the Transforma-
tion of American Politics, not one Black person or Black organiza-
tion is ever mentioned, much less analyzed. This is a fundamentally
bankrupt approach to the study of racial politics in America
because it willfully strips African Americans of any meaningful
role in American racial politics. At the turn of the last century,
DuBois (1903) mused that Black people in America know how it
feels to be a problem. Myrdal (1944) called the Negro “an Ameri-
can dilemma.” This is also how Black people are treated in much of
the work on race. But African Americans are not merely a problem
or dilemma. Black people are political agents with attitudes and
strategies that contribute to the politics of America, even when they
are unobserved and unattended to by Whites.
A second form of Black invisibility in the study of race occurs

when scholars of White racial attitudes choose to ignore the
research of scholars of Black public opinion. When discussing the
fields of race politics and Black politics, Dawson (in Sears et al.,
2000) observes, “There are racially separate research communities
with some, but not abundant crossover” (p. 355). This point is made
clear in a recent volume on race politics (Tuch & Martin, 1997). In
this volume (Tuch & Martin, 1997), the late A. Wade Smith states
that “although the majority of scholars wrestling with issues of race
and racism remain White, African American and other minority
scholars now hold prominent places in discussion of race and racial
change” (p. 14). Although Smith is making an attempt to be
inclusionary, this statement reflects the continuing failure to recog-
nize research on Black public opinion as relevant to the body of lit-
erature on race. Although it is not my goal to essentialize Black
people by arguing that anything written about African Americans
is about race, it must be acknowledged that much of the research on
Black public opinion deals with African American racial attitudes
(Bracey, Meier, & Rudwick, 1970; Carlisle, 1975; Dawson, 1994,
2001; Sigelman & Welch, 1991; Smith & Seltzer, 1992; Tate,
1994). And this research, conducted mostly by Black scholars, is
willfully ignored by race politics researchers. The notion that
Black scholars are only now emerging in the discussions on race
requires an ignorance of decades of work by Black scholars on
Black public opinion.
Writing on the notion of invisibility in Ellison’s Invisible Man,
Roberts (1999) correctly notes that “in Ellison’s narrative, invisi-
bility is not a trope for nonexistence, nonfunctionality, or even
meaninglessness. It is a metaphor that figures a state of being that
comes into existence when others refuse to see us, to acknowledge
our existence, to accept our presence as making a contribution to a
world of meaning” (p. 121). By this understanding, it is clear that
scholars of race have rendered African Americans invisible in their
scholarship. The refusal to grapple with African American political
history, attitudes, or strategies within the study of American racial
politics imposes invisibility on Black people.
BLACKS AS “OTHER” TO THE WHITE CITIZEN
A second problem with the presentation of Blacks in race poli-

tics scholarship is the pervasive use of the term citizen or American
when referring only to White citizens. It is a problem that happens
in tables of empirical results, titles of books and articles, and even
theoretical discussion about racial attitudes (Alvarez & Brehm,
1997; Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Gilens, 1999; Sniderman et al.,
1991). Race politics scholars have been sloppy. Instead of specify-
ing their findings as research on White racial attitudes, they have
claimed knowledge of American racial attitudes.
This is a pervasive problem in this literature, but some examples
stand out as particularly egregious. One is Gilens’s book entitled
Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999). This piece is a clear example
of this common practice of excluding Blacks from the category
“American.” Using data from several national surveys including
the NES, GSS, and National Race and Politics Study, Gilens (1999)
examines White racial attitudes while asserting, “I examine the
preference for increasing and decreasing welfare spending among
Americans with difference perceptions of race” (p. 68, italics
added). Using several different analytic techniques, Gilens con-
cludes that White American attitudes toward welfare are largely
shaped by their perceptions of the deserving and undeserving poor
and further that this notion of deservedness is linked to racial ste-
reotypes (bolstered by media portrayals) of Blacks as lazy.
Throughout the text, Gilens utterly fails to acknowledge that his
work is not about why Americans hate welfare, it is about why
White Americans hate welfare.
My point here is not to critique either his underlying theory or
his generally convincing empirical evidence but to point out the
ease with which Blacks are dismissed as irrelevant even in a text,
which fundamentally deals with American notions of Blackness as
portrayed in popular culture. It is possible that Black attitudes
toward welfare are structured by processes similar to those Gilens
proposes for White opinion. It is conceivable that African Ameri-
cans also believe welfare recipients are lazy and that Black attitudes
are affected by media images of the poor. But we certainly have no

way of assessing this hypothesis from Gilens’s evidence.
Further, I would argue that the more interesting question is the
broader one that Gilens’s title suggests he will address. Why do
Americans, not just White Americans, resist welfare? Perhaps both
Whites and Blacks respond to notions of the undeserving poor. May-
be Black attitudes toward welfare are structured by a different set of
concerns, such as racial independence and pride. These are research-
worthy questions, but they seem never to occur to Gilens, because
for him the notion of White and American are synonymous.
It is impossible to imagine that an author of a volume on Black
public opinion would be able to title her work American Political
Attitudes. Publishers, reviewers, and peers would note that the title
is misleading, because the book is not about American attitudes but
about African American attitudes. This criticism, however, is
rarely leveled at scholars like Gilens who study White attitudes and
then purport to have researched Americans. This linkage of White-
ness and citizenship occurs on all sides of the race politics debates;
it is not a shortcoming of a particular ideological or scholarly posi-
tion, rather it is an implicit notion that infects much of the work of
many race scholars.
BLACKS AS NORM VIOLATING, ASSISTANCE SEEKERS
In addition to rendering Blacks invisible or excluding them from

the category “citizen,” race politics scholars often base their
research on erroneous assumptions about the content of African
American politics. This occurs primarily through the uninterro-
gated notions (a) that African Americans violate norms of Ameri-
can individuality and industriousness and (b) that African Ameri-
cans want government assistance in any available form.
A central claim of researchers from the sociopsychological
school of symbolic racism is that White policy attitudes are
affected by a new racism, which is a blend of traditional American
values and anti-Black affect. Symbolic racism has been hotly criti-
cized since its introduction (see critique by Sniderman & Tetlock,
1986). And the major figures associated with the theory have
backed off of some of the original propositions (Kinder, 1986;

Sears, 1988). But race researchers in this tradition continue to
maintain that “the conjunction of being Black and violating funda-
mental individualistic values seems to be the lightning rod that
attracts opposition to liberal racial policies” (Sears, Henry, &
Kosterman, in Sears et al., 2000, p. 113).
This proposition reflects another way that Black people are
marginalized in the study of race. When symbolic racism research-
ers talk about the blend of anti-Black affect and traditional Ameri-
can values, the “traditions,” “America,” and “values” they are refer-
ring to are always racialized. Although these scholars present
individualism, meritocracy, and the work ethic as if they are race-
neutral values, any careful observer of American history recog-
nizes that this is an erroneous assumption. Notions of individuality
and success through hard work are fundamentally intertwined with
maintenance of White domination and African American subordi-
nation (Smith, 1997).
Therefore, there are two important processes that race research-
ers ignore. First, by assuming that the values of the “American
creed” are race neutral, they fail to account for the implicit racism
inherent in American constructions of individualism and meritoc-
racy. Thus, they underestimate the effects of racism by assuming
that American ideals are free from racial animus. They fail to see
that Blackness itself is a violation of traditional White American
values. The principled politics researchers fall into the same trap by
assuming that political conservatism is a race-neutral idea, when in
fact American political history shows it to be linked with racial ide-
ology (Smith, 1997).
Second, race researchers ignore that there are traditional Ameri-
can values associated with marginalized groups in American social
order. These are traditional American values rarely considered in
discussions of the American creed. My point here is not to
essentialize Blackness and claim that African Americans have bio-
logically inherited an Afrocentric worldview, which is more com-
munal. But I do want to suggest that the history of Blacks in Amer-
ica has led to a set of American values, which are not uniformly
similar to those of White Americans (Levine, 1977). For example,
African Americans display consistently higher levels of religiosity

and egalitarianism than White Americans (Smith & Seltzer, 1992).
Just as it is inaccurate to assume that citizen means White, it is also
erroneous to assume that “traditional American values” only refer
to the traditions and values of White Americans. Blacks are not vio-
lators of American norms, they are simply bound by a unique set of
American norms.
Another mistaken assumption underlying much of the research
on race is the notion that Blacks uniformly support policies of gov-
ernment assistance. Race researchers spend a great deal of time
asking why Whites continue to oppose policies such as affirmative
action and welfare. Different hypotheses are offered for why
Whites, who are less racist than at any time in American history,
remain unwilling to provide policy assistance to Blacks (Edley,
1996). But, these writers rarely interrogate the notion that support-
ing affirmative action, welfare, or busing is a show of racial sup-
port. Sniderman and his colleagues in the principled politics school
argue that failure to support redistributive policies is not necessar-
ily racist but instead is a reflection of deeply held political values.
But even that assertion begins with defending itself against the
assumption that what Black people want is help and that not giving
Black people help requires defense against a charge of racism.
If we look more carefully at Black people themselves, it is clear
that not all Blacks are in favor of all forms of government assis-
tance. The range of responses to racial injustice among Black
Americans is equal to that of Whites (Appiah & Gutman, 1996). A
full third of Blacks do not support increases in federal spending to
assist Blacks; nearly 40% do not believe that the government has a
special obligation to improve Blacks’ standard of living; more than
half believe that Blacks should work their way up with no special
favors; and more than a third oppose hiring preferences for Blacks
(Tuch et al., in Tuch & Martin, 1997). These figures do not dimin-
ish the important racial gap that continues to exist in the political
attitudes of Whites and Blacks. These figures do not indicate that
Whites who oppose government assistance to Blacks are not racist.
These figures do demand recognition that African Americans are
not a monolithic political community. Not all Blacks believe that
government assistance is the best strategy for addressing racial

inequality. In fact, recent research suggests that some form of
nationalism, not integrationism, is the most pervasive worldview
among African Americans (Dawson, 2001).
When race researchers assume that all Blacks are assistance
seekers, they assume that we can illuminate racial attitudes through
an exploration of White views toward government assistance. The
belief in a unitary Black population is false, which means that to
fully understand racial politics we must understand White attitudes
toward a variety of different strategies proposed by Blacks. But as
long as race researchers push Black people to the margins of race
research, this deeper analysis can never occur.
WHAT IS AT STAKE
I have shown that in the study of race politics Black people are
either invisible, wrongly excluded from the category “American,”
or wrongly portrayed as monolithic assistance seekers. In this
highly contentious field of race politics, these could appear to some
observers as little more than a scholar of Black public opinion beg-
ging for attention from the “big boys” in race politics. Therefore, it
is reasonable to ask whether there are any substantive conse-
quences for failing to include Black people in the study of race poli-
tics. There are several:
1. Erroneous conclusions about processes

2. Unexplored alternative hypotheses
3. Inaccurate historical accounts
Arguably, the most serious problem facing quantitative, empiri-

cal researchers is the problem of model misspecification. No matter
how sophisticated the statistical technique used to estimate it, a
model that fails to include relevant variables will consistently lead
to biased results. In a like manner, this is the problem facing race
researchers when they ignore Black agency. Failing to account for
the meaningful contributions of Black people to the politics of race
leads these investigators to draw conclusions based on biased

information.
For example, race researchers rarely discuss a simple reality illu-
minated by journalist David Shipler (1997) in his account of race in
America. Whites, on average, because they have the privilege of
being the racial norm, spend considerably less time thinking about
issues of race than African Americans. In his experience of discuss-
ing race over the course of several years with many different kinds
of Americans, Shipler concludes “that a Black person cannot go
very long without thinking about race; she has already asked her-
self every question that I could possibly pose. By contrast, most
Whites rarely have to give race much thought” (p. 10). Any public
opinion or social psychology researcher knows that there are seri-
ous consequences to this asymmetry. If Shipler’s observation is
correct, when surveyors ask African Americans about racial issues,
they are tapping into well-developed beliefs, whereas Whites are
offering attitudes formed more immediately. This means that
White respondents will be significantly more susceptible to mea-
surement error introduced through priming and questionnaire arti-
facts. White racial attitudes would need to be analyzed in an
entirely different light if investigators learned that they were not
tapping deeply held beliefs but quickly formed responses. This, of
course, is a testable notion and its effects could be controlled for by
using measures that control for the frequency and intensity with
which different Whites normally think about race in their daily
lives. But because Black people and their experience with race is
never considered, race researchers fail to see this excluded variable
and thus cannot diagnose the misspecification in their models.
Instead, they continue to argue about the sophistication of the esti-
mation of biased models.
The failure to deal with African Americans creates a blindness
that allows race researchers to fail to explore alternative hypothe-
ses. The principled politics literature asserts that many Whites
oppose liberal policies for Blacks because they have a principled
stance against government intervention more generally. But there
is an important alternative to this notion that these researchers
never test. A significant portion of African Americans support, not
government intervention, but Black autonomy. They believe that

the best strategy for addressing inequality is autonomous Black
control of organizations, economies, and politics in predominately
Black communities. If Whites oppose liberal policies because they
are proponents of small government, then they ought to be support-
ive of Black nationalist agendas. On the other hand, if Whites are
really motivated by racial distrust and dislike, then they will oppose
nationalist agendas as much or possibly more than liberal policies.
This is a reasonable and obvious question to ask, but it is one that
the principled politics researchers never ask because they never
consider the diversity of Black political thought.
Historical accounts in race research rarely occur, but when they
do they are often inaccurate or incomplete because of the failure to
account for the role of African Americans. For example, I submit
that Carmines and Stimson would have to fundamentally rethink
the question of how race operates as a political issue if they were to
consider the activities of African American civil rights organiza-
tions. Their neat story about how race fades into the background
would have to be substantially rewritten if they accounted for the
state repression of NAACP (Kluger, 1975) and labor organizing
among Blacks in the North and South (Kelley, 1990). These events
demonstrate that there is a continuing politics of race even in peri-
ods where Carmines and Stimson assert that there is not. Similarly,
the assertion by Sniderman and his colleagues that the politics of
government nonintervention is a race-neutral value can only be
made because they ignore the history of government-supported
racism and inequality in America.
Symbolic racism asserts that it is a common White stereotype for
Whites to believe Blacks to be lazy. But it is a stereotype with a spe-
cific history in America (Jordan, 1968). The history of this idea is
never investigated or commented on by these researchers, and
therefore the stereotype of Black laziness is presented as an uncon-
tested, ahistorical truth, when in fact it is not. Shipler (1997), quot-
ing James Baldwin, writes, “The country’s image of the Negro,
which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to
reflect, with frightening accuracy, the state of mind of the country”
(p. 299). This suggests to us that public opinion race researchers
should more closely interrogate the assumption that Blacks are

norm violators because it will reveal something about the White
people who believe it. Asking why Whites believe that Blacks are
lazy and unattached to the Protestant work ethic would require a
historical accounting of Black and White relations in the United
States, a project that these investigations do not even attempt.
FAILED ATTEMPTS AT BLACK AGENCY
Not all scholars of race marginalize African Americans. There

are several scholars who have not ignored African Americans but
who have taken Black people seriously as agents in the politics of
race. I submit, however, that most of these attempts have failed to
adequately address the problems that arise from exclusion and
invisibility. There are two major categories of attempts at Black
agency:
• Black Bodies: African American Populations and Race of Inter-

viewer Effects
• Black Co-Conspirators in Racism: Social Dominance Theory
Researchers in each of these categories retrieve African Americans

from the shadows of complete obscurity, but none wholly account
for the role of Black people in the politics of race.
BLACK BODIES: AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATIONS

AND RACE OF INTERVIEWER EFFECTS
There are two literatures that investigate how Black bodies influ-
ence White racial attitudes. First, there is work that investigates
how various levels of integration affect White people’s perceptions
of race and policy (Kinder & Mendelberg, 1995; Massey &
Denton, 1993; Taylor, 2000). Second, there is a body of research
that specifies how the race of interviewer affects White responses
to survey questions (Kinder & Sanders, 1996; Sanders, 1996). The
scholarship produced from these approaches has been useful in
many ways but continues to strip Black people of full agency in the
politics of race.
Analyzing data from the 1990 and 1994 General Social Survey,
Marlee Taylor finds that “White negativity swells as the local Black
population grows, especially outside the South” (in Sears et al.,
2000, p. 119). She finds that there are a number of racial policy
dimensions for which White attitudes are very sensitive to local
racial context. It is particularly interesting that she actually finds an
increase in traditional racism when there is a high proportion of
Blacks, and this effect is not sensitive to economic context. That is,
a poor Black population is not any more threatening than a middle-
class Black population. Her work reinforces the earlier findings of
Massey and Denton (1993), that Whites avoid African Americans,
and challenges the work of Kinder and Mendelberg (1995), that
racial isolation, not integration, enhances the role of prejudice in
White attitudes.
The second type of race politics research concerned with Black
bodies is the research on race of interviewer effects, most notably
the work of Sanders (Kinder & Sanders, 1996; Sanders, 1996).
Sanders (1996) is sincerely concerned with the ways that Black
presence alters the expression and measurement of White attitudes.
She argues that survey interviews are one site of racial integration
worthy of study as a political phenomenon. When the interviewer is
of a race different from the respondent, it creates an integrated situ-
ation, a circumstance that may be common or uncommon for the
respondent. “Explicitly and intentionally varying interviewer race
provides a way for political analysts to investigate the effects of
integration and segregation on American political thinking”
(Sanders, 1996, p. 6). Sanders shows that race of interviewer effects
are so powerful that they can actually alter White perceptions of
fact-based reality. Survey respondents asked about the economic
realities of Blacks and Whites respond differently depending on the
race of the person asking them the question. In their joint volume,
Kinder and Sanders (1996) show that liberal views on race are
expressed more often in the presence of Black interviewers and less
often in the presence of White interviewers for both Black and
White respondents.
These approaches are a minimum way of reincorporating the

meaningfulness of Blackness into the discussion of White racial
attitudes. That White attitudes are sensitive to racial context is the
lesson of both Taylor and Sanders. Their findings are a strong
empirical refutation to Sniderman’s assertion that Black people do
not matter in the politics of race. But the problem with Black popu-
lation and race of interview research is that Black agency is reduced
to the presence of the Black body. Through their physical presence,
African Americans change White racial thinking. This is itself a
provocative finding, but these authors never fully interrogate the
meaning of the fact that a Black body, devoid of political or ideo-
logical content, can affect White attitudes. Neither the Black popu-
lation nor the race of interviewer work goes far enough in determin-
ing the intricate relations of real Black people with real White
attitudes. Black people still have no voice, only bodies. Although
this is a great improvement over their invisibility, it still falls short
of specifying the complex relations of race.
FOOT SHUFFLING, DISSEMBLING, AND BAD PARENTING:

BLACKS IN SOCIAL DOMINANCE THEORY
At first glance, social dominance theory appears to be a promis-

ing approach for centering Black people in the study of race.
Sidanius et al. (in Sears et al., 2000) argue that “there is strong evi-
dence that the contemporary American racial hierarchy is driven by
what it has always been driven by, namely the establishment and
maintenance of dominion, superiority, and the power of the collec-
tive US over the collective THEM” (p. 231). This approach appears
to be fundamentally concerned both with the attitudes of White
Americans and with the agency of African Americans. Certainly,
the social dominance theorists have rightly emphasized the vital
role of group interests in racial politics, but a deeper investigation
of social dominance theory reveals a very troubling notion of Black
agency.
Sidanius and Pratto (1999) provide a deeply problematic
account of African American complicity in racial oppression.
Under the heading of what they call “behavioral asymmetry,” they
identify ways that African Americans and other subordinate groups

contribute to their own subordinate status. They argue that through
(a) deference or outgroup favoritism and (b) self-debilitation, sub-
ordinate groups contribute to negative self-fulfilling prophecies.
The social dominance theorists argue “that the self-destructive and
self-debilitating behaviors are the primary means by which subor-
dinates actively participate in and contribute to their own continued
subordination” (p. 260, italics added). The social dominance theo-
rists rescue Black people from invisibility only to label them foot-
shuffling Uncle Toms (deference) who contribute to their own sub-
ordination through poor child-rearing practices, academic laziness,
and criminal activity (self-debilitation).
This portrayal of Black agency is not only disturbing, it is sim-
plistic and ahistorical. For example, Sidanius and his coauthor
argue that Black parents are more punitive than White parents, fail-
ing to allow their children the freedom to challenge authority
(Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). The authors, quoting contemporary
child-rearing scholars, suggest that this parenting style is deficient.
Two criticisms can be leveled against this argument. First, they fail
to provide convincing empirical evidence to support their claims of
a race or class difference in parenting styles.3 Second, if they could
prove this characterization to be true, Sidanius and Pratto still fail
to account for the historical necessity that underlies this parenting
style. In this country, the consequences for Black children who
challenge the authority of Whites are severe. Emmett Till was
lynched for breaking the unspoken rules of the Jim Crow South.
Amadou Diallo was shot 42 times because he did not know that
Black men are not allowed to reach for their wallets when con-
fronted by White police. And it is a daily occurrence in U.S.
schools that little Black boys and girls are tracked into special edu-
cation programs when their questioning of White academic author-
ity is labeled disruptive. Rather than pointing out that Black parents
have used punitiveness to help their children learn to negotiate a
complex and dangerous racial code, the social dominance theorists
simply suggest that Black people are playing into racial stereotypes
and therefore reinforcing their own oppression. Social dominance
theory revives Black people in the study of race, but their analysis
looks little different than Moynihan’s (1965) description of a

pathological Black family, Wilson’s (1996) argument about ghetto-
related behaviors, or the Thernstrom and Thernstrom (1997) dis-
cussion of unqualified Black college students. It certainly does
nothing to enrich our understanding of the complex and multifac-
eted relationship of Blacks to American race politics.
TOWARD A NEW MODEL OF INQUIRY
I am not the first scholar to level these criticisms against the field
of race politics. Bobo (in Sears et al., 2000) says that race and racial
group interests must be repositioned to a more central analytic
place and multiracial analysis needs to be more commonplace. In
the same volume, Dawson criticizes the study of race politics by
arguing (a) that the traditional left-right divide does not capture the
entire range of effects of ideological thinking on the politics of
race, (b) that there is a racial separatism in the research communi-
ties of largely White scholars studying race politics and largely
African American scholars studying “Black” politics, and (c) that
there needs to be a more careful attention to historical analysis in
social scientific race research (in Sears et al., 2000).
For my part, I would like to suggest that there are several ways to
center Black people in the study of race and to suggest that these
changes in approach will improve the quality of race scholarship.
1. Scholars must recognize that Blacks are neither a monolithic

group at any given time period nor are Black people the same on
average across time.
2. Researchers must recognize that White attitudes toward Blacks
are structured, in part, by the content of White’s interactions with
Black people.
3. Scholars should explore the idea that supposedly race-neutral val-
ues such as self-reliance and meritocracy are in fact racialized and
they should be more careful in their use of universal language such
as American or citizen.
4. Race researchers should include a gendered analysis that reflects

how the intersections of gender complicate the relationships
between Whites and African Americans.
5. Race researchers should move beyond the Black-White paradigm
through carefully theorized multiracial analysis.
Race research needs to account for variation in political attitudes

among Blacks at any given historical moment. The portrait of racial
politics will be incomplete as long as race scholars assume that atti-
tudes toward liberal racial policies are the only meaningful racial
attitudes. It is important to examine White attitudes toward other
Black political strategies. What are the limits to White women’s
support of cross-racial alliances around feminist agendas? Are
Whites supportive of Black nationalist attempts to create autono-
mous Black institutions? These understudied fields of inquiry are
at least as meaningful as the question of White support for affirma-
tive action.
Further, race politics should give greater attention to historical
analysis that accounts for the ways that African Americans have
contributed to the politics of race in America and the ways that
Whites have historically understood and responded to those activi-
ties. Race researchers agree about many aspects of White attitudes
toward Blacks across time. There is a dramatic liberalization of
Whites’ general racial perspectives followed by a stagnation of
White support for government policies (Schuman et al., 1985).
Whereas the field has been deeply divided about the causes of these
trends, it has generally ignored the fact that the Black people whom
Whites are responding to in the 1940s are not the same as Blacks in
the 1970s or 1990s. The African American population is not inert.
The political leadership, demands, strategies, and rhetoric have
shifted dramatically during the years that surveyors have been ask-
ing Whites about race.
I hypothesize that Whites responding to survey questions about
race in the late 1940s before the advent of the civil rights movement
thought of the average Black person differently than Whites
responding to those same questions in the late 1960s during the
summers of urban unrest. Race scholars have looked solely to char-
acteristics of respondents (e.g., age, level of education, ideology) to

understand their racial attitudes. But it is also reasonable to believe
that characteristics of the “object” have also affected patterns in
White attitudes. Race researchers need to begin placing their sur-
vey data in historical context with respect to public portrayals of
Black political agendas. How Whites respond to a primarily social
agenda may be quite different from how they respond to a primarily
economic one.
In addition to accounting for White responses to variation in
Black politics over time, race politics research should analyze the
racial context of White respondents themselves. This country is
still deeply racially divided, but in contemporary America there is
now considerable variation in Whites’ personal experiences with
African Americans. Within any respondent sample there will be
some Whites who are engaged in romantic or familial relationships
with Blacks, Whites who work in highly integrated workplaces,
Whites who have never had a meal with a Black person, and some
Whites who have never met a Black person. It is worth analyzing
how these various life experiences affect not only the substance of
White political and racial attitudes but also the strength with which
they hold them.
Journalist David Shipler’s (1997) book is disconcerting for
social scientists because much of what he discovers about White
attitudes simply is not reflected in much of the social science work
on White racial attitudes. The tensions and complexities he reveals
are far more textured than most social scientific accounts. Further,
the tenacity of old-style racism that he uncovers in his ethnographic
work is stunning compared to survey research’s agreement that bio-
logical, old-fashioned racism is dead. It is worth pondering why
respondents are most willing to express disturbing racial views in a
face-to-face discussion than they are when asked in anonymous
surveys. It forces us to examine whether social scientific processes
are woefully disconnected from reality. I do believe that quantita-
tive social science is powerful in a way that journalistic accounts
like Shipler’s are not, but the disconnect is worrisome for research-
ers of race.
Part of the reason that Shipler’s account provides a more tex-

tured picture is because of his insistence on placing people in
meaningful racial contexts. Even within the constraints of survey
research, investigators can measure the ways that integrated inter-
actions affect White attitudes. Further, experimental methods offer
the opportunity to manipulate racial contexts in ways that mimic
aspects of real-world racial life. Experimental processes can be
used to test the ways that Black and White people affect one
another in the politics of race.
In addition to placing respondents in their historical and contem-
porary racial context, race researchers need to be sensitive to the
history of ideas and language that they claim is race neutral. At the
most mundane level, this means carefully specifying theories,
tables, and titles so that “American” and “White” are not assumed
to be synonymous. More substantively, this means that notions of
individuality and meritocracy cannot be assumed to be free of
racial content. Jordan’s (1968) formidable historiography convinc-
ingly demonstrates that attitudes toward Blackness and Black peo-
ple are intricately bound to American founding ideals. I am not sug-
gesting that conservatism, individualism, or meritocracy are
fundamentally or necessarily racist ideas. I am arguing that the neat
division between race and politics suggested by the principled poli-
tics researchers is overly simplistic and ahistorical. The particular
racial history of this country requires that researchers be more care-
ful in their assumptions of neutrality. At a minimum, these
researchers must engage the historical evidence and offer an alter-
native account. Ignoring the history of Black people and racialized
political ideologies is insufficient.
I have written at length about the invisibility or flawed portrayal
of African Americans in the research on race. But gender is also
nearly always ignored in discussions of American racial politics.
All Blacks are not men and all women are not White (referencing a
volume by Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982). At a bare minimum, schol-
ars should account for gendered differences in White respondents’
attitudes toward racial policies and should develop measures that
allow investigation of differences in attitudes toward Black men
and Black women. More substantively, a gendered analysis would
tease out the complicated intersections of race and gender that

affect race policy. For example, race politics scholars have failed to
adequately address the ways that images of both race and gender
affect perceptions of American welfare policy. Policy makers and
media develop narratives not just about Black welfare recipients
but, more specifically, about Black women welfare recipients. Sim-
ilarly, images of Black violent crime are more specifically about
Black male crime. Much of American racial discourse is gendered,
and these gendered discourses must be specifically addressed in the
study of White racial attitudes.
In addition to ignoring gender, race researchers seem inexplica-
bly bound to the Black-White paradigm of American racial poli-
tics. In this piece, I am guilty of the same omission. The United
States is becoming an increasingly racially diverse nation. South
Asian, Pacific, Latino, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Ameri-
cans and immigrants are fundamentally altering the complexion of
America’s cities. The politics of race in America is now multiracial,
even in the South. Ignoring the ways that these racial and ethnic
groups affect racial attitudes and policies leads researchers to erro-
neous conclusions. But, dealing with the increasingly complex ter-
rain of American race must occur at the level of theory, not just
empirical work. Race researchers cannot simply add additional
“dummy variables” to equations that estimate models based on a
Black-White dyad. It is time for more research that carefully theo-
rizes the connections between these groups. There is an increasing
body of work produced with serious theorizing of our multiracial
society, but it must become more the norm than the exception
(Cain, Kiewiet, & Uhlaner, 1991; Gilliam, 1996; Link & Oldendick,
1996).
The social scientific study of race politics is a methodologically
innovative and incredibly productive field of research. But it is fun-
damentally flawed. As long as these researchers choose to ignore or
mischaracterize African Americans, there will be gaping holes in
our understanding of American racial politics. When African
Americans are rendered invisible, portrayed as monolithic, or
excluded as Americans, the picture of race is hopelessly inaccurate.
As long as the contributions of Black public opinion scholars are
ignored, the literature remains incomplete. But through careful

attention to historical and contemporary Black agency, race
researchers can finally capture the true heart of the politics of race.
NOTES
1. Currently, 90% of Whites do not think that Blacks have less inborn ability to learn (up
from 74% in the 1970s), 96% think that Black and White students should go to the same
schools (up from 32% in the 1940s), and 97% believe that Blacks and Whites should have an
equal chance to get any kind of job (up from 45% in the 1940s) (Schuman et al., 1985). These
consistently high levels of White racial openness on these and similar measures have been
replicated in other large and small, national and local surveys (e.g., General Social Survey,
Detroit Area Study, Gallup Polls, Harris Polls, National Race and Politics Study).
2. In the 1990s, only 38% of Whites believed that the federal government should ensure
integrated schools and only 44% thought the federal government should ensure fair job treat-
ment. Further, only 12% of Whites favored preferences in hiring or promotion for Blacks to
redress past discrimination and only 25% thought the federal government should work to
improve Black social and economic position (Schuman et al., 1985). Again, these consis-
tently low levels of support for government-sponsored racial policies have been replicated in
other large, national and smaller, regional surveys.
3. The authors cite 1967 data on reported cases of child abuse and neglect. These data are
not only woefully out of date but deeply biased because they are based on reported cases.
Poorer, Black parents are significantly more likely to be reported by schools and doctors to
child welfare agencies. The pathologies of the middle class are invisible. This is a point that
social dominance scholars ought to know well, but they choose to ignore it when making
these sweeping claims about the behavior of subordinate groups.
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Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell earned a B.A. in English from Wake Forest University in

Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1994) and a Ph.D. in political science from Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina (1999). She served as an adjunct professor of
political science at North Carolina Central University (1997-1999). She joined the
faculty of the University of Chicago in 1999 as an assistant professor of political sci-
ence. At the University of Chicago, she is an associated member of the Department of
Psychology and an affiliated member of the Center for Gender Studies and the Center
for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. She lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood
of Chicago with her husband and daughter.

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10.

THE HEART OF THE

This piece confronts a serious deficiency in the literature on racial politics.

Keywords: race and politics; African American; American politics

JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, Vol. 34 No. 2, November 2003 222-249

concentrating on the cleavage between Blacks and Whites misses

This assertion by Sniderman and his colleagues makes explicit a

African Americans have been marginalized in the study of race and

THE STUDY OF WHITE RACIAL ATTITUDES

The empirical, quantitative study of American racial attitudes is

focused study of White racial attitudes is often referred to as the

tive action and other government-sponsored remedies for racial

about the appropriate role of government or by lingering racial ani-

DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM

The problematic position of African Americans in the study of

• Blacks as irrelevant or invisible

BLACKS AS IRRELEVANT AND INVISIBLE

African Americans are rendered irrelevant or invisible in the

and de-emphasizing those that don’t benefit the party. Dissatisfied,

A second form of Black invisibility in the study of race occurs

BLACKS AS “OTHER” TO THE WHITE CITIZEN

A second problem with the presentation of Blacks in race poli-

are affected by media images of the poor. But we certainly have no

BLACKS AS NORM VIOLATING, ASSISTANCE SEEKERS

In addition to rendering Blacks invisible or excluding them from

backed off of some of the original propositions (Kinder, 1986;

African Americans display consistently higher levels of religiosity

government assistance is the best strategy for addressing racial

1. Erroneous conclusions about processes

Arguably, the most serious problem facing quantitative, empiri-

leads these investigators to draw conclusions based on biased

government intervention, but Black autonomy. They believe that

should more closely interrogate the assumption that Blacks are

FAILED ATTEMPTS AT BLACK AGENCY

Not all scholars of race marginalize African Americans. There

• Black Bodies: African American Populations and Race of Inter-

Researchers in each of these categories retrieve African Americans

BLACK BODIES: AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATIONS

These approaches are a minimum way of reincorporating the

FOOT SHUFFLING, DISSEMBLING, AND BAD PARENTING:

At first glance, social dominance theory appears to be a promis-

identify ways that African Americans and other subordinate groups

looks little different than Moynihan’s (1965) description of a

TOWARD A NEW MODEL OF INQUIRY

1. Scholars must recognize that Blacks are neither a monolithic

4. Race researchers should include a gendered analysis that reflects

Race research needs to account for variation in political attitudes

acteristics of respondents (e.g., age, level of education, ideology) to

Part of the reason that Shipler’s account provides a more tex-

tease out the complicated intersections of race and gender that

ignored, the literature remains incomplete. But through careful

Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell earned a B.A. in English from Wake Forest University in

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