Racial Heritage
We are One: Understanding the Maintenance of Black Democratic Party Loyalty
Julian Wamble et al.
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite growing ideological diversity within the group, black Americans have maintained their overwhelmingly unified support for the Democratic Party. We argue that black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans’ use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of racial social context provided by the race of interviewer in face-to-face American National Election Study survey interviews of black respondents, we demonstrate the racialized social imperative of black Democratic party identification. We show that black respondents are more likely to identify as Democrats in the presence of other blacks, particularly those respondents whose conservative ideological placement provides cross-pressuring incentive to otherwise make an alternative partisan choice. Our social explanation of black partisan homogeneity is a significant departure from previous accounts that have focused almost exclusively on attitudinal ascriptions to racial shared fate.
Hate Crime Increases with Minoritized Group Rank
Mina Cikara, Vasiliki Fouka & Marco Tabellini
Harvard Working Paper, May 2021
Abstract:
People are on the move in unprecedented numbers across the globe. How does migration affect local intergroup dynamics? In contrast to accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the social group reference dependence hypothesis: violence and negative attitudes toward each minoritized group will depend on the number and size of other minoritized groups in a community. Specifically, as groups increase in rank in their relative size (e.g., to largest minority within a community), discriminatory behavior and attitudes toward them should increase accordingly. We test this hypothesis across U.S. counties between 1990 and 2010. Consistent with this prediction we find that, as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, and Arab populations increase in rank relative to one another, they become more likely to be targeted with hate crimes and more negative attitudes. The rank effect holds above and beyond group size/proportion, growth rate, and a number of other alternative explanations. This framework makes novel predictions about how demographic shifts may affect coalitional structures in the coming years and helps explain previous findings in the literature. More broadly, our results complement the existing literature by indicating that attitudes and behaviors toward social categories are not fixed or driven only by features associated with those groups, such as stereotypes.
Criminalized or Medicalized? Examining the Role of Race in Responses to Drug Use
Sadé Lindsay & Mike Vuolo
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drug policy has shifted from intense criminalization toward reforms that prioritize decarceration and treatment. Despite this shift, little is known about whether support for recent treatment-oriented drug policy is equitable by users’ race and the drug type. Using the opiate and crack cocaine crises as cases, we analyze 400 articles from the New York Times and Washington Post to assess the degree to which the two crises were racialized, criminalized, and medicalized. We find that media coverage medicalized and humanized White people who use opiates, while coverage of crack cocaine focused on criminalization, vilifying Black people who use drugs. We then conduct two vignette experiments (N=308; N=630) to examine whether these racialized frames shape public support for treatment or criminalization. We find the public more likely to support criminalization for Black people, while supporting drug treatment for White people. Respondents are more likely to support drug treatment for heroin use than for crack cocaine. Our findings suggest that support for medicalized approaches to drug use is more likely to occur for White people and drugs linked to White people, while Black people and drugs associated with Black people continue to be perceived as largely amenable to punitive options.
Whose Rights are Civil Rights? Evaluating Group Threat as an Explanation for Racial Differences in Attitudes toward Same-Gender Sexuality
Alexander Davis & Bethany Bryson
Journal of Homosexuality, forthcoming
Abstract:
The alleged prevalence of anti-gay bias among Black communities in the United States has received ample popular and academic attention in recent decades. But just how consistent is the purported relationship between race and homophobia? In this paper, we use the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey to show that public claims about “Black homophobia” have been dangerously overstated. Moreover, where racial differences in attitudes toward same-gender sexuality do occur, we find that the two most prevalent scholarly explanations for such gaps -- religious institutions and gender ideologies -- do not predict anti-gay bias for Black survey respondents. We thus derive an alternative explanation from scholarship on group threat: that perceived competition for political resources is what motivates racial differences in antagonism toward same-gender sexuality. Our results support that alternative and, in so doing, evince the importance of a relational approach to homophobia in academic and activist spheres alike.
Black Workers in White Places: Daytime Racial Diversity and White Public Opinion
Brian Hamel & Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the effects of racial context on public opinion often use residence-based measures of context, ignoring how the demographic composition of a context may change throughout the day. In this short article, we introduce a new zip code-level measure, racial flux, that accounts for how contexts differ between worker and resident populations. We merge our measure with survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and show that greater racial flux -- more Black workers relative to Black residents in a zip code -- is associated with more conservative voting behaviors and racial attitudes among whites who live in the zip code. Our study suggests that whites are as politically responsive to the presence of non-resident minorities as they are resident minorities. More work is needed on measuring racial context, and on exploring the contours of how and why context affects political preferences.
The Damages and Distortions from Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market
Peter Christensen & Christopher Timmins
NBER Working Paper, July 2021
Abstract:
By constraining an individual’s choice during a search, housing discrimination dis- torts sorting decisions away from true preferences and results in a ceteris paribus reduction in welfare. This study combines a large-scale field experiment with a residential sorting model to derive utility-theoretic measures of renter welfare loss associated with the constraints imposed by discrimination in the rental housing market. Results from experiments conducted in five cities show that key neighborhood amenities are associated with higher levels of discrimination. Results from the structural model indicate that discrimination imposes costs equivalent to 4.7% of annual income for renters of color, and that search behavior results in greater welfare costs for African Americans as their incomes rise. Renters of color must make substantial investments in additional search to mitigate the costs of these constraints. We find that a naive model ignoring discrimination constraints yields significantly biased estimates of willingness to pay.
Race and Income in U.S. Suburbs: Are Diverse Suburbs Disadvantaged?"
Ankit Rastogi
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, August 2021
Abstract:
Sociological narratives of communities of color often make two assumptions: that people of color are concentrated largely in cities and that communities of color are disadvantaged. However, the recent widespread suburbanization of people of color challenges both assumptions, destabilizing how we link race, place, and class. This visualization uses the 2019 American Community Survey to ask, How is racial diversity in suburbs associated with income? The findings suggest that, by and large, racially diverse suburbs are middle class when comparing their median household income with the national value ($63,000). The most multiracial suburbs host populations with the highest median incomes (mean ~ $85,000). Black and Latinx median household incomes surpass the national value in these diverse suburbs. Moreover, these findings are robust in regressions including metropolitan fixed effects. Given that most people of color live in suburbs, understanding suburban communities of color is critical for understanding the American geography of racial inequality.
Exposure to Anti-Black lives matter movement and obesity of the Black population
Hyun Joon Park et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Methods: We scraped geo-coded tweets (N = 51,020) that contained #BLM, #ALM, #WLM, and #BlueLM from 2014 to 2016. We determined the stances of the tweets on BLM using machine learning algorithms and aggregated stances at the metropolitan or micropolitan statistical area (MMSA) levels. Participants’ BMI and obesity status were derived from the 2017 BRFSS SMART data in 76 MMSAs, as compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (N = 20,530).
Results: After controlling for individual- and regional-level covariates, regional measures of racism and police brutality rate, and baseline BMI in 2014 aggregated on MMSA level, Black people had a higher BMI and prevalence of obesity in areas that showed higher negative stances on BLM. Stances against BLM were positively associated with implicit racism against Black people and can be an acute race-related stressor associated with negative downstream health outcomes.
Native Americans’ Experience of Chronic Distress in the USA
David Blanchflower & Donna Feir
NBER Working Paper, August 2021
Abstract:
Four million Native Americans who identify as single race live in the USA. Another three million identify as Native American in combination with another race. Yet they are rarely the focus of detailed research. We provide the first evidence that levels of consistently poor mental health, or chronic distress, among Native peoples were greater in every year between 1993 and 2020 than among White or Black Americans. We find this to be present among those over the age of thirty but less so for the young. Over time we demonstrate there has been a rise in chronic distress among Native Americans and multi-race individuals. However, chronic distress seems to be lowest among Native peoples living in the seven states with the largest Native American populations of Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma. In our judgment these facts are important and not widely known. This stands in stark contrast to the enormous scholarly and media interest in declining physiological well-being among White Americans.
Methamphetamine use among American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States
Lara Coughlin et al.
Drug and Alcohol Dependence, forthcoming
Methods: We examined past-year methamphetamine use from 2015 to 2019 between AI/ANs and the general non-institutionalized U.S. population using the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Then, we identify potential subgroups of AI/AN people at elevated risk of methamphetamine use across factors including demographic, social determinants, mental health, and co-occurring substance use.
Results: A total of 214,505 people, aged 18 or older, were surveyed between 2015 and 2019; 3,075 (0.55%) identified as AI/AN. An estimated 26.2 out of every 1000 AI/ANs used methamphetamine compared to 6.8 out of every 1000 in the general U.S. population. Compared to methamphetamine use in the general population, AI/AN methamphetamine use tends to cluster in rural areas and among those with low income. AI/ANs who use methamphetamine were more likely to be male, middle-aged, low income, have severe mental illness, and misuse other substances than AI/AN people who did not use methamphetamine.
Fraternity Membership and Negative Racial Attitudes among U.S. College Students
Frank Samson
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the years, race-related incidents involving Greek letter organizations (GLOs), especially fraternities, continue to arise despite the ensuing controversy and negative media attention that inevitably follow such incidents. The present study examines whether there is an association between GLO membership and negative ethnoracial attitudes given a range of relevant psychological, sociological, and political theories about ethnoracial attitudes. Building on insights from microclass research on attitudinal structuring and drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen (N = 2,817), results of linear regression models indicate that GLO membership is associated with heightened negative ethnoracial attitudes, particularly among white male students. Moreover, a measure of ethnoracial group affiliation partially mediates this effect. This latter finding suggests that among the various ethnoracial attitude theories, group position theory may be better formulated to explain an association between GLO membership and negative ethnoracial attitudes, given its consideration of both ingroup boundary formation and organizations. The results also support microclass processes and suggest future research to more clearly account for pre-occupational structuring that later feeds into occupational processes.