Affiliation:
1. Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269
Abstract
Due to the centrality of race and racism in social, economic, and political life, coupled with the racially privileged position of White people, the assessment of White racial attitudes is an ongoing concern. There is a great deal of survey-based, quantitative work that demonstrates a compelling case of White attitudinal polarization—a grouping of authoritarian, racist attitudes versus another alliance of progressive, antiracist attitudes—an increasingly racialized culture war. However, other studies, largely qualitative and open-ended, demonstrate the heterogeneous, shifting, and hypocritical nature of White discourse about race. To resolve this paradox, I refrain from the assumption that White racial “attitudes” are essentially bifurcated, while I also refuse the contention that White people produce spontaneous narratives whole-cloth. Rather, I argue that with sustained attention to time, context, and triangulation, we can better understand how and why White people speak of People of Color in positive ways one moment and negative the next, marshaling both to defend, rationalize, or improve their racialized subject position. I argue that these contradictions are—à la Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment—“superposition strategies.” Both racist and antiracist attitudes are simultaneously alive and dead in the same individual or group. Contradictory White discourse helps maintain a sense of self-efficacy and coherent White racial identity within conflictual and politically supercharged social situations, as well as within racially unequal social structures.
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Reference113 articles.
1. White Bound
2. R. Delgado, J. Stafancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York University Press, New York, ed. 3, 2017).
3. A. W. Doane Jr., E. Bonilla-Silva, White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (Routledge, New York, 2003).
4. “What Group?” Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of “Color-Blindness”
5. Racial Formation in the United States
Cited by
5 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献