A Cosmopolitan Way of Life for All?

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to re-evaluate the independent impact of urban and regional residency on racial tolerance from 1972 to 2006. Recent scholarship has questioned the extent to which the effects of these subcultures reflect general toleration and/or more deep-seated underlying racial attitudes. Using data collected by the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, this article builds upon past research by including different measures of racial tolerance borrowed from the contemporary work of Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan to reassess the impact of these subcultures over a four-decade period. Findings indicate that Southerners remain more obdurate regardless of how racial tolerance is measured and this effect appears to be persisting across the four-decade period. The impact of urbanism, on the other hand, and its effect across time is much more variable and dependent on how racial tolerance is measured. This article further discusses these findings in the framework of the classical theories of Louis Wirth and Samuel Stouffer.