Reexamining Racial Resentment: Conceptualization and Content

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in the racial attitudes literature about the degree to which new racism measures actually tap negative racial beliefs. Racial resentment is one construct that has been criticized on such grounds. To date, Kinder and Sanders (1996) have proposed the most commonly utilized measure of racial resentment, which is largely based on a similar construct—symbolic racism. The authors enter this discussion by proposing and testing an alternative racial resentment measure, one that is more explicit. They analyze data from two convenience samples of college students and from two national adult samples. They find the Explicit Racial Resentment (EXR) measure to have strong measurement properties and associations with known correlates of racial attitudes, suggesting promise as a survey-based indicator of underlying racial resentment.