Dissonance Persists

Abstract

Attitudes toward race and politics continue to show tensions between antiracist norms and racist stereotypes, even among new generations of White Americans raised in an era of consensus on antiracist social norms. I suggest that this “dissonance” stems from a process of “two-tracked socialization” and I demonstrate the persistence of such dissonant attitudes in two ways. First, in the aggregate, the youngest cohorts of White Americans do not greatly differ from older generations in their policy preferences on racial matters and beliefs about race, politics, and inequality. Second, stereotypes still influence policy preferences among younger cohorts. On the second point, I replicate Gilens's work on the racialization of welfare policy attitudes with more recent data and added attention to differences and similarities across birth cohorts.