• DOI:10.1111/J.0092-5853.2005.00117.X
• Corpus ID: 17066642

Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race‐Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?

@article{Feldman2005RacialRA,
  title={Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race‐Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?},
  author={Stanley Feldman and Leonie Huddy},
  journal={American Journal of Political Science},
  year={2005},
  volume={49},
  pages={168-183}
}

• S. Feldman, L. Huddy
• Published 2005
• Psychology
• American Journal of Political Science

White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries’ race and socio-economic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans. I sw hite opposition to racial policies driven by racial prejudice or is it grounded in race-blind ideological principles? This has been the subject of a prolonged debate among researchers of American race relations. The controversy has been most heated over race-conscious policies such as affirmative action which are opposed by a majority of white Americans. Pervasive opposition to affirmative action has lead some researchers to question whether opposition really stems from racism or is based instead on a principled objection to the nature of the programs themselves. This “principled” approach has been developed most forcefully by Sniderman and colleagues (Sniderman and Carmines 1997; Sniderman, Crosby, and Howell 2000), who argue that race-conscious policies violate individualism, equal treatment, and other basic tenets of American culture and are opposed by many whites on ideological grounds. They present further evidence that principled opposition to affirmative action is most pronounced among conservatives (Sniderman and Carmines 1997; Sniderman et al. 1996). From this perspective, white program opposition, especially conservative white opposition, represents a reasonable response to a flawed set of policies.