Racial resentment: The insidious force that divides America
It’s easy to look back across decades to see the workings of stark racism in American political life: Mob lynchings and police killings. Poll taxes and literacy tests imposed to prevent Black people from voting. Politicians of the 1950s and ‘60s aggressively defending segregation, and their more recent counterparts who use racially coded “dog whistles” to whip their base voters into action.
Such aggressive, overt racism remains a force in American culture, sometimes resonating across decades, even centuries, to shape race relations today. But David C. Wilson , dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, says we need to be more aware of other, more subtle social dynamics that reinforce racial inequality and injustice.
In a new book,
Racial Resentment in the Political Mind , Wilson and co-author
Darren W. Davis argue that many white people perceive that Black people, because of their race, unfairly receive enhancements that bring about racial equality, like scholarships, jobs and other advantages. Anxiety about the nation’s increasing diversity and what it means is making those resentments more intense, the authors say.
Those conflicts then play out in legislative bodies and the courts — indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to hear two cases that challenge affirmative action in university admissions.
“When policies aimed at producing racial equality and justice are proposed, the opposition is, in part, due to racism or prejudice,” Wilson said in a recent interview.
“But the stronger factors are tied to uncertainty about how the policies will disrupt a way of life that most whites have learned to navigate and benefit from. Rather than simply disliking African Americans or Hispanics, many white people also dislike distributing rewards or changing merit systems on the basis of a criterion they cannot benefit from.
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In that context, any racial progress today is perceived as coming at the expense of whites, even if it strengthens our democracy. … If you don’t pay attention to those psychological aspects of political decision-making, you’ll miss the nuance of American politics, let alone the politics of race.”
In a new book, Goldman School Dean David C. Wilson explores how changing U.S. demographics are driving white anxiety, resistance to racial justice
news.berkeley.edu
This forum is full of people like this and ths thread is an example of the type of people talked about in the article I posted.