“Economic Insecurity and the Racial Attitudes of White Americans”

Abstract

The two dominant paradigms in the study of white Americans’ racial attitudes—symbolic racism and group position theory—while fundamentally differing with regard to theoretical orientations and causal emphases, concur in their rejection of individual-level economic circumstances—typically operationalized through either conventional measures of class or direct racial threats to whites’ personal lives—as a meaningful determinant of whites’ racial attitudes. This article argues that these existing measures do not sufficiently consider the subjective dimension of individuals’ economic well-being. As such, conclusions drawn from the relative lack of association between these measures and racial attitudes are likely overstated. Utilizing a measure of affective economic insecurity—anxiety concerning one’s economic circumstances—a strong correlative relationship is shown to exist between this dimension of individual-level economic circumstances and whites’ racial attitudes. Specifically, it is shown that affective economic insecurity is related to whites’ level of racial resentment, their perception of racialized labor market competition, and their attitudes toward immigration. A causal relationship between affective economic insecurity and perceptions of racialized labor market competition is established through an original survey experiment.