Archive: Jul 2008

Lapinski and Huber have an interesting article in the latest issue of Perspectives on Politics. In it they challenge Tali Mendelberg’s notion of implicit bias. Mendelberg makes the argument that direct racial appeals do not work in contemporary society because of the norm of racial equality. Lapinski and Huber claim that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit racist appeals among the public. Their case is particularly compelling for less educated voters. For this group, they found that:

For these citizens, explicit appeals therefore do not generate the egalitarian counter-reaction that inhibits racial priming,

This Real News Network video featuring interviews with West Virginia voters before the Democratic primary in that state provides some anecdotal evidence that subtlety in racial appeals is not necessary for some constituents.

What I have less trouble buying wholesale is that higher educated voters are not affected by racial appeals. Their argument for why this is the case is that educated people

already bring their racial resentment to bear in expressing policy opinions on important issues that might otherwise be vulnerable to racialization.

They claim that higher educated people are more likely to “self-prime” or bring racial attitudes into their policy decision-making regardless of they types of appeals made. I’m less inclined to buy this argument. I think the type of issue examined has an impact on how much priming effects matter. I also wonder what effect age has on priming effects.

This article by Jeffrey Grogger at the University of Chicago highlighted on the Freakonomics blog estimates the cost of “sounding black” to be a 10 percent decline in wages when controlling for other factors. What’s impressive about this study is the methodology used to derive the 10 percent figure:

How does Grogger know who “sounds black?” As part of a large longitudinal study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow-up validation interviews were conducted over the phone and recorded.

Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.

Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each voice and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.

It’s nice to have an army of graduate students 🙂 Here are a few interesting findings as described in the Freakonomics blog:

* whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites (as opposed to 10% for Blacks who “sound black.”

* blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.

* sounding “Southern” is almost as bad for your wages as “sounding Black”

These findings seem to reflect where we are in America right now. We are much more open to assimilation but actual cultural integration is still a high hurdle for most Americans. The majority culture is, in large part, prepared to accept those from historically discriminated groups in positions of power and influence as long as they conform to “conventional” society, which included a “normal” way of speaking and acting. hence the consternation amongst elements of the media over “terrorist fist bumps” and angry preachers.

I gave a talk a few days ago about diversity and multiculturalism and the conversation with the group got on to the “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail. I began to discuss the e-mails as a “smear” when one audience member stopped me and said “but he is a Muslim, isn’t he?” Of course, five minutes later, that same person was on about how much they hated Obama’s pastor.

Because Obama seems so incredibly conventional in his presentation, some people struggle to find a way to put him in the conventional “black” box. I think this is much more the case for older Americans than for younger ones who have grown up accustomed to the idea of full assimilation. But even among the young, the idea of “black speech” is associated with part exoticization and part inferiority. Take for example the frequent derogatory use of the word “ghetto,” denoting anything that is run down or in disrepair. Of course, my students say…. “that’s not about black people, whites can be ghetto too.”

These same students also think that “ghetto is cool” under certain circumstances and at certain times. “Ghetto” is great in the car with the windows rolled up, but not so hot when you are applying for a job.

01238 magazine has a story on a paper entitled “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan,” by a-list economists Steve Levitt and Ronald Fryer. They find that, in the main, the activity of the clan was more akin to the Elks or Masons than a contemporary terrorist/hate group:

The research sample showed that the average Klan member was better educated and wealthier than the surrounding population. He was also more likely to see the Klan as a fraternity of sorts than as a violent posse. When the two economists uncovered a trove of expense receipts in Pennsylvania, Fryer says, “I thought maybe we’d find something exciting, like rope or guns, but instead they were buying stuff like ice cream.

I haven’t read the entire article. I’d take issue with the research as presented in the article if it in any way downplays the incidents of real terrorism and brutality in which the Klan has historically engaged. But the article does highlight some fascinating aspects of how the Klan worked. It appeared that it worked much like modern pyramid schemes:

The Klan was highly effective at one thing, however: making money for its leaders. Rank-and-file members had to pay joining fees, “realm taxes,” and routine costs like robe purchases. Most of this money made its way to the top via an army of “salesmen,” who took their own cut. Levitt and Fryer calculated that in one year, David Curtis Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 other states, took home about $2.5 million (in 2006 dollars). “The Klan was able to bundle hatred with fraternity and make a real sell of it,” says Fryer.

Their study reminds us that racial/nativist hatreds can be exploited for both political and economic gain. I wonder if anyone has looked at contemporary nativist groups and examined their organizational and financial structures.

There has been some good recent scholarship (here and here) in political science challenging the use of the hypothetico-deductive model to explain how race impacts the political process. Traditionally, political scientists have taken race or ethnic identification to logically precede group-based interest-formation and mobilization.

The reality of race and ethnicity is that they are multifaceted, inter-sectional and contextual constructs that cannot be captured through survey research that asks respondents to check a box next to the ethnicity with which they identify.

Attempts by statistical researchers to ‘control for third variables’… ignore the ontological embeddedness of locatedness of entities within actual situation contexts.” (Emirbayer 1997, 289).

This is true, but then the question remains, how do you validly and reliably study identity in the political process. One interesting approach might be to employ folksonomies to race questions in political science. Rather than asking people to classify themselves according to the controlled vocabulary of the survey researcher, a folksonomy would allow the respondent to use as many self-identifiers they want to describe themselves. You can use social network analysis to group respondents based on the similarity of their self-tagging structures into clusters and then test whether cluster membership is related to a desired political outcome.