Exam 4: Contemporary Racial Framing: White Americans

You and a fellow student are discussing "family values." He tells you that black adults have different family values to whites. Explain to him that the central difficulty for many black families lies not in their values but in the difficult economic and other social circumstances this racist society constantly creates for them.

One group of researchers reviewed the significant literature on news depictions of African Americans and found:

Research on media priming demonstrates that even one major exposure to racist portrayals can engender stereotype-based responses among whites toward blacks.

Describe the study by Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally in which white research participants watched The Cosby Show.

Describe the pathbreaking study by Brittany Slatton that illustrates a negative racial framing of black families and "black culture" among white men.

Historical data on white images of and attitudes toward black Americans suggest that for centuries the overwhelming majority of whites have not been openly and unapologetically racist.

Recent research on white students at major college campuses found racial attitudes expressed on short-answer survey items were often identical to those expressed in response to similar interview questions requiring detailed responses.

A 1940s Gallup poll found that only nine percent of Americans polled thought there should be racially segregated trains and buses.

Racial prejudice:

A recent Washington Post analysis of surveys polling three generations of white Americans found:

An examination of news stories in Pittsburgh's newspapers and television media found that the largest block of reports on African American males was about crime.

Images in white minds of black Americans as ape-like and ape-linked are limited to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Describe Chris Crandall's and Mark White's survey of 200 Donald Trump supporters and 200 Hillary Clinton supporters before the 2016 presidential election.

A Los Angeles study surveyed 506 English-speaking respondents. Researchers found that:

Discuss how language and speech, including accents, act as racialized markers. Why is ridicule of language or speech racist? The Language of White Racism

People who show an implicit racial bias on measures like the Implicit Association Test (e.g., associating white faces and black faces with positive words and negative words) are more likely to engage in overtly racist actions.

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found all the following EXCEPT:

Some types of ____________, as scholar Geoff Mann puts it, sound white in tone because they often express or imply white-racist views of society and are the "voice of nostalgia" that calls whites to remember an even more white-controlled societal past.

Describe the increase in popularly expressed racism, including racist images, attitudes, and invectives in the decades before the Civil War, as seen in the popularity of whites-in-blackface minstrel shows.

Describe specific attitudes that whites hold toward themselves and toward black Americans in terms of the white racial frame's pro-white subframe and the anti-others subframes.