Abstract

A topic of long-standing interest in racial attitudes research is whites' support for principles of racial equality on one hand coupled with their intransigence on policies designed to redress that inequality on the other. Much has been written on possible explanations of this “principle-policy gap” and what the gap reveals about the state of contemporary American race relations. In this article we provide an update and partial replication of our 1996 study of whites' views of racial policies in what has been referred to as our post-racial society. Using both General Social Survey and American National Election Survey data, we assess the current state of whites' racial policy attitudes and the factors that shape those attitudes and consider whether any meaningful change has occurred in recent decades. Among the explanations of the principle-policy gap that we examine, one stands out as especially powerful: racial resentment, a variant of stratification ideology that focuses on the role of racial individualism in shaping white resistance to meaningful policy change. Moreover, we find no evidence that whites' racial policy views have changed since the 1980s.

Few issues are as controversial as race-targeted social policies. Viewed by proponents as appropriate remedies for the lingering effects of past racial injustices and by opponents as unfair “reverse discrimination,” racial policy was one of the most divisive issues in late twentieth century American social and political life.