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White Racial Identity and Reparations for Slavery

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Identities in Action

Part of the book series: Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research ((FSSR,volume 6))

Abstract

In this study, we explore the relationship between racial identity and white Americans’ views on reparations to African Americans for slavery and the legacy of racial inequality it spawned. More specifically, we draw on data from an original 2016 survey to examine the association between various dimensions of White racial identity and support for a range of reparative measures targeting African Americans. The White racial identity dimensions we examine are prominence, salience, private self-regard, public self-regard, and verification. The views on reparations we analyze are an apology, a memorial, financial payments, special scholarships for university attendance, preferential hiring and promotion, fair treatment in jobs, and improving the economic and social conditions of black Americans. Consistent with prior work, we find that private self-regard (pride) is a key predictor of whites’ opposition to reparative policy targeting blacks. At the same time, we observe that public self-regard (respondents’ perception of others’ respect for whites) consistently predicts support for these same reparative policies. We draw on identity theory and recent scholarship on whiteness to explain these patterns. Our findings contribute to a growing body of work on how racial identity shapes white Americans’ racial policy attitudes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stets and Burke (2000) allude to this potential overlap between IT and SIT in noting that “role” and “group,” as concepts, are not easily separable—empirically or analytically—a view echoed by others calling for greater theoretical synthesis in the interest of a more unified and general view of the self (see Deaux & Martin, 2003; Hogg et al., 1995; Stryker & Burke, 2000).

  2. 2.

    SSI develops panels of samples that are tailored to capture the respondents who fit the researcher’s parameters and they also try to match the sample as closely as possible to the age, gender, and geographical makeup of the American adult population. Therefore, the sampling method was proportionally selected. Recent research has found evidence that probability and non-probability sampling yield similar results on racial attitudes when using particular internet surveying platforms (Simmons & Bobo , 2015).

  3. 3.

    See Reichelmann (2018) for full details about the experiment including the exact images and wording of the slavery exposure conditions. In analyses conducted to date, the slavery exposure experiment has only shown effects on the collective emotion variables (Reichelmann, 2020). Nonetheless, to be conservative and to ensure full transparency, we include the experimental conditions as controls in the analyses presented here.

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Acknowledgements

The data collection was completed with funding from the following agencies : the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association (Graduate Student Investigator Award – 2016); the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation at The New York Community Trust (Doctoral Dissertation Grant Recipient – 2016); and Northeastern University ’s Provost’s Office (2017), Department of Sociology (2016), and Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence (2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Ashley V. Reichelmann

  2. Department of Sociology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Matthew O. Hunt

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  1. Ashley V. Reichelmann
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Correspondence to Ashley V. Reichelmann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Philip S. Brenner

  2. Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    Jan E. Stets

  3. Department of Sociology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    Richard T. Serpe

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Reichelmann, A.V., Hunt, M.O. (2021). White Racial Identity and Reparations for Slavery. In: Brenner, P.S., Stets, J.E., Serpe, R.T. (eds) Identities in Action. Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76966-6_5

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