The Racial and Economic Context of Trump Support: Evidence for Threat, Identity, and Contact Effects in the 2016 Presidential Election

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Knowles ◽  
Linda Tropp
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Neighborhood Diversity ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
To Come ◽  
Neighborhood Level ◽  
Support Evidence

Donald Trump's ascent to the Presidency of the United States defied the expectations of many social scientists, pundits, and laypeople. To date, most efforts to understand Trump's rise have focused on personality and demographic characteristics of White Americans. In contrast, the present work leverages a nationally representative sample of Whites to examine how contextual factors may have shaped support for Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries. Results reveal that neighborhood-level exposure to racial and ethnic minorities is associated with greater group threat and racial identification among Whites, as well as greater intentions to vote for Trump in the general election. At the same time, however, neighborhood diversity afforded Whites with opportunities for intergroup contact, which is associated with lower levels of threat, White identification, and Trump support. Further analyses suggest that a healthy local economy mutes threat effects in diverse contexts, allowing contact processes to come to the fore.

The Racial and Economic Context of Trump Support

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Knowles ◽  
Linda R. Tropp
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Neighborhood Diversity ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
To Come ◽  
Neighborhood Level

Donald Trump’s ascent to the Presidency of the United States defied the expectations of many social scientists, pundits, and laypeople. To date, most efforts to understand Trump’s rise have focused on personality and demographic characteristics of White Americans. In contrast, the present work leverages a nationally representative sample of Whites to examine how contextual factors may have shaped support for Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries. Results reveal that neighborhood-level exposure to racial and ethnic minorities predicts greater group threat and racial identification among Whites as well as greater intentions to vote for Trump in the general election. At the same time, however, neighborhood diversity afforded Whites with opportunities for intergroup contact, which predicted lower levels of threat, White identification, and Trump support. Further analyses suggest that a healthy local economy mutes threat effects in diverse contexts, allowing contact processes to come to the fore.

scholarly journals Black Deaths Matter: Race, Relationship Loss, and Effects on Survivors

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Umberson
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
The Life Course

Close relationships are a resource for mental and physical health that, like other social resources, is unequally distributed in the population. This article focuses on racial disparities in the loss of relationships across the life course. Racial disparities in life expectancy in the United States mean that black Americans experience the deaths of more friends and family members than do white Americans from childhood through later life. I argue that these losses are a unique type of stress and adversity that, through interconnected biopsychosocial pathways, contribute to disadvantage in health over the life course. I focus particularly on how the interconnected pathways associated with loss undermine opportunities for and increase risks to social ties throughout life, adding to disadvantage in health. I call on social scientists and policy makers to draw greater attention to this unique source of disadvantage for black children, adults, and families.

U.S. National Commission for UNESCO Conference: Africa and the United States

1961 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Simon ◽  
Phoebe Ottenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Boston University ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come

The Eighth National Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO was held in Boston, October 22-26, 1961 , in cooperation with Boston University. The theme of the conference was “Africa and the United States: Images and Realities.” The conference was attended by over two thousand persons. More than sixty Africans took part, many of whom are prominent in political, educational, or cultural affairs in their home countries. This was probably the largest conference on Africa ever held in the United States, and its participants represented an unusually broad range of interests. Included were educators, journalists, social scientists, technical experts, industrialists, foundation representatives, librarians, artists, writers, government officials, and well-informed layment. The range and scholarliness of the papers presented indicated that there is a growing body of persons in the United States who have had personal contact with African affairs, and also that the United States is beginning to come of age in its understanding of the African continent, not only in the social sciences but in the arts, in the communications field, and in science and technology as well as in other areas.

scholarly journals Race as an Open Field: Exploring Identity beyond Fixed Choices

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Croll ◽  
Joseph Gerteis
Keyword(s):  
Open Field ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethnic Classification ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Relationship

This paper uses new, nationally representative data to examine how Americans describe their own racial and ethnic identities when they are not constrained by conventional fixed categories. Recent work on shifting racial classifications and the fluidity of racial identities in the United States has questioned the subjective and cultural adequacy of fixed categorization schemes. Are traditional racial boundaries breaking down? We explore the possibility in three ways. First, we explore the relationship between open-field identification (asked at time of survey) with fixed-choice racial and ethnic identifications (asked upon panel entry). Despite changes in American racial and ethnic discourse, most people reproduce normative, categorical racial and ethnic descriptors to identify themselves. Yet racial and ethnic classification is more complex and fluid for some respondents, particularly those who had earlier described themselves as Hispanic or mixed race. Second, we investigate the social meaning of alternative racial labels. Within the standard racial and ethnic categories, there are both dominant labels (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic) and less dominant alternatives (e.g., Caucasian, African American, Latinx); in some cases, the differences come with important social distinctions. Third, we explore the ways that a small but important subset of respondents refuse or deny racial identification altogether. We conclude with a discussion of the future of racial and ethnic classifications, paying particular attention to plans for the 2020 U.S. census.

scholarly journals The Unceasing Significance of Colorism: Skin Tone Stratification in the United States

Daedalus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Ellis P. Monk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Past Century ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Life Chances

Abstract For many decades now, social scientists have documented immense ethnoracial inequalities in the United States. Much of this work is rooted in comparing the life chances, trajectories, and outcomes of African Americans to White Americans. From health to wealth and nearly every measure of well-being, success, and thriving one can find, White Americans remain ahead of Black Americans. What this focus on ethnoracial inequality between “groups” obscures, however, is long-standing skin tone inequality within groups. In this essay, I trace the trajectory of colorism and skin tone stratification in the United States over the past century. Next, I high-light the contemporary persistence of skin tone stratification, not only among African Americans, but among Latinx and Asian Americans as well. I conclude by arguing that future research on colorism will be essential to understand comprehensively the significance of race/ethnicity in a demographically shifting United States (such as immigration and “multiraciality”).

scholarly journals Silencing the seventh trumpet: Analyzing the effect of private schooling on voting behavior

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-210
Author(s):  
Ian Kingsbury
Keyword(s):  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Private School ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Southern California ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Private Schooling ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The University ◽  
Quantity Of Education

The United States has one of the lowest election turnout rates in the developed world. Consequently, social scientists are perpetually seeking to expand upon their knowledge of what factors are associated with voting, or the lack thereof. Commonly identified factors including age, income, race, and educational attainment have been studied extensively. However, while the quantity of education is deemed important, the type of education is overlooked. The limited literature that exists on the topic suggests that private schools have a positive effect on civic outcomes, including voter participation. In using a rich, nationally representative dataset—the Understanding America Study based out of the University of Southern California—this study reexamines whether attending a private school has an effect on whether Americans vote. It also sheds light on a heretofore-unanswered question: How does private schooling affect which candidate an individual supports? Overall, the data indicate that private schooling appears to have no impact on voter turnout, but that attending some private school appears to have a liberalizing effect.

Introduction: Applying Anthropology In HIV/AIDS Research

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
William Leap ◽  
Kathleen O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Treatment Strategies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Incidence Rates ◽  
World Health ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Health Care Practitioners ◽  
Aids Pandemic ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

We are now living in the second decade of the AIDS pandemic. Incidence rates for HIV infection and deaths from HIV-related illness continue to climb in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Health care practitioners debate alternatives in treatment strategies, biomedical researchers pursue the elusive search for "the cure," and social scientists explore the interface of the biological and cultural, dealing with the underlying social correlates and consequences of AIDS. While the connections with death and dying have convinced some people to remain at a distance from the pandemic, others have come to realize that AIDS is now a part of living and is likely to remain so for some time to come.

ACHIEVING THE AMERICAN SOUL

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 619-629
Author(s):  
HOWARD BRICK
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Norman Mailer ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

In 1963—as good a date as any to serve as a pivot between “fifties” and “sixties” America—James Baldwin remarked, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” It was a bracing declaration, a bit gentler than Malcolm X's designation of Negroes as “victims of Americanism” and perhaps by now, as historians focus ever greater attention on the nationally constitutive role of slavery and white supremacy, almost a commonplace. Yet Baldwin's idea remains challenging to plumb and to fully inhabit. For at that moment, which both Kevin Schultz and Andrew Hartman suggest was preoccupied with “the very question of America and its meaning,” Baldwin's little book, The Fire Next Time, upended the whole debate. He was no black nationalist and, notwithstanding his expatriate life in France, no “emigrationist,” for he believed that blacks in the United States were, socially and culturally, wholly of, if not in, this country; and yet, given the deep corruption in the national past, there was no “meaning” to return to, reclaim, realize, or vindicate as a promise of black freedom. The verb Baldwin chose, in a determinedly existentialist vein, was to “achieve our country”—to create a viable moral meaning for national identity where none as yet existed. If Schultz's subjects, William F. Buckley Jr, and Norman Mailer, were “vying for the soul of the nation” and Hartman's warriors fighting “for the soul of America,” they were—in Baldwin's perspective—chasing a chimera. Such a thing wasn't there; it was yet to come, if at all.

scholarly journals Death of family members as an overlooked source of racial disadvantage in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 915-920 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Umberson ◽  
Julie Skalamera Olson ◽  
Robert Crosnoe ◽  
Hui Liu ◽  
Tetyana Pudrovska ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Nationally Representative

Long-standing racial differences in US life expectancy suggest that black Americans would be exposed to significantly more family member deaths than white Americans from childhood through adulthood, which, given the health risks posed by grief and bereavement, would add to the disadvantages that they face. We analyze nationally representative US data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (n= 7,617) and the Health and Retirement Study (n= 34,757) to estimate racial differences in exposure to the death of family members at different ages, beginning in childhood. Results indicate that blacks are significantly more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a mother, a father, and a sibling from childhood through midlife. From young adulthood through later life, blacks are also more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a child and of a spouse. These results reveal an underappreciated layer of racial inequality in the United States, one that could contribute to the intergenerational transmission of health disadvantage. By calling attention to this heightened vulnerability of black Americans, our findings underscore the need to address the potential impact of more frequent and earlier exposure to family member deaths in the process of cumulative disadvantage.

The Myth of the Millennial Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 130-164
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
American Dream ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
To Come

The myth of the Millennial Nation held that the United States, grounded as it was in the natural order, would shine its example around the globe until all nations of earth had abandoned despotic rulers and claimed the natural order of freedom and democracy for themselves. White Americans in the early national period, therefore, stood with one foot in the mythic age of creation and the other in the mythic, golden age to come. History became irrelevant. Early in the nineteenth century, white Americans imagined that the millennial transformation of the globe could be wrought solely through America’s moral example. But moral example gave way to force and violence as the myth of the Millennial Nation gave way to the doctrine of manifest destiny. By the early twentieth century, manifest destiny morphed into the American Dream. If manifest destiny had turned the millennial vision outward, inspiring the acquisition of both land and opportunity for economic investment abroad, the American Dream turned the millennial vision inward, inspiring new visions of opportunity at home. As the nation transitioned from millennial vision to manifest destiny to American dream, the myth of White Supremacy was the constant connecting factor that underpinned all three.

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