Using a decade’s worth of data, Racial Resentment in the Political Mind seeks to unpack the impact of racial attitudes on politics and political opinion. The book gets underway by attempting to address a pressing issue with the construct of racial resentment in the social sciences: the measurement and meaning of racial resentment in the 21st century. A robust predictor of political and policy attitudes, Kinder and Sanders’s (1996) measure is arguably outdated in terms of expressing racial attitudes. Likewise, political scientists have argued that this measure is often conflated with racial prejudice and entangled with governmental policies’ attitudes.
Davis and Wilson start strongly by providing a theoretical backing for how their measure is different from other conventional measures, situating it within the field-related constructs (e.g., social dominance orientation [SDO], just world beliefs, authoritarianism) and contemporary sociopolitical history (i.e., the election of Barak Obama and Donald Trump). They then proceed to construct and validate a new measure of racial resentment, which they term “Whites’ resentment towards African Americans” [WRTA], arguing that it is not a racial attitude, but one rooted in anger about Blacks getting resources or advantages unfairly through the use of race.
Using multiple datasets to develop a new measure, they argue that they have ameliorated the issues uncovered in Kinder and Sanders’s (1996) measure. However, the method used to build this measure is limited by the available items in the datasets at hand. Although Davis and Wilson did explore the impacts of different wordings and racial versus non-racial primes, an integral part of constructing sound psychometric measures is skipped: building a large pool of items that capture the universe of the construct. Nonetheless, they arrive at four items that “constitute [the] core measure of Whites’ resentment toward African Americans” (p. 84). Notably, none of these items require reverse coding, none explicitly tap into anger, one is double-barreled, and not all items are used across analyses. Still, using correlational analyses, they consider the reliability of this construct over time and the validity of this new measure against racialized and non-racialized constructs as well as policy decisions.
To their credit, Davis and Wilson go beyond the traditional analyses to assess their items, employing item response theory, specifically a polytomous Rausch model. However, it is unclear if other models were explored. Likewise, they use exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to make their points, but, at times, additional analyses are warranted. For example, a series of CFAs are used to demonstrate that the WRTA scale is unique from existing measures (i.e., Modern Resentment, Classic Racial Resentment). But no EFA is provided demonstrating that these items are indeed three distinct constructs. Still, they acknowledge the high intercorrelation between these scales.
Nonetheless, Davis and Wilson then consider who might hold WRTA, arguing it is not only “racists” who hold these views but also “those who volunteer at their children’s schools and athletic youth leagues, drink cappuccinos at Starbucks, and do not try to intentionally offend anyone” (p. 114). Using correlational and regression-based analyses, they demonstrate that WRTA is associated with just-world beliefs, system justification beliefs, political ideology, education, age, and more, which then is argued to shape racialized and non-racialized political attitudes as well as voting behavior.
In a slight divergence from the key goal of the book, Davis and Wilson explore attitudes about the phrase “Make America Great Again.” They find evidence that the glory of the past (i.e., “Again”) and the phrase as a whole are interpreted heterogeneously by race, age, and ideology, with racial resentment also significantly influencing a preference for “the past.” Still, the pattern of associations could be furthered with the inclusion of constructs, such as White Nationalism or White Ethnotraditionalism. Continuing, Davis and Wilson demonstrate that racial attitudes suffer from the same cognitive biases and motivated reasoning prevalent in other attitudes, finding that these biases reflect racial attitudes and perceived threats about the status quo.
Davis and Wilson close by considering two areas for future research. First, they introduce the concept of racial schadenfreude – “Whites need for African Americans to suffer the consequences of their actions to restore orderliness, certainty, and justice. This is the only way to keep society orderly and fair” (p. 194). Associated with racial resentment, they argue that resentment is resolved, in part, through racial schadenfreude. Their data finds an association between negative statements of President Obama and racial schadenfreude as well as 2016 vote intentions. Left unexplored is whether Whites indeed gain self-esteem from this racial schadenfreude or if these attitudes simply reflect catharsis. Likewise, a comparison of attitudes about racial sympathy would help contextualize these findings.
Second, Davis and Wilson discuss and develop a measure of African Americans' resentment toward Whites. They define this construct as, “anger stemming from a sense of injustice that Whites use racial discrimination and other tactics to defend an “unjust” status quo and privilege, which comes at their expense and keeps them at most oppressed, and at least unequal” (p. 220), conceptualizing it as (1) responsibility denial of Whites, (2) White privilege, and (3) deservingness/effort. They find their construct is not associated with sociodemographic characteristics, but positively associated with values of democracy, public policy issues, immigration, and White privilege. Thus, more work in this area is warranted.
Ultimately, Davis and Wilson take an essential initial step towards considering and constructing a measure of WRTA, introduce a new construct for political and social scientists to explore – racial schadenfreude – and propose a new scale for measuring African Americans’ resentment towards Whites. Still, much more work in this area is needed in order to disentangle political and racial attitudes of Americans, including the measurement of these key constructs.
