A Historical Note on Whites’ Beliefs about Racial Inequality *

Abstract

Beliefs about sources of the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by blacks have been investigated by major continuing surveys since the 1970s. Results indicate that most whites tend to place responsibility mainly on blacks themselves, with the primary emphasis on a presumed lack of motivation on the part of blacks. Drawing on two survey questions used by the Gallup organization, we show that at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963, white respondents tended to blame whites and blacks equally for racial disadvantages, but that this changed sharply in the late 1960s. The change, which may well have been a reversion to pre-1960s beliefs, was probably a result of both the enactment of civil rights legislation, which supposedly ended racial discrimination, and the eruption of riots in Detroit, Newark, and other cities, which differed drastically from the earlier nonviolent protests in the South. This shift in public beliefs indicates that attributions of blame for socioeconomic disadvantage are not as fixed as later data suggest. Our analysis makes strategic use of a split-sample experiment to distinguish substantive change over time from change resulting from variations in the wording of survey questions.