Previous
New Deal
Racial resentment is political scientists’ term for hostility towards minority groups (and especially Black people). People with high levels of racial resentment blame racial inequities on minority groups’ culture and level of effort, and they believe that the government unfairly helps people of color at white people’s expense. Research shows that racial resentment is strongly correlated with zero-sum thinking, opposition to government spending, and support for anti-democracy policies.
Racial Resentment Quotes in The Sum of Us
The The Sum of Us quotes below are all either spoken by Racial Resentment or refer to Racial Resentment. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
Today, the racial zero-sum story is resurgent because there is a political movement invested in ginning up white resentment toward lateral scapegoats (similarly or worse-situated people of color) to escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few. For four years, a tax-cutting and self-dealing millionaire trumpeted the zero-sum story from the White House, but the Trump presidency was in many ways brought to us by two decades of zero-sum propaganda on the ubiquitous cable news network owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2
Quotes
Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as Black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a Black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government. The idea tapped into an old stereotype of Black laziness that was first trafficked in the antebellum era to excuse and minimize slavery and was then carried forward in minstrel shows, cartoons, and comedy to the present day. The welfare trope also did the powerful blame-shifting work of projection: like telling white aristocrats that it was their slaves who were the lazy ones, the Black welfare stereotype was a total inversion of the way the U.S. government had actually given “free stuff” to one race over all others.
Get the entire The Sum of Us LitChart as a printable PDF.
Racial Resentment Term Timeline in The Sum of Us
The timeline below shows where the term Racial Resentment appears in The Sum of Us. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Racism Drained the Pool
...superior to Black people because of their behavior and culture. Researchers call this idea “ racial resentment ” and have shown that it explains why most white people still do not support...
(full context)
Racial resentment has increased because, as racial equality took a step forward in the 1960s, economic equality...
(full context)
Chapter 3: Going Without
...most white Americans still oppose “Obamacare,” and political science research shows that it’s because of racial resentment . In one experiment, white voters supported a public healthcare plan when told it was...
(full context)
Chapter 8: The Same Sky
...climate action when Obama began advocating for it and that climate denial correlates closely with racial resentment . Indeed, a major sociological study by Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap concluded...
(full context)
...and neglect for the poor are already built into the system. She also explains how racial resentment typically fuels white opposition to government action in the U.S. On the subway ride home,...
(full context)
Chapter 9: The Hidden Wound
Indeed, white Christians score far higher in racial resentment today. This is largely because, as religion scholar Robert P. Jones points out in his...
(full context)
