Post the Introduction of Your Most Recent Paper

[Antonio the Sixth]

Dante, in his masterpiece Paradise Lost,

Please tell me you just mistyped here and didn't actually write that on your paper.

[Antonio the Sixth]

My papers' intros usually take up several pages, so I can't post an entire one, but here are the first two paragraphs of one I wrote last June (and got an A+ for).

By ending the systematic disenfranchisement and institutional discrimination faced by African-Americans in the South and elsewhere, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fundamentally reshaped American society. Far from only affecting the condition of Black citizens, this transformative event has had significant repercussions on White attitudes and behavior as well. In the political sphere, in particular, it led to a reconfiguration of the partisan divide along the lines of the conflict over racial policy (Carmines & Stimson 1989). The most striking manifestation of this political realignment was the collapse of the Democratic party in the South, where it once dominated. However, the irruption of racial issues as a driver of White voters’ political attitudes and partisan identities concerned the entire country. The impact of this process on U.S. politics is as potent today as it was in 1980, when Ronald Reagan voiced support for States’ Rights during a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. At the elite level as much as in the mass electorate, Republicans have with increasing consistency expressed reluctance toward policy initiatives favoring African-Americans, while Democrats have near-unanimously championed such proposals.

This continued salience of racial issues in the political debate seems in contradiction with the modern consensus in favor of racial equality among the White public. Opinion surveys have documented that, over the past fifty years, belief in the inferiority of African-Americans and support for explicitly racist policies have declined steadily, and, by the 1990s, were confined to a small subset of the White public (Schuman et al. 1997, p. 99-195). If almost all Americans profess to share the fundamental goals of the Civil Rights movement, why do modern debates on racial issues remain highly contentious and politically charged? The most compelling explanation offered by social psychologists to resolve this apparent paradox resides in the concept of “symbolic racism”. First laid out by Sears and Kinder (1971), the theory of symbolic racism argues that traditional racist beliefs are no longer the main drivers of White hostility toward African-Americans. In their stead, a new form of prejudice has taken hold among a large segment of the White public, which reformulates a deep-seated aversion toward Blacks in the language of American individualism and work ethic (Sears & Henry 2005). The measure of symbolic racism developed by these scholars has consistently proven to be the best predictor of voters’ positions on racially charged issues and attitudes toward African-American candidates, outperforming both ideological indicators and “old-school” racist attitudes.