Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute

Extract

Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. By Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 288p. $40.00.

In his seminal 1958 article (“Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”), sociologist Herbert Blumer argued that we should understand race relations and racial prejudice especially as a “sense of group position.” Blumer's basic intuition is that individuals are organized by racial categories as groups and that group members are concerned about the relative position of their group in the racial hierarchy: Members of higher-status groups in particular react with many of the visible signs of race prejudice when their group's status is challenged. Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan offer possibly the most comprehensive exposition and explanation of that argument in their new book, Prejudice in Politics. First, Bobo and Tuan let us know exactly what group position theory is and how to make sense of it in comparison to other ideas about the nature of prejudice in politics. Along with group position, they examine the relevance of other theoretical explanations of prejudice, such as self-interest, clashing values, and symbolic racism. Then they use a unique survey to operationalize, compare, and contrast these competing ideas about prejudice in politics. In the end, they offer us the compelling idea that the “real” answer to understanding prejudice in politics lies not in eliminating alternative hypotheses but in a group position–oriented synthesis of these presumably competing ideas.