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Race and Determinations of Discrimination: Vigilance, Cynicism, Skepticism, and Attitudes about Legal Mobilization in Employment Civil Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

David McElhattan ,
Laura Beth Nielsen  and
Jill D. Weinberg
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Abstract

What factors affect whether ordinary citizens believe that workplace decisions involving African-American employees rise to the level of discrimination? When do observers believe targets of possible race discrimination should consider mobilizing the law? We use a factorial design vignette study administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,087 ordinary people to address these questions. The “vigilance hypothesis” predicts that minorities will be more likely to perceive discrimination than whites. Our analysis partially confirms this: African Americans perceive anti-Black discrimination at higher rates than do whites and Latinos, while Latinos do not show a significant difference from whites. Where respondents believe discrimination occurred, we analyze what influences whether respondents might recommend legal mobilization. The “cynicism hypothesis” suggests that people of color may be less likely to favor using law. We find, however, that African-American and Latino respondents express more confidence in civil litigation, compared to whites. Further, African Americans express the strongest support for legal mobilization (recommending that a “friend” contact an attorney), while whites and Latinos do not differ in mobilization recommendations.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 669 - 703
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Robert L. Nelson, Jeremy Freese, Liora Israël, Kangsan Lee, and Gabrielle Ferrales for their insight and generous support. We thank the anonymous reviewers at LSR for their invaluable feedback. We also thank the members of the American Bar Foundation faculty and research committee who helped us with this project including: Robert Sampson, John Hagan, Michael McCann, Stuart Macaulay, Elizabeth Mertz, Carol Heimer, and Janice Nadler. We give special thanks to Kat Albrecht and Anya Degenshein for their research assistance. The research benefited from presentations at the Law and Society Association meetings in Boston and Minneapolis, the Empirical Critical Race Theory Workshop, the Fellows Advisory Research Committee of the American Bar Foundation, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the Chicago Area Legal Writing Group. The research was funded by the American Bar Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. All errors and conclusions are those of the authors.

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