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White Americans' fear of losing their socioeconomic standing in the face of demographic change may be driving opposition to welfare programs, even though whites are major beneficiaries of government poverty assistance, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.
While social scientists have long posited that racial resentment fuels opposition to such anti-poverty programs as food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Aid to Needy Families, this is the first study to show the correlation experimentally, demonstrating a causal relationship between attitudes to welfare and threatened racial status.
"With policymakers proposing cuts to the social safety net, it's important to understand the dynamics that drive the welfare backlash," said study lead author Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley. "This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups."
The findings, to be published May 30 in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.
Notably, the study found anti-welfare sentiment to be selective insofar as threats to whites' standing led whites to oppose government assistance programs they believed largely benefit minorities, while not affecting their views of programs they thought were more likely to advantage whites.
"Our findings suggest that these threats lead whites to oppose programs they perceive as primarily benefiting racial minorities," said study senior author Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and social psychology at Stanford University.
[...] "Overall, these results suggest whites' perceptions of rising minority power and influence lead them to oppose welfare programs," Wetts said.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:10PM (1 child)
Its a generational confusion thing, that a lot of the 60s Civil Rights era propaganda was based on the concept that advantaging and disadvantaging groups based solely on race was very unfair. So apply that to welfare programs that boil down to forcibly take money from white people and give it to others, seems like it would violate that propaganda image from the 60s that fairness and equality under the law is important.
Remember if we were a unified society we would have a unified non-multicultural culture. There's nothing inherently wrong with being an XYZ, and if being an XYZ means lower than white economic performance, well, live how you want to live unless the constant calls of "uncle tom" prevent you from living in your subculture the way you want to live. Although thats another issue. The problem comes about when people who were born ABCs in ABC culture and therefore make more money, are being bled dry to keep an inferior culture of XYZ afloat. Its very creationist or anti-evolutionary or anti-science. In summary there's nothing wrong with being an XYZ, but today living like an XYZ implies massive cultural inferiority, and rather than fixing that massive cultural inferiority, lets just destroy more successful group ABC to temporarily float XYZ culture a little higher, till the money and people run out.
The critical distinction is being able to look at South Africa or Zimbabwe or the USA and see that some cultures are simply inferior, and rather than fixing or improving them we're taking the cowards way out by actively and intentionally destroying the more successful subcultures. That would require observation and judgment that a culture of low productivity and high criminality is worse than a culture of high productivity and low criminality, and some people would literally rather die than notice that, so lets just destroy the good one so we're all equal.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2018, @06:34PM
I'll take propaganda over your bullshit.
Consider me ready to burn down your "progress" by any means nessecary in pursuit of my regressive racial equality of opportunity.