Trust in Black America

Race, Discrimination, and Politics

Shayla Nunnally

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814759318
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in democracy. Rather than promoting democracy, the United States government has, from its inception, racially discriminated against African American citizens and other racial groups, denying them equal access to citizenship and to protection of the law. Civil rights violations by ordinary citizens have also tainted social relationships between racial groups—social relationships that should be meaningful for enhancing relations between citizens and the government at large. Thus, trust and democracy do not function in American politics the way they should, in part because trust is not color blind. Based on the premise that racial discrimination breaks down trust in a democracy, Trust in Black America examines the effect of race on African Americans' lives. Shayla Nunnally analyzes public opinion data from two national surveys to provide an updated and contemporary analysis of African Americans' political socialization, and to explore how African Americans learn about race. She argues that the uncertainty, risk, and unfairness of institutionalized racial discrimination has led African Americans to have a fundamentally different understanding of American race relations, so much so that distrust has been the basis for which race relations have been understood by African Americans. Nunnally empirically demonstrates that race and racial discrimination have broken down trust in American democracy.

Part I
Understanding Race and Trust

1
Introduction
Race, Risk, and Discrimination

The Significance of Race and Risk in America

In July 2010, American television media revealed seemingly controversial footage of Shirley Sherrod, a black American woman and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development agent in Georgia, speaking about her being unable to treat a white farmer fairly. The videotape featured Sherrod’s March 27, 2010, speech delivered to a Douglas, Georgia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its twentieth annual Freedom Fund program.¹ The video clip initially had been released online by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger affiliated with BigGovernment.com, in order to show Sherrod’s and the NAACP’s racist attitudes toward whites,² as it appeared that Sherrod described how she considered denying a white farmer access to government benefits.

At the time, the story seemed shocking and newsworthy. Fox News anchors suggested that the video clip exemplified a black bureaucrat in President Barack Obama’s administration practicing reverse discrimination against whites. Indeed, in their perspective, Sherrod represented ideals that were being incorporated into the agenda of the nation’s first black president. Critics asked how a civil servant could deny benefits to others based on their race. The alleged controversy also lay in the paradox of a civil rights organization promoting racial discrimination. Some charged that the NAACP was hypocritical because, as a civil rights organization, it invited a “racist” speaker, despite its professed challenges against racism; here, it seemed as if the NAACP endorsed a speech by a civil servant who supposedly upheld discrimination against whites.

In effect, Breitbart’s video snippet started a national media frenzy that characterized Sherrod as a racist, ill-willed civil servant who was “out to get white people.” The ramifications of the snippet were great, as the brouhaha over it led to calls for Sherrod to be fired, and eventually, she was asked to resign her post. The NAACP president, Ben Jealous, also denounced her speech. But, as the eventual release of and attention to the full-length video of the speech showed, the allegations of Sherrod’s “racist acts” were not true and, in fact, were unfounded.

As the news story developed, the actual travesty lay in the fact that the video snippet did not capture Sherrod’s full speech. In fact, in the unedited, full video of Sherrod’s speech, she actually challenged the NAACP audience to think about supporting justice for all, despite their personal discrimination experiences and misgivings about historical racial discrimination and mistreatment of people (by whites, in particular). Sherrod’s own father had been lynched by whites in the Jim Crow South in 1965, and the perpetrators were never brought to justice. In her entire speech, she actually encouraged a standard of justice that centers on seeking greater good and not seeking racial retribution for one’s personal, past racial discrimination experiences. Sherrod even questioned her own intentions toward the white farmers, as she stated, “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”³

In its entirety, Sherrod’s speech actually relayed her personal triumphs of overcoming her own prejudices to aid a white farmer in saving his farm land. As the Sherrod news story continued to unfold before the public’s view, the white farmer and his wife, whom Sherrod assisted in saving their farm, appeared on news interviews to add veracity to Sherrod’s claims about assisting them in their time of need. They even praised her for helping them keep their farm land. Ultimately, the truth revealed a gross mischaracterization of Sherrod, and the out-of-context scope of the video prompted a national controversy without any substantiating evidence. Sherrod was branded a racist for no evidentiary reason.

Soon the television media attempted to redeem Sherrod’s character, as they invited her for guest appearances to speak about the matter from her perspective. Eventually, the NAACP president apologized to her, and the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, both apologized and offered Sherrod another job with higher rank. President Obama also called to offer his regrets for the incident and to encourage her to rejoin the USDA. Sherrod respectfully declined.

What is a simple moral of this story? “Don’t judge a book by its cover. . . without reading its full content.” But, in the broader scheme of things, this vignette sheds light on a deeper, more troubling aspect of American society: that people judge one another on the basis of race and that people distrust decision-making because of the perception that members of other racial groups will seek racial expediency and ill-will toward people not in their own racial group.

Sadly, our nation’s history has an indelible imprint of race affecting the status of humanity, equality, and participation of people in American society. Frankly, such racist decision-making has had dire consequences, especially and most frequently for nonwhites. Such vagaries of race and perceived zero-sum gains of one racial group at the expense of another, lead people to assess actions, intents, and the risks of discrimination on the basis of the race of the actor making the decisions. Just as the Sherrod episode implies, people think about race with respect to whether it will disproportionately affect outcomes in their disfavor. Underlying these sentiments is the extent to which race influences how people are perceived as being trustable to fulfill actions on others’ behalves and the extent to which people perceive the probability of discrimination as a negative risk to their interests and well-being on the basis of their own racial group membership.

This relationship among race, risk, and inequitable experiences of democracy is the focus of this book—racial (dis)trust. With the tables turned differently from the Sherrod story, which focused on the perception that whites were being mistreated and that they were implicitly distrusting of a black woman bureaucrat’s decision-making, this book entertains how race influences trust from black Americans’ social and political perspectives. This book also explores how race influences blacks’ assessments of whites and other nonblack groups as far as their roles in racial discrimination and trustworthiness in social and political aspects of blacks’ lives. In this sense, this book offers a historical and contemporary look at how race and trust intertwine in (black) Americans’ social and political perceptions.

One way in which we see the significance of trust in America is with respect to United States currency. The face of the penny, for example, states simply across its top, “In God We Trust.” The image of President Abraham Lincoln rests below it, and the word “Liberty” is engraved to the left. Trust is not entrusted in America, nor is it even entrusted in President Lincoln. Instead, the penny implies that trust is a divine relationship shared between people and God. But people make trust go around, and moving from one’s faith in a higher being to connecting with others depends on how people view each other and their relationships. Trust has everything to do with how we think about people. Moving from the celestial conception of trust to one that underscores human relationships, we must ask, “In whom do we trust?”

In America, much of how we think about people also depends on their race. What is race? Race is a social construct. In the United States, people’s physical characteristics have been categorized into pseudoscientific racial categories that assigned biological significance, with sociopolitical consequences. Embodied in the construction of race are group-based interests that perpetuate conflict and social stratification (Omi and Winant 1994). Historically, race has operated as a physical characteristic that affected people’s welfare under uncertain circumstances. It also intensified their exposure to discrimination depending on their specific racial group.

Race also governs the way that people engage(d) in social, political, and economic conflict (Omi and Winant 1994). For black people, who is black⁴ and how black people have been treated in America are connected to their race. Even when considering trust with respect to the United States’ penny: Lincoln’s likeness on the coin, his trials to unite the nation during the Civil War, his eventual greatness for reuniting the nation, and his pursuit of liberty relate to the subjugation of blacks in much of American history because of their race. Historically, the construction of race in the United States has physically, symbolically, and psychologically marginalized black Americans (and other nonwhite groups) to an otherized group classification, especially vis-à-vis whites. This has operated to deny blacks and others their human, civil, and political rights. Whites’ power domination over black Americans, additionally, historicized black-white relationships in a way that created power imbalances favorable to whites and that created uncertainty between the two groups over individuals’ commitment to white-dominating practices. Race, thus, is not benign: it has and continues to operate malignantly. Its sociohistorical development and contemporary effects, thus, have ravaged the full scope of humane possibilities.

To this degree, there are unknown probabilities of risks associated with people’s racial group and their likelihood for being perpetrators or victims of racial discrimination. With respect to trust, this means that in whom people trust and where people trust has real political and social consequences. Because of the racial hierarchy in the United States, this means that there is a racial calculus of trust. Where people are situated in this hierarchy (as whites or nonwhites) affects how they perceive this racialized trust calculus. For nonwhites in particular, I argue that historical and contemporary experiences with race increase the extent to which they rely for their trust calculations on the race of the trustee (the person who is to be entrusted).⁵ But, as I elaborate later, respective racial groups and their group members’ experiences with race are not the same, and diverse racial experiences are what affect variations in people’s trust. In particular, racial experiences are what I offer inform and reduce black Americans’ trust in others, making them one of the least trusting groups in America.

For blacks, I argue that enhanced socialization about historical race relations, black culture, and the effect of race on their living conditions influences how they perceive and relate to black and nonblack group members. Socialization that emphasizes group-specific mistrust should increase the likelihood that blacks perceive nonblacks in more negative, uncertain, and distrusting ways. Personalized experiences with race in contemporary society also inculcate information about racial groups and their relationships with blacks, and these experiences also influence trust assessments. It is the nexus between perceived risk, uncertainty, racial discrimination, racial socialization, and the psychological processing of race that I believe is core to the examination and explanation of black Americans’ (dis)trust. This approach is important for the study of trust because it elucidates the effect of undemocratic racial experiences on racializing trust. Therefore, with the significance of race and the risk of discrimination in black Americans’ lives, we must ask the question, “In whom do blacks trust?” Most importantly, this question must be analyzed explicitly with respect to this group’s racial circumstances. In this vein, the focus of this book, as I describe in more detail later, is to explain the aforementioned interrelationships of these racial circumstances with respect to blacks’ trust.

The remainder of this chapter establishes the historical racial experiences that blacks have had and how these experiences have contradicted theoretical foundations and conceptions of both democracy and trust. The chapter also provides more discussion about the focus of the book and situates its study of blacks’ trust within the larger literature and debates about trust. It provides a cursory overview of the theory of discriminative racial-psychological processing that I offer to describe how race influences blacks’ trust. In addition, this chapter describes the methods that I use to operationalize the theorized relationships that I see between race and trust. To conclude the chapter, I provide an overview of the book chapters, all of which examine in various ways trust in black America.

Racialized (Dis)trust? Race and the “Unmaking” of Democracy

For hundreds of years in America, blacks’ unique experiences with slavery and de jure and de facto discrimination have stood in stark contrast with democratic principles envisioned for the foundation of the nation. Historically, every constitutional right assured American citizens was either denied or understood to be applied differently to blacks. In law and society, physical characteristics (as they were associated with blacks’ racial phenotypes) prescribed both behavioral expectations and behavioral prohibitions.

During the era of slavery, psychological descriptions of black temperament accompanied the physical descriptions of the black body, as slave traders and slave owners attempted to define blacks’ labor productivity as being ripe for them to be enslaved persons (Johnson 1999; Roberts 1997). Scientific racism also infiltrated social, political, and economic thought, and it created multiple distinctions and stratifications of the “Negro” as subordinate and inferior to whites (Gossett 1997).

Racialized behavioral descriptors thus normativized behavioral expectations for blacks, and “acting” properly in certain “places” defined whether blacks “appropriately” followed slavery and Jim Crow etiquette and, thus, could be “trusted” to perform their generally perceived role as being property or second-class citizens. The confinement of the “Negro’s place” to the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder and the racial hierarchy continued well through the mid-twentieth century, thus codifying racial etiquette between blacks and whites (Litwack 1998; Woodward [1951] 1999, 1974). Part of defining blacks’ “place” involved restricting “black behavior” in ways that further institutionalized the link between race, behavior, social customs, and law (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Key 1949).

The mores about race had to be learned and transmitted across generations of black Americans. With Jim Crowism emphasizing etiquette that both black and white children had to learn in order to maintain racial equilibrium in the South and across the country (see Ritterhouse 2006), black social, political, and economic actions depended on racial knowledge about blacks’ “place” in order for them to avoid racial harm. In contemporary American society, race still structures behavioral expectations and actions both intraracially and interracially, encapsulating what scholars refer to as the “performance of race” (Willie 2003), as people assess whether people as racial group members comply with racial expectations and cultural norms and “act” like other members of their racial group.

Even historical linguistic characterizations of blacks’ and whites’ behaviors suggest how much their behavior either substantiated a racial hierarchy or contradicted it, making it all the more evident that both groups’ behaviors were interpreted to qualify how much they could be trusted to “stay in their place” in historical American race relations. For example, whites who supported black interests were referred to as “negrophiles,” whereas those that did not were referred to as “negrophobes.” More common epithets reduced whites who sympathized with black interests to “nigger lovers” and “race traitors.” Thus, slavery and Jim Crow governed carte blanche the historical probability, risks, and benefits of black Americans’ interactions with whites in social and political contexts.

With respect to the behavior of American political institutions and their (white) actors, we also see evidence of how distrust was institutionalized and normativized among black Americans. The era that generally symbolizes the tenuous relationship between African Americans and the U.S. government has been called “The Nadir,” the low point during which the government retracted its protective advances on behalf of blacks during the Reconstruction era (Logan 1965). Institutionalized, asymmetrical power relations between blacks and whites affected how these two groups interacted with one another historically, as whites were constructed as a dominant group over blacks and other nonwhites. With white-group interests being integral to white domination, nonwhite interests were often subordinate, if not excluded, based on what was thought to be in the best interests of whites.

Organized terror against black Americans (e.g., in the form of actions by the Ku Klux Klan and other antiblack groups) and state-sponsored unequal protections for black Americans by whites (or even by blacks who held a negative view of the value of black life) also signaled how much people inside or outside political institutions could be trusted to act on behalf of blacks’ interests and protection. Even blacks who internalized racism could act in ways that were adverse to black interests (Woodson [1933] 1999). Moreover, blacks who did not challenge their subjugated status in society were referred to as “good,” whereas those who contested their status were referred to as “bad” (Hartman 1997).

Many whites also distrusted blacks because they feared blacks’ ability to overthrow institutions that benefited white-group interests (Woodward [1951] 1999, 1974; Key 1949). Conversely, many blacks distrusted whites because of their power to oppress and disempower them socially, politically, and economically (Bay 2000; Hartman 1997; Haney López 2006; Omi and Winant 1994; Woodward 1974).

Massive resistance to desegregation in the South and elsewhere during the mid-twentieth century also made the route toward blacks’ inclusion a piecemeal experience for blacks. As opposed to government acting as an agent to promote trust, as Putnam (1993) prescribes, in the United States, the government propagated racial discrimination against African American citizens and other nonwhites, denying them equal access to citizenship, equal access to the franchise, and equal protection of the law. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which codified into law that public accommodations could no longer be segregated and that customs associated with racial etiquette and racialized spaces were supposedly dismantled. Despite the codification of racial equality, blacks still have had to face the uncertainty of being racially discriminated against by people who retained antiblack attitudes. Such racially uncertain conditions also perpetually remind(ed) blacks about the prospective costs of racial discrimination, especially in black-white interactions. (Of course, this entails that blacks must be aware of these historical black-white relationships.) Thus, historicized relationships between blacks and whites are meaningful for analyzing African Americans’ contemporary trust because those relationships offered very little room for trusting, then and possibly even in today’s society.

Moreover, racial attitudes toward...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I: Understanding Race and Trust
• Part II: Racial Internalization
• Part III: Racial Externalization
• Appendix A: NPSS Descriptive Statistics of Survey Sample
• Appendix B: Survey Sample and U.S. Census Quota Matching
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author