pubTalk

Former President Jimmy Carter caused quite a stir this week when he claimed that race has fueled much of the recent opposition to President Obama and his plans to reform health care. To many people, the charge seemed far-fetched. After all, Americans just elected a person of color President. Didn't you hear, Mr. Carter? We live in a "post-racial" era now.

Maybe so. But then again, based on the research I've been doing lately, I kind of doubt it. True, the research doesn't say much about the actual motives that have led some people to oppose the Obama administration. It does make clear, though, that race remains a powerful factor affecting the ways that Americans think in the areas of health and welfare.

In two new publications, my co-authors and I use experiments embedded in surveys to isolate the effects of race in policy contexts. In the first study, forthcoming in Social Science Quarterly, we presented respondents with information about group-based health disparities. The disparities themselves were described in exactly the same way for each respondent. But based on random assignment, they were associated with (a) higher vs. lower education levels, (b) higher vs. lower income levels, or (c) different racial identities -- specifically, whites vs. blacks.

As it turns out, it doesn't make much difference whether a health disparity is an income-based gap or an education-based gap. People respond to each case in pretty much the same way. When the health disparity is presented as a racial gap, however, we find that people become far less likely to support government efforts to reduce it. Why is this the case? The evidence from our study suggests two mechanisms. When the health disparity is attached to race, as opposed to income or education, respondents become far less likely to view it as a significant social problem. At the same time, they also become significantly more likely to predict that government efforts to eliminate the health disparity will fail.

In a second article, recently published in the American Sociological Review, my co-authors and I used a survey-experiment to study welfare case managers' decisions about when to "sanction" (that is, punish) clients for non-compliant behavior. Case managers in the Florida Welfare Transition (WT) program were asked to make sanctioning decisions based on hypothetical scenarios. The vignettes - and thus, the potentially legitimate grounds for a sanction - were identical in all cases. But the client was identified as either black or white and, in each case, as having or not having a prior sanction on her record.

According to our analysis, black welfare clients with a prior sanction are 29 percent more likely to be sanctioned than whites with a prior sanction, and 45 percent more likely to be sanctioned than whites without a prior sanction. To corroborate this analysis, we collected administrative data regarding the actual treatment of clients in the WT program. In the administrative data, we found similar patterns. Among clients with no prior sanctions, blacks were 14 percent more likely than whites to get sanctioned. When black clients had a prior sanction on their record, this disparity doubled: blacks with a prior sanction were 28 percent more likely to be penalized than were whites who had no sanction history.

The results suggest some "baseline" racial bias in sanctioning processes but, more strongly, underscore how African Americans are made vulnerable by any attribute that appears to confirm a negative racial stereotype. White clients in the experiments suffered no observable negative effects when linked to the discrediting marker of a prior sanction. African-American clients, however, enjoyed no such immunity: their odds of being sanctioned increased dramatically in the presence of discrediting markers even when the details of their case did not change a bit.

So, have we entered a post-racial era of American politics? Is the former President from Plains, Georgia out of line to suggest that an implicit racial subtext has been playing out in the recent politics of social policy? I see a lot of blog posts and op-eds arguing that his claims were irresponsible and untenable. But I also conduct a lot of research that makes it hard to think he doesn't have a point.