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MULTIPLE GROUP THREAT AND MALLEABLE WHITE ATTITUDES TOWARDS ACADEMIC MERIT1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2013

Frank L. Samson
Frank L. Samson*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Miami
*
Frank L. Samson, Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33146. E-mail: flsamson@miami.edu
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Abstract

As the White populace in the United States moves toward numerical minority status by 2042, how might Whites respond to impending threat of losing their dominant group position? In particular, how will Whites react at selective, elite universities, where Asians are increasingly prominent and other non-Whites are maintaining or capturing a larger share of enrollments? Drawing on group position theory, I test White commitment to meritocracy as a public policy, using a survey-based experiment (599 California adult residents) to examine the importance grade point average should have in public university admissions. Whites decrease the importance that grade point average should have when Asian group threat is primed. However, White Californians increase the importance that grade point average should have when thinking about group threat from either Blacks or Blacks and Asians simultaneously. Ethnoracial outgroup threat shifts White support for meritocracy in different directions.

Keywords

Group ThreatMeritocracyUniversity AdmissionsAsian AmericanRace
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 233 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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Footnotes

1

The author thanks David Grusky, Monica McDermott, and participants of the Social Psychology Workshop, Inequality Workshop, and affiliates of Stanford University's Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) for their helpful feedback on various aspects of this paper. This research was partly funded by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant SES-080264, and a Stanford University Graduate Research Opportunity Grant and Sociology Research Opportunity Grant. A RICSRE Graduate Dissertation Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation Fellowship supported the author during various stages of the data collection, analyses, and writing.

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