Marco M. Aviña, "The 'Great Awokening' Had a Strong Upper Class Accent"
Recent scholarship hails rising racial liberalism among white liberals as a racial reckoning and even a “Great Awokening.” In this paper, I show that affluent white liberals have driven these changes—primarily on low-cost symbolic recognition outcomes rather than high-cost redistributive commitments—which I argue has major implications for the politics of racial and economic inequality in the US. I first document a 40-year, widening class gap in racial liberalism among white liberals that is pronounced for racial attitudes but largely absent for race-targeted policy preferences. I then leverage George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests as a focusing event and natural experiment which shifted racial salience and norms. Using regression-discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and instrumental variables approaches, I find that previously reported shifts in stated racial attitudes were strongest among higher-income white liberals; by contrast, increases in redistributive policy support, turnout, and reductions in implicit bias did not disproportionately occur in this group. Taken together, these results complicate common narratives of racial progress: recent shifts among white liberals are concentrated among the affluent and largely expressive, consistent with a politics of recognition without commensurate redistribution.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260127T170000Z DTEND:20260127T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR