As the largest racial group in the country and the one that occupies the most and the highest positions of power, white people’s decisions about what is racist and sexist help determine the contours of inequality.
In “Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas,” Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright suggest a new way to understand how and why inequalities persist by analyzing more than 120 interviewees – white Southerners and Northerns, Republicans and Democrats, working-class and professional-middle-class and men and women.
Streib is an associate professor of sociology at Duke University and author of “The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College,” in which she looked at the surprising truth that students who graduate from the same college go on to earn roughly the same amount, regardless of their family’s class background. Leondar-Wright has been a community organizer and a workshop facilitator as well as a sociology professor at Lasell University.
“Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?” was published last month, and Leondar-Wright speaks at Porter Square Books on Feb. 23. We interviewed her Tuesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did your partnership and book come about?
It was Jessi’s idea originally, and it came about during Trump’s first term, a particular moment in our country’s history. White public opinion was polarized in many ways, more dramatically than among any other racial or ethnic group, and in particular, both parties had lifted up race and gender as their flagship issues to get polarized about. So we were just curious about what was going on with white people, and we wanted to find out. It was a time many more white people were declaring themselves antiracist and getting involved with the fight for civil rights and reparations, but there was also widespread white opposition to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. That piqued our curiosity, and the more we talked about it, the more we wanted to know what was behind it. We had the experience in our own lives of seeing something you think is racist or sexist and talking to a person who doesn’t see it that way. I always think of that experience like an optical illusion, because we can look at the exact same image and see different things. We wanted to know, when we talked to a large number of white voters, what points of view would we uncover?
How did you identify people to speak with?
We called the study “American Lives and Viewpoints” and we advertised it on Craigslist and Facebook, paying people for interviews. Jessi and I are sociologists and we wanted to be able to make a number of comparisons, so we picked 16 categories and picked people from both sides of the spectrum for each. So we had half from the North and half from the South, half with high school educations and working-class jobs and half with college degrees and more professional managerial jobs, half men and half women, half Republicans and half Democrats, and so on. We did 127 interviews in all. We started by asking them about their life stories and gradually moved over to their experiences with racism and sexism, asking questions about what they had observed growing up and what came up in their families and their workplaces. We also asked about what they saw as racist or sexist in current events and news coverage, and we showed them these storyboards with eight hypothetical situations and asked if they thought they were racist or if they were sexist, depending on the scenario. We made them classic situations given what was going on in the world: a white police officer shooting an unarmed Black person, a gender pay disparity. After people said whether they did or did not see racism or sexism in the situation, we asked them to explain their thinking. We noticed there were certain consistencies, and generally, even if we personally disagreed with a person’s answer, we were able to understand the internally consistent logic in where they were coming from.
What was the biggest takeaway?
I have progressive values and I consider myself a committed antiracist, so I went in thinking that I was going to agree with the liberals who were roughly half our sample and that I was going to completely disagree with the other half, the conservatives. I was surprised to find this wasn’t true. As you can imagine in liberal Cambridge, the liberals were the people who consistently said yes, they see racism and yes, they see sexism. And by and large, I tended to agree with them, but the way they reached the conclusion really dismayed me, because they said yes without asking any questions. Conservatives, on the other hand, asked a ton of questions about the scenario, informing themselves more fully before making a decision. I think this explains a lot of resentment toward liberals and the idea that woke people have gone too far. And I do think asking questions about the case before judging is a good thing, and so we ended up preferring the conservatives’ methods, which was a surprise. For example, one of the sexism cartoons shows a man in a hospital bed. In walks a woman with a white coat, he says hello, nurse, and she says, I’m your doctor. We asked people if he was being sexist, and the liberals automatically said yes. But the conservatives asked all these follow-up questions. Was he on any medications that could distort his thinking? What was the angle of his bed to the door? Could he see her name tag? How old is he? Most of them ultimately decided no, we can’t really tell. And I have a criticism for their decision-making processes too, because they’re oblivious to or ignoring the patterns. The liberals know the patterns exist and they’re right about that, but they assume the case matches the pattern, and sometimes they jump to a conclusion that isn’t fair. Sometimes they would even presume particular things without any evidence. We asked them if they heard racial slurs in their hometown when they were growing up, and a lot of people just said yes or no, but the most strongly ideologically liberals said, I didn’t, but I must have, because they’re everywhere. I ended up feeling like assuming without evidence is a bad practice, and I don’t want to do that. In the last chapter, we make recommendations for what to do in a possible case of racism and sexism. What we recommend is a both/and construction: You need to be well-informed about the patterns of inequities we have in our society by gender and by race, including structural ones, but you also need to ask questions about the case, because not all suspected cases fit the pattern.
Having studied white people’s definitions of sexism and racism, how do you think they differ from one belong to people of color?
We would love it if we, or someone, could do a similar study with similar questions with people of color as the respondents. Since we’re both white, I don’t think we’re necessarily the people to do those interviews, but we have talked about how great it would be to get funding to hire sociologists of color to do those interviews. Based on Pew research or Gallup polls, people of color largely see more racism than white people do. That’s not surprising, and that’s always been true. But what’s interesting is there’s also evidence that strongly ideologically liberal and left white people perceive more racism in the society than people of color do. We noticed that people who don’t have advanced degrees or live in liberal bubbles answer questions about the prevalence of racism and sexism mostly by looking around, thinking about what they’ve seen or heard. But the people who thought racism and sexism was there in every case, they have other sources of information besides their own lives that they’re leaning on. Whether it’s a political affiliation or media they consume, it’s good to be learning so much about the structural inequities in our society, but then they can lean on that evidence too heavily. We saw in the interviews that white people can make assumptions that aren’t always fair on racism and sexism, and it would be fascinating to compare that with people of color of various demographics.
What do you think people can learn from the book about being in dialogue with people who are different from them, especially in this divisive political moment?
I’ve heard liberal Democrats despairing about Trump voters and assuming that there’s just this massive amount of hateful racism and sexism among white voters, and it’s really exaggerated. There are more potential allies out there than we think, and I think this book will share a hopeful message for liberals. Even the most strongly ideologically right-wing interviewees that we talked to, they have these narrow definitions of what racism is, but when they see things that fit into it, like hate crimes or outright discrimination, they are as vehemently against it as anybody else. A lot of them have spoken out against the racism or the sexism that they’ve seen. This feeling that liberals and progressives are this little embattled minority that’s getting beaten at every turn is understandable right now, and I get why people feel that way, but it’s good not to immediately assume that someone has a certain view. Writing this book really strengthened my appreciation for organizations like Surj and the Poor People’s Campaign that work with working-class people to build coalitions to stick up for a better society for all of us. That understanding of how race and class and social justice fit together against things like racism and sexism is so important.
Betsy Leondar-Wright reads from ’Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?’ at 3 p.m. Feb. 23 at Porter Square Books, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free.
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