Trust in Black America: Race, Discrimination, and Politics

4. Trust No One: Navigating Race and Racism

90 | 4 Trust No One Navigating Race and Racism Black Americans’ Contemporary Racial Discrimination Experiences It would be ahistorical not to acknowledge that much of the fret about racial discrimination rests among nonwhites, who in the American racial hierarchy have been historically and socially constructed as the negation of whites and deemed inferior to them (Bonilla-Silva 2001; Pickering 2001). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, generally, nonwhites perceive more racial discrimination than whites do (Sigelman and Welch 1991; Weitzer and Tuch 2004). Despite the abolition of Jim Crow, the arrival of an era of supposed equality before the law, and declining trends in whites’ animosity toward blacks (Schuman et al. 1997; Tuch, Sigelman, and MacDonald 1999), black Americans living in the post–Jim Crow United States continue to experience and perceive racial discrimination (Sigelman and Welch 1991; Laudrine and Klonoff 1996; Sanders Thompson 1992, 1996; Jefferson and Caldwell 2002; Sellers and Shelton 2003; Combs et al. 2006). More nuanced, however, are blacks’ perceptions that blacks’ disproportionate indigence is increasingly being attributed more to group members’ personal commitment to group advancement rather than being attributed to systemic discrimination (Hunt 2007). Black Americans, nevertheless, continue to perceive that their race leads others to threaten the quality of their everyday lives, as they continue to experience racial discrimination in public places (Feagin 1991; Sigelman and Welch 1991; Broman, Mavaddat, and Hsu 2000; Rodriguez 2008). To illustrate, higher-income blacks report more experiences with racial discrimination in their work, education, and living environments than do lowerincome blacks (Hochschild 1995). Still, evidence suggests that people with lower incomes perceive more employment discrimination than do people with higher incomes (Rodriguez 2008). Trust No One | 91 Despite the fact that both black men and black women mostly attribute their discrimination experiences to their race (Rodriguez 2008), evidence suggests that black men and black women perceive discrimination differently and more frequently in certain contexts (Broman, Mavaddat, and Hsu 2000). For example, black men report more discrimination experiences than black women do in their relations with police, especially via racial profiling and police harassment (Weitzer and Tuch 2004, 2006; Brunson and Miller 2006), and in the context of employment and housing (Rodriguez 2008). Notwithstanding some evidence that both black men and women perceive that they are discriminated against in the workplace and in shopping places (Broman, Mavaddat, and Hsu 2000), black men generally perceive discrimination in those places more than black women do (Rodriguez 2008). Black men’s perceptions of systemic discrimination also are heightened with higher levels of racial identity, whereas black women’s perceptions of systemic discrimination increase with perceptions of blacks’ power imbalances in American society (Reese and Brown 1995). More generally, a greater number of black men and black women than white men and white women report being perceived as mistrusted, perhaps as a consequence of their race (Rodriguez 2008). Thus, it seems the uncertain probabilities attached to discrimination and race would enhance blacks’ concern about the likelihood of being mistreated due to their race wherever they go, and such uncertainty seems to promulgate a groundswell of distrusting attitudes in people in contexts where blacks have been discriminated against the most. Furthermore, as much as 60 percent of African Americans experience or encounter racial discrimination throughout their lifetime (Kessler, Mickelson , and Williams 1999), and these experiences are evident even among young black adults, a generation that did not experience de jure and de facto segregation. For example, 41 percent of African American college students report that they have heard racial epithets, 41 percent report that they have heard them frequently, and 59 percent report that they have been the targets of such remarks (Kessler, Mickelson, and Williams 1999). In an era of supposed equality, moreover, younger blacks perceive more discrimination in ambiguous social relations than older blacks do (Broman, Mavaddat, and Hsu 2000; Rodriguez 2008). It is even more unsettling that physical violence committed against blacks because of their race continues even today in America’s post–Jim Crow society.1 Considering black Americans’ perpetual experiences with racial discrimination , it is highly likely that they are concerned about being racially discriminated against in their future social interactions with other racial groups. 92 | Trust No One Just as racial socialization messages influence black identity, they also should influence how people process racial information such as racial stereotypes, the frequency of racial discrimination experiences, and the perceived risk for prospective racial discrimination, all...