Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (review)

Despite its focus on the Wisconsin Treaty Rights dispute, Prejudice in Politics is not a book about Native Americans. Albeit readers will learn about our disastrous history of conquest and colonial domination of the Chippewa nation and some of the contemporary extensions of that history on all Native Peoples (e.g., fishing disputes, water battles, mining and timber harvesting, etc.), the authors main goal is to explore "how and why does racial prejudice enter into politics in the modern United States?" (1).

The authors contend, borrowing from Blumer (Bobo relies on a much refined view of Blumer's argument based on the work he has done for the past 20 years, see pp. 32-45), that the prejudice in all racial public controversies expresses whites' sense of themselves as a superior group, their perception of racial others as intrinsically different, their belief they have proprietary rights to certain social goods, and their feeling of threat when members of subordinate groups demand rights or resources. As such, this elaboration of Blumer's theorization encompasses micro and macro level arguments and is to date one of the most holistic theories of racial politics.

Bobo and Tuan rely on survey data Bobo gathered in 1990 on the Treaty Rights matter in Wisconsin to make their case (for details see pp. 45-47 and appendices A and B). Using an almost detective approach, which makes reading this book a breeze, the authors build up a formidable case and systematically seem to demolish all other alternatives, namely, the prejudice as irrationality view, the clashing values view of authors such as Sniderman and Piazza (1993), the self-interest perspective, and the symbolic racism perspective. To bolster their argument, Bobo and Tuan include data from open-ended questions which clearly show the prejudice and the sense of group position of the white respondents. A fifty-eight-year-old male stated, for example, that "…Indians are the only race that can retire the day they're born…They are whores, you know." (147. And a 23-year-old female stated "…they are spearing our fish then selling them…That's not legal." (157)

Bobo and Tuan conclude the book by examining why the controversy died out in the early 1990s. They claim that although most whites were against the Chippewa's fishing practices, because anti-treaty protesters were not well-regarded, the issue never achieved intense salience among whites, and most whites ultimately wanted a legal solution to the matter, the conflict was bound to be short-lived. (But caution must be exercised here as the authors acknowledge that the "settlement" of the dispute included Chippewas giving away some of their rights!)

Now I proceed to offer my criticisms of this book based on the feedback I received from students in a seminar I offered on comparative racial politics in the fall of 2006. My students addressed first the elephant in the room with this book: why did the authors use this rather small and old case to test a general theory of prejudice? (On this matter I pointed out that Professor Bobo has produced a body of scholarship on black-white issues based on the sense of group position concept.)

Second, albeit the authors used some qualitative data to make their case, the data was, according to my students, severely underutilized. (On this point I suggested that given Professor Bobo's predilection for survey data, the fact the authors used qualitative data at all ought to be seen as an accomplishment and as a salutary development.)

Third, many students complained that the opinions of Chippewa people were hardly included in this book. (Because I did a survey in the Detroit area a while ago, I know how difficult and expensive it is to sample small and hard to reach segments of a population and, therefore, I do not blame Bobo for not including them in the analysis...