Thomas Piazza – författare

Racial tension divides American society. Racial equality remains a distant goal. Although the potion of Black Americans has improved in recent years, the widespread enthusiasm for the Civil Rights movement has waned. Why has progress slowed? What makes racial problems in America so difficult to solve? A principal cause, according to The Anatomy of Racial Attitudes, is the way in which white Americans explain, or account for, the social conditions in which most black Americans find themselves. A substantial proportion of whites believe that stereotypes that Black Americans are relatively less well off because blacks do not try hard enough to better themselves or because of the difference due to genertics or to God's plan. Whites who hold such views have relatively little sympathy for programs designed to improve the social conditions. In contrast, whites who believe that Black Americans are kept back either by deliberate discrimination or by the accumulated social results of past discrimination are much more receptive to policies designed to help blacks. Using qualitative and quantitive data, this book explores the variety and extent of these explanations for social differences; it also describes how each explanation--or combination of explanations--influences a person's views on policies designed to bring about greater racial equality. This study promises to influence not only the course of future academic research on race relations but also the formulation of public policy to deal with racial problems. It reveals that the resistance of many whites to policies favorable to racial equality are not isolated phenomenon but instead is part of a comprehensive view of how society works. If strides toward racial equality are to be made in the foreseeable future, the insights provided here must be considered seriously by policy makers and be incorporated into their strategies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Racial tension divides American society. Racial equality remains a distant goal. Although the potion of Black Americans has improved in recent years, the widespread enthusiasm for the Civil Rights movement has waned. Why has progress slowed? What makes racial problems in America so difficult to solve? A principal cause, according to The Anatomy of Racial Attitudes, is the way in which white Americans explain, or account for, the social conditions in which most black Americans find themselves. A substantial proportion of whites believe that stereotypes that Black Americans are relatively less well off because blacks do not try hard enough to better themselves or because of the difference due to genertics or to God's plan. Whites who hold such views have relatively little sympathy for programs designed to improve the social conditions. In contrast, whites who believe that Black Americans are kept back either by deliberate discrimination or by the accumulated social results of past discrimination are much more receptive to policies designed to help blacks. Using qualitative and quantitive data, this book explores the variety and extent of these explanations for social differences; it also describes how each explanation--or combination of explanations--influences a person's views on policies designed to bring about greater racial equality. This study promises to influence not only the course of future academic research on race relations but also the formulation of public policy to deal with racial problems. It reveals that the resistance of many whites to policies favorable to racial equality are not isolated phenomenon but instead is part of a comprehensive view of how society works. If strides toward racial equality are to be made in the foreseeable future, the insights provided here must be considered seriously by policy makers and be incorporated into their strategies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

What, precisely, is the clash over race in the 1990s, and does it support the charge of a “new racism”? Here is a brilliant articulation of what has happened, of how racial issues have become entangled with politics—the process of negotiating who gets what through government action. We now have to understand and cope with a “politics of race.”

One of the most wide-ranging studies of prejudice undertaken in a decade, The Outsider combines new research methods and rich analysis to upend many of our assumptions about prejudice. Noting that hostility toward immigrants has been on the rise throughout Western Europe, Paul Sniderman and his team conduct the first study of prejudice in Italy and offer insights applicable to nearly all countries worldwide. The study of prejudice, they argue, has been both stimulated and limited by tensions among partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. It is the distinctive effort of The Outsider to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict, and social identity approaches.Drawing on computer-assisted interviewing, this book focuses on Italy partly because it has experienced two different waves of immigration, from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and thus allows one to consider to what extent the color of immigrants' skin imposes a special burden of prejudice. Italy is also an apt site for the study of intolerance because of long-standing prejudices that have existed internally, between Northern and Southern Italians. The book's findings show that any point of difference--color, nationality, or language--marks the immigrant as an outsider. The fact of difference, not the particular mode of difference, is crucial. Moreover, the general election of 1994 provided a rare opportunity to investigate the political impact of prejudice when the party system was itself in the process of transformation. The authors uncover a potential line of cleavage: rather than prejudice being concentrated on the political right, it has a wide following among the less educated of the political left.Analyzing the contributions of personality, social-structural factors, and political orientation to the wave of intolerance toward immigrants, The Outsider offers unprecedented insights into the phenomenon of prejudice and its link to politics.