Exploring the Structure and Political Consequences of Black Chicagoans' Racial Attitudes

Black Americans have historically based their explanations of Black/White racial disparities on structural factors, mainly discrimination and prejudice. However, in this post-Civil Rights era, survey trends have shown movement away from these structural roots, raising concerns about the current structure of Black racial attitudes. Prior research has been dominated by old data sources and variable-centered approaches (e.g., factor analyses, regression analyses) that have contributed to a structural vs. individual (i.e., either/or) understanding of racial attitudes in general, and Black racial attitudes in particular. My dissertation fills this gap in the literature by exploring the contemporary structure of Black Chicagoans racial attitudes using a person-centered approach (i.e., latent class analysis). Using data from the 2018 Chicago Area Study, I was able to analyze racial inequality across four domains: unemployment, education, justice, and health. First, I used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine the dimensional structure of Black Chicagoans explanations for racial inequality. Then, I brought in latent class analysis (LCA) to identify profiles of Black Chicagoans based on their levels of support for each domain’s racial inequality explanations. Lastly, racial policy variables were added to previous LCA models as distal outcomes to examine the relationship between Black Chicagoans explanations for racial inequality and their racial policy attitudes. Incorporating a person-centered approach to the study of Black Chicagoans explanations for racial inequality revealed politically consequential racial attitude configurations that extend our understanding of Black racial attitudes by providing a more comprehensive view into how Black Americans explain racial inequality today.