Allport downplayed government complicity in American racial caste despite official segregation
Evidence
In the first quote given above from Allport’s chapter 20, published in the year of the watershed Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, Allport seems oddly naive about America’s racial situation, describing discrimination as “unofficial” and even “illegal.” The continuing support, both passive and aggressive, for legalized discrimination and segregation by governments at all levels was a harsh reality of his day. To be sure, elsewhere in the book he acknowledges the complicity of legal and political authorities in maintaining the racial caste system, such as in the mob lynchings of Blacks, and in the Supreme Court’s extraordinarily narrow interpretations of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and in its precedent-setting Plessy v. Ferguson decision. However devoted White Americans of his day were to the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, they largely acquiesced to a government-supported racial caste system. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2164
In the first quote given above from Allport’s chapter 20, published in the year of the watershed Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, Allport seems oddly naive about America’s racial situation, describing discrimination as “unofficial” and even “illegal.” The continuing support, both passive and aggressive, for legalized discrimination and segregation by governments at all levels was a harsh reality of his day. … However devoted White Americans of his day were to the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, they largely acquiesced to a government-supported racial caste system. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2164
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ and index-of-forbidden-subjects work on how dominant groups rationalize caste systems — also to Myrdal’s ‘American dilemma’ framing of the intrapsychic conflict.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2164; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2164