Combat and housing desegregation reshaped racist attitudes across class and region

Evidence

In 1949, Stouffer et al.’s extensive study of “the American Soldier” provided the first massive field test of intergroup contact’s effects. Using an ingenious quasi-experimental design, Stouffer showed that the experience of fighting side-by-side with African American soldiers in the desperate Battle of the Bulge during the winter of 1944–5 sharply changed the attitudes of White American soldiers. Though limited to the fighting situation, these altered attitudes were found among southerners as well as northerners, and among officers as well as enlisted men. Later field studies of racially desegregated public housing projects provided additional evidence for contact’s ability to diminish racial prejudice among both Blacks and Whites (Deutsch & Collins, 1951; Wilner, Walkley, & Cook, 1955; Works, 1961). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1662

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the pre-Allport empirical bedrock for the vault’s contact-theory thread. — connects to: Nationalist and racist movements recruit across class and gender lines — Silke Roth, Intersectionality and coalitions in…, 311; Residential desegregation fractured white working-class solidarity into defensive individualism — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 191