Well-educated blacks grew more distrustful of white racial attitudes than poorly educated blacks

Evidence

The clash between contending sets of interests and values is exacerbated by a growing perceptual gap between the races. On the one hand, the best-off African Americans - those best poised to take advantage of the opportunities that affirmative action offers - increasingly distrust white Americans’ racial values and practices. In the 1960s, poorly educated blacks were more likely than well-educated blacks to agree that “whites want to keep blacks down”; by the 1980s, the positions of the two groups were reversed (Hochschild, 1995:74). In 1990 and again in 1996, well-educated blacks agreed more than did poorly educated blacks that “the Government deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people” (Hochschild, 1995:74 and analyses of New York Times/CBS News survey of October 13,1996, in possession of author). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2016

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hochschild’s Facing Up to the American Dream research on race-class distrust asymmetry. — connects to: Denominational white control pushed college-educated blacks toward separatism — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 283
• QUESTION: What explains the 1960s-to-1980s reversal in distrust by education level — could be explored further.