I examine the effect of television viewing and ideological orientations associated with “modern” racism such as minimization of the impact of racial discrimination and individual attribution on opposition toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Using cross-sectional General Social Survey (GSS) responses from U.S. adults between 2004 and 2010, I estimate ordered logistic regression models predicting attitudes toward preferential hiring of Blacks. Additionally, I compare agreement with key tenets of abstract liberalism to the findings of previous policy reasoning studies to determine the importance of these attitudes in predicting support for affirmative action policy. In this study, I aim to address the potential real-world implications of television exposure and abstract liberalism in influencing minority group incorporation, acceptance, and societal integration.

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This content analysis was designed to investigate newspaper coverage of the desegregation of Mississippi State varsity football through the media coverage of the first Black football players at Mississippi State University, Robert Bell and Frank Dowsing. Two hundred and three articles from three newspapers (The Starkville Daily News, Mississippi State Reflector, and Jackson Clarion-Ledger) were examined using a three-tiered qualitative analysis. That analysis resulted in 426 frame instances and 686 theme instances, or a total of 1,112 codes. The resulting data were then interpreted using Critical Race Theory (CRT) to generate understanding of the desegregation of the football program. The CRT guided interpretation of the results of the content analysis contradicted the popular narrative regarding Mississippi State University desegregation and athletic desegregation, indicating that the varsity football team and the careers of Bell and Dowsing were reported in a way that supported the existing MSU power structure.

This ethnography of white farmers and industry workers considers the interconnections of privilege and property through farming and how white farmers and industry workers justify and explain existing disparities in who farms and who does not. Data for this ethnography is from semi-structured interviews with white farmers and industry workers, participant observation at agricultural events, and analysis of relevant materials published by agricultural organizations. The stories that white farmers and industry workers tell and share to explain white rural wealth related to agriculture and whiteness in farming ignore the ways in which property was and is distributed in the U.S. from the arrival of the first white Europeans until now and instead rely on individually centered explanations rooted in the ideology of the American Dream and colorblind racial ideology.

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Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is an iconic classic that inspired many street lawyer novels. Examining John Grisham’s A Time To Kill as a low-culture-imprint of Lee’s novel, the thesis analyzes the convergent and divergent points of rhetorical devices that promote colour-blind liberalism across the two texts seeing as they are published 30 years apart. Both pieces of legal fiction act as a reflection and critique of formal legal institutions and through this reflection, the thesis deals with how the texts reinforce, perpetuate and resist the white dominant ideology through the “progressive” race politics of colorblind liberalism.

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This study explores how participants respond to news coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting based on their colorblind racial attitudes. The purpose of this study is to understand how people’s beliefs about the salience of race and racism, as well as how framing within news coverage, contributes to how people privately respond to racial events and their willingness to publicly express their views in discussions. Participants answered questions about their racial ideology, their views about the role of race in the Trayvon Martin shooting, and whether or not they were willing to express these views in a discussion after reading articles that either promotes an overtly colorblind view of the Trayvon Martin case, a race conscious view of the case, or only states the facts of the case (for the control condition). It was found that there were racial differences in how participants viewed the role of race in the Trayvon Martin shooting, even when controlling for racial ideology, and that beliefs in colorblind ideology impacted views of the Trayvon Martin case and willingness to discuss it, with participants with race conscious views that were shown an article that presented the case from a colorblind perspective reporting being less willing to discuss their views on the case compared to those shown an article that presented the case from a race conscious perspective.

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