Contextualizing Public Opinion on Consumer Racial Profiling: A Marxist Approach

Abstract

Using a Marxist foundation, this article sought to contextualize public opinion related to consumer racial profiling (CRP). CRP is when customers are profiled as shoplifters because of their race or ethnicity. This study tested 2 hypotheses related to those who classified themselves as “haves” and “have-nots.” More specifically, it was hypothesized that those identifying themselves as haves will more likely support the practice of CRP and also believe that the practice of CRP was widespread. Although only 1 of the 2 hypotheses was supported, the research did uncover other important variables for understanding public opinion on CRP.

KEYTERMS:

• Consumer racial profiling
• Marxism and race relations
• shopping while Black

We thank Dr. Mukund Kulkarni at Penn State Harrisburg for research support that was instrumental in securing the data used in this article.

Notes

∗p < .05.

∗p < .05.

1. We recognize that a general conflict perspective has been presented to understand traffic stop racial profiling (Petrocelli, Piquero, & Smith, 2003). However, we see this presentation as being much more general than our focus on the Marxist perspective.

2. For Tables 2 and 3, we examined the collinearity diagnostics for each of the measures. Following Tewksbury, Higgins, and Mustaine (2008) we used OLS to examine the collinearity of the independent measures. That is, we acknowledge the statistical faults of using OLS with these types of data, but the collinearity diagnostics remain robust and are able to be used in analyses such as this one. We did not find tolerances near the .20 cutoff for acceptable collinearity.