Race Preferences at Work: How Supervisory Status, Employment Sector, and Workplace Racial Composition Shape White Americans’ Beliefs About Affirmative Action

ABSTRACT

This study examines how white Americans’ beliefs about affirmative action intersect with three important workplace factors: supervisory status (supervisors vs. subordinates), employment sector (public vs. private), and workplace racial composition. Using data from the 1996–2018 General Social Surveys, we first examine trends over time in three beliefs: (1) the perception that whites are hurt by affirmative action, (2) attitudes toward the preferential hiring and promotion of blacks, and (3) opinions regarding special treatment by the government for blacks. We then examine how the three workplace factors shape support for (or opposition to) such race-targeted policies. Our analyses reveal declining opposition to affirmative action over time, though a majority of whites, regardless of authority level, still hold conservative stances on race-targeted policies. Further, results for our three key predictors (supervisory status, employment sector, workplace racial composition) provide support for group position, new governance, and intergroup contact theories, respectively. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for intergroup relations with special focus on understanding barriers to the implementation of antidiscrimination and diversity policies aimed at ameliorating racial inequities in U.S. workplaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Affirmative action
• group position theory
• intergroup contact theory
• new governance theory
• public/private sector

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In their study using 1994 Los Angeles survey data, Bobo et al. (2000) observed that white supervisors were significantly more opposed to affirmative action than their subordinate counterparts. We keep this finding in mind but forward our expectation of “no differences” across the supervisory divide in light of (1) our broader set of outcomes, (2) our nationally representative data source, (3) our larger set of workplace and other covariates, and (4) the overall set of findings reported by Bobo et al. (2000), alongside those of more recent tests of group position theory that analyze the relationship between supervisory status and whites’ racial attitudes (e.g., Smith and Hunt 2021).

² Extrapolating these scope conditions to the U.S. workplace illuminates why anti-black prejudice and discrimination remains such a prominent problem. For example, few workplaces in the United States have racial/ethnic representation throughout all ranks of the organization proportional to the population. Thus, the absence of a critical mass of minority representation throughout all levels of the organization precludes by default the prospect of equal status between groups.

³ We explored possible creation of a composite measure (e.g., index) of whites’ beliefs combining these three measures, though this proved impossible since all three items never appear on the same GSS ballot in any of the years we examine. In addition, since the three outcome variables have different response options (ranging from 3 to 5 categories), we elected to dichotomize each of them for consistency in modeling and interpretation of effects.

⁴ We recognize that supervisory status is not a guarantee that a person has direct influence over implementing and enforcing equal opportunity policy. We revisit this issue in our conclusion.

⁵ Since it is impossible, without additional information, to simultaneously estimate the effects of age and cohort (year of birth) in repeated cross-sectional models controlling for survey year, we used the GSS variable AGE in our analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan A. Smith

Ryan A. Smith is professor and chair at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and Faculty Affiliate at the Graduate Center, PhD Program in Sociology, City University of New York. He holds a Master’s in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of research include the causes and consequences of race, ethnic and gender inequality in workplace power, racial attitudes in America, and the functional use of religion during times of existential crises.

Matthew O. Hunt

Matthew O. Hunt is professor of sociology at Northeastern University. His primary research interests involve intersections of race/ethnicity, social psychology, and inequality in the United States. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociology of Education, and other publications.