Review: Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith Available to Purchase

Scholars investigating racial attitudes have spent forty years trying to understand the nature, structure, and potency of racial resentment in American politics, especially among white Americans. Central to the debate has been whether racial attitudes, when measured as racial resentment, capture ideological orientations or racial prejudice. This carefully constructed, well-organized book—Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith—takes up the charge from scholars of Black politics who have called for better measurements of racial attitudes. Relying on quantitative and qualitative data, DeSante and Watts Smith make a significant contribution to the academic literature by engaging in one of the first systematic studies of racial attitudes among white millennials while controlling for cohort and period effects. These scholars present new measures of racial attitudes called FIRE (fear, institutionalized racism, and empathy),...