Delilah-Mae

In one recent study 626 white students at more than two dozen colleges and universities kept journals for just a few weeks in one semester of racial events, discussions, and performances they encountered. They recorded a large number, nearly 7,000 instances, of clearly racist events—a number that, if calculated out for a whole year and for all white college students, might be in the hundreds of millions of such events per year. Many of these racist events were in backstage settings with white relatives or acquaintances, but others were in settings with a racially diverse group of people present. The diaries indicate that racist commentaries, joking, and actions are still commonplace among younger, better-educated whites.

Moreover, examining these thousands of accounts, we find that African Americans are the non-European group that obsesses or preoccupies a large proportion of these whites. African Americans appear in a substantial majority of all the racist commentaries, racist jokes, and other racialized performances reported by these students from various regions. Other racial groups, such as Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, are periodically targeted, but verbal and other attacks on them make up only a minority of the events recorded by these students. Clearly, much social science research shows that most whites have a more developed framing of black Americans than of other U.S. groups of color.