How White People Decide What’s Racist Or Sexist

An interview with sociologist Jessi Streib, who simply asked them

Remember that Jeff Maurer and I are doing our comedy/politics show $oyboyz this weekend — Saturday in New York City at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday in Washington, D.C. at 7:00 p.m. There will be A Gathering following the D.C. show (unfortunately I need to rush to a train right after the NYC show because a friend is, coincidentally, having a birthday party that night).

---

In January, Stanford University Press published Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas. It’s a very interesting book, and I was drawn to it largely because of the wonderfully straightforward and revealing methodology adopted by its authors, the sociologists Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

They simply sought out random white Americans, presented them with various ambiguous scenarios, and asked them to reflect on whether those scenarios demonstrated racism or sexism. Then they asked them to describe their reasoning.

That’s it! It really was simple. And yet, it gave rise to a fascinating account of how people far from the bruising elite battles over race and sex reason their way through these questions.

To take one example, Streib and Leondar-Wright showed respondents this illustration:

Then they read them the following prompt:

A white cop shoots an unarmed black man who’s holding up his cell phone. Afterward he said he saw a gun, and he’s sure he’d fire on a white person who made the same threatening gesture. Is this a story about racism?

The responses they collected formed the basis of Is it Racist?

The researchers found that they could sort respondents into two basic groups: “acquitters” tended to, well, acquit, determining that the scenarios weren’t racist or sexist. “Convictors” did the opposite.

The two groups adopted different strategies, as explained in this chart from the book:

(An error unfortunately made it into the book, Streib explained to me, so I’ve corrected it here.)

It shouldn’t be surprising that acquitters tended to be more politically conservative, on average, than liberals. But the authors’ proposed reasons why, it turned out, are pretty interesting, and tie in to our propensities toward conformity and groupthink.

Not everyone could be easily pinned down, Streib and Leondar-Wright found: Some respondents fit more into the category of moderate acquitters and convictors, as the authors called them. They tended to be less politically engaged and a bit more flexible and open-minded in their thinking about these issues.

I’d corresponded previously with Streib and had really enjoyed her 2014 book The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages, so when she reached out to me about this one, I jumped at the chance to interview her — including to push her on a few points where I disagreed.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity, which includes some discussion of Streib’s own preferred compromise between the methods of acquitters and convictors.

How did you guys come up with your method? Because it’s sort of subtly ingenious.

We just wanted to talk to everyday white people about how they make these decisions that seemed like the country was asked to decide on more and more. So, we started talking about this project after Trump was elected the first time, and during that time, there were constant questions: “Is Trump racist? Is he sexist?” and half the country was saying yes, and half the country was saying no.

And then you had the Confederate statues debates and the Charlottesville debates, and it just seemed like we were constantly coming up against these questions. And we weren’t that interested in what elites thought, or what people who are incredibly involved in politics thought. We were interested in just how everyday people make these decisions. And so, we got on Facebook and found, like, “Buy, Sell, Trade” groups and that type of community group, and we went on Craigslist, and we tried some occupational listservs, and just tried to reach out to as many ordinary people as we could, with the idea of also trying to get a lot of diversity within those groups. So we wanted conservatives and liberals, working-class people and professionals, men and women, and try to get as diverse an array within middle-aged white people as we could find.

As you note in your book, when I say “I believe X,” I am making a statement of my belief, but it’s also a social act, because it broadcasts certain things about my social tribe, and it can have pretty big consequences for my standing within my tribe. Am I correct in saying that for all four groups you studied, on the “acquitter” and “convictor” side, part of what’s going on there is that people know what they are supposed to say and what beliefs they’re supposed to express?

That’s exactly right, and they know that. But I also think a lot of them believe it. It’s not just virtue signaling about their group, but because they know they’re part of this group, they know what they’re supposed to believe, and then they also come to actually believe it, often. Not 100%, but yes, I think a lot of people’s views about what’s racist and sexist are signaling to people in their group that they’re on the right side of this debate.

Your interviewing reminded me of some of the work Jon Haidt has done on moral foundations, where you can see the sort of intellectual hoops people jump through to arrive at their preferred conclusions.

Yes, I agree that motivated groups do that. I don’t think they realize they’re doing it, but the motivated convictors say almost everything that we ask about is racist and sexist, and the motivated acquitters say almost everything we ask about is not racist or sexist, [and] each comes up with these logics that allow them to say that that’s true all the time. So, for the motivated convictors, you know, we’ll ask them, “Have you ever seen this particular form of racism?” And they’ll say, “Well, no, but I must have. . . [and] my own evidence from my own life is unimportant. We know that racism is everywhere in America, so therefore I must have seen it.” Whereas the motivated acquitters are on the opposite side. In any accusation of racism or sexism, they think that the person who made the accusation is up to no good. They are out to make money; they’re out to make a name for themselves; they’re trying to divide the American people; and so, why should we take that accusation seriously? It’s coming from a source who has bad motives. So, they dismiss other people’s accusations out of hand.

So, both groups come up with this logic that makes it very easy to see what they want to see, and very hard for them to understand how other people might disagree with them.

There’s this interesting finding in psychology and political science that contrary to some people’s expectations that more educated and knowledgeable people are more likely to hold true beliefs, people with more knowledge and education can actually reverse engineer justifications for false or unjustifiable beliefs. So, it was interesting to me that you found that moderate acquitters and moderate convictors were both able to surmount certain forms of bias and groupthink sometimes, just because they didn’t have as much exposure to the correct viewpoints for their tribe. Am I stating that right?

Yes, and they’re less part of a tribe. So especially the moderate acquitters, they tend to vote Republican, but they’re mostly not following the news. Some of them are very isolated, and so they don’t particularly have a local tribe, and that makes them pretty open to evidence that contradicts what they would normally say. They also know they don’t know a lot about it. With this group in particular, a lot of them hadn’t heard the word sexism before, so they know very little about sexism in particular, but also, they know little about racism. And so when somebody comes along and says, “Hey, did you know this fact?” or “I had this racist experience,” they’re kind of open to saying, “Oh, let me hear you out. Let me understand the evidence,” in a way that the other groups might not.

The moderate acquitters really stood out as the most interesting and idiosyncratic group. Like, you talked to a lot of folks who had been through trauma, who were troubled. You guys wrote that the moderate acquitters had more trouble with social cues and often had less knowledge even of terms we view as fairly basic, like sexism. Can you just talk about them a bit, and at least speculate as to why they were so different from members of the other groups?

Some of them are incredibly socially isolated, so they aren’t getting a lot of information about racism or sexism from their friends, or from just observing in the world how people are treated differently. They don’t watch very much news. Some of them have trouble picking up social cues — and they tell us that. We also picked that up, but they were the first to admit it. So, they are kind of very low-information about racism, sexism, and they’re not figuring it out just by observing the world, because they’re so isolated, and they’re not picking it up from the news because they’re not watching the news.

And so, in some ways, they’re very open-minded. They also often have this experience of their parents or grandparents who were incredible bigots, and so they grew up saying, “I don’t want to be like those people.” To them, the worst thing you can do is see an individual as a member of a group, because they saw their parents and grandparents doing that in an only negative way, and they said, “I’ll never be like that.” They responded by becoming deeply color-blind, and to some degree gender-blind, and see that as anti-racism and anti-sexism, because they’re not being like the generations before them.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall on how we have this thick dossier on Donald Trump that just seems to bounce off a lot of Americans, and they don’t care, or maybe they don’t know is more accurate. And to me, the moderate acquitters also stood out as the group of maybe convincible voters who could have put him over the top. I’m curious if you agree that it’s those, not the hardened racist or the really ideological voters, that probably made the difference.

What was also kind of comforting to us — we’re both liberals — is that the moderate acquitters mostly voted for Trump, but they didn’t really support him. They just found him better than the alternative. They will call Trump racist, at times. They will say that some of what he does is sexist. They’re not just blind to it, even though they know very little. When you present them with something Trump said, they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, that does sound racist to me.” And so, the idea that all Trump voters are racist and sexist — I mean, it depends on your definition of racist and sexist — but they’re not enthusiastically endorsing his racism and sexism.

This is sometimes hard to relate to as a news-addicted “high information voter,” but would you say that, for millions of voters, they aren’t aware of candidate bios and party platforms, and instead, vote way more on vibes?

It’s true. I would also say, to you or I, the idea that you’ve never heard sexism in your life, that word, seems crazy, right? Like, I’m a sociologist — we swim in this stuff. But when you learn about their lives, it no longer seems that crazy.

Some of them were addicted to drugs for years and just barely hanging on; some of them have disabled children who just need a ton of help, and they’re really, really busy with that. Of course they weren’t reading about sexism. They’re not watching the news. They’re not talking to their friends about sexism — they’re keeping their kids alive. And so when you start thinking about all the hardships that exist in the country and that so many people are experiencing, I think it’s pretty easy, then, to be sympathetic to how little information people get, or just how isolated some people are too.

And I would also say the reverse of this is that a lot of us have all this information, and we think we’ve seriously thought about it, but a lot of us are born into families who believe these things and go to schools that teach the same things, and we like to think that we are objective, but a lot of us are just part of a tribe, and we try hard to believe what our tribe believes.

If there’s such a thing as a truly “objective” human, I’ve never met one. You conducted this research before Trump was elected a second time. Did the fact that this guy gets elected again at the end of your project change the way you thought about anything? Would you have done anything differently if you had known that would happen?

I think my co-author would have said we should have asked about trans issues, and we didn’t, because that was such a big part of the election. We should have talked more about abortion too. It came up when respondents brought it up, but we didn’t purposely bring it up, and I wish we had. But mostly the second election just helped me understand why people think about Trump, and what I would call his racism and sexism, the way that they do, and why so many people are bothered by wokeness and how the motivated convictors — these people who are very left and live in these leftist bubbles and think almost everything is racist and sexist — are so distant from the rest of the country.

Overall, you guys expressed more sympathy to the convictors than the acquitters. I appreciated that you offered an overall balanced account, but you’re like, No, we think, on average, the convictors are more correct, or more accurately understand the world. In liberal bubbles, especially since 2020, part of what pushed me in the anti-identitarian direction was that we saw this endless string of scandals and meltdowns. These are not happening at steel mills in Ohio — these are happening at The New York Times or NGOs. Ryan Grim, a lefty writer, wrote a long article in The Intercept in 2022 on how institution after institution melted down over accusations of racism and sexism, or mostly racism. I think that made me more sympathetic to the acquitters, because I know people who have been fired over what seems like weaponized claims, and I’m curious if you’re at all sympathetic to that.

I would say a couple of things. One is that I think we could separate out identity politics and convicting. I don’t think those have to be the same. We could think about individual instances of racism and sexism, and think about that choice of “Is this racist or sexist?” without referring to people’s own identities when making that choice. That way, regardless of your race or gender, you could come to the same conclusion.

But I agree with you that aspects of convicting — or the convictors and their methods — are incredibly problematic, especially that what they tend to do is what we call “algorithmic thinking.” They see a case and they know it’s part of a pattern of how racism or sexism tend to play out and, without asking any questions, without thinking about the evidence of this case at all, without considering alternative explanations, they are very firm that it’s racist or sexist. And that seems like a problem, as not all cases that, at first blush, seem to match a pattern are best characterized by racism and sexism, and we should at least consider alternative explanations, ask questions about what actually happened, dig into the evidence a little bit more, before we come to a conclusion — especially a strong conclusion, and especially a conclusion we might post all over social media.

I think convictors are quick to judge, and that makes them over-convict and convict a lot of innocent people. And that’s also why, even though we side a little bit more with the convictors than the acquitters, we come up with our own way of making these judgment calls at the end of the book, because we don’t think the convictors’ way is the best possible way to be making these decisions

Could you run us through this “surveyor technique” in your own words, and how it differs from the prosecutor-like approach of acquitters and the pattern-matching approach of convictors?

Surveyors go out and they think about racism and sexism like a real-life surveyor might. A surveyor would go to a new plot of land with some knowledge about what issues might come up at that land; and a surveyor of racism and sexism would know a lot of patterns about how racism and sexism play out, but then, like the real-life surveyor, they wouldn’t say, “Oh, because these are patterns, then they must occur on this plot of land.” They would actually go and look. They would gather evidence to see “Is there a problem here? Is there not a problem here? Should we be worried or should we not?”

They would also consider alternative ideas of what’s going on. So, someone might say “You might have this issue,” but they might then say, “Oh, you know, maybe it’s this other thing instead.” And so, they would also consider alternatives. So, with racism and sexism, we want to start out with the big patterns, but then we want to investigate and gather evidence about whether they actually happened in a given case, and we want to consider alternative explanations. Some things that are bad and happen to women or to people of color happen by chance. Sometimes they happen equally to people of different groups. And we want to actually understand exactly what form they take. And so we want to really gather the evidence before we make any conclusions. And so starting out broad and then going narrower and gathering the evidence is kind of the basis of it.

I found this to be a really interesting book, but I’m skeptical of one argument you make — namely, that it matters that much whether the average person gets this “right,” especially in cases where there’s often no objectively correct answer.

For example, you write of motivated acquitters,

Their motivated reasoning has great impact. They not only acquit interactions and institutional policies that do not contribute to unfair inequalities but also ones that do. In doing so, they abet the latter’s continuation, buttressing and excusing processes that make some people’s lives more difficult than other people’s.

On an individual level — “Is this individual person coming to the right conclusion about racism and sexism?” — are we sure that matters? It’s one thing if you’re investigating the Chicago Police Department for a pattern or practice of discrimination. But, for a random person, are we sure we care?

I’m super sympathetic to your viewpoint, because I’m usually the one being like “What do I do that matters? Structure matters, and does individual action actually matter?” But then when you think of all of the situations where we do make these judgment calls, I really think they do add up to mattering.

So, you know, as a professor, I think about this stuff when I teach. Am I treating everybody fairly? Am I grading in a fair way? Those things only matter a little — I’m only one professor, for a semester of their lifetime of education — but I think if we’re all making decisions in a similar way, that matters. How we think about something like sexual harassment really matters. If we call it sexual harassment or not, we’re much more likely to do something when we think of it that way than when we don’t. I think how we treat our partners, especially for heterosexual relationships, is filled with gender stuff that adds up to mattering. I think how we think about voting, it really matters. For people who are bosses, I think it really matters how they think about what’s racist and sexist when they hear their employees’ complaints or when they make their own rules. I think in parenting it matters a lot, when you’re teaching your kid that some things are racist and some things are sexist, or you’re teaching them they’re not racist or sexist.

So I think it kind of all adds up. Does any one person’s decision about any one thing particularly matter? Maybe not. But in aggregate, when we think about how everybody is making these decisions all the time, I think then that’s how it matters.

One more thing I want to push on. You guys write that:

Acquitters do what we all do: find ways to prove ourselves right. But they use judgment calls to affirm a belief they don’t realize is wrong: that racialand gender inequality are rare.

There are so many different ways to pose that question, and as you point out, by some metrics, women do better than men, or girls do better than boys. By other metrics, we still have genuine gender inequality. And then there are other metrics like the pay gap, which has to do with women having to leave the workforce to take care of kids. You guys had so much appropriate nuance and hedging, but you seem pretty confident that, yes, racism and sexism remain big problems in society, and to me, a lot of those are just very complicated parts of other systems involving things like class.

Betsy and I are first and foremost class scholars, so we would be the first to agree with you that class matters a ton. But I think there’s overwhelming evidence about racial inequality. The gender ones I think we could debate more, but when you think about the wealth gap, the neighborhood quality gaps, the opportunities for upward and downward mobility — although that is changing between black girls and white girls who start out at the same place are getting more and more equal opportunities. But for black boys, there’s a huge gap for upward and downward mobility. There’s a huge gap between black and white boys for incarceration. There’s huge gaps for health outcomes. I mean, it’s just, like, overwhelming, whatever you think about it. I guess your question is whether it was unequal treatment that caused it.

Right. I grew up in a wealthy suburb, and that’s in part because my grandparents were white and had a chance at upward mobility at a time the country was booming that other people didn’t have. There are black people my age whose families didn’t have that same opportunity to build wealth, and that might explain socioeconomic disparities between us. Is there a risk of conflating these undeniably true aspects of twentieth-century American history with situations in which acquitters don’t see racism in a present-day interaction? Because you don’t need racism in everyday interactions to get discrepant outcomes, right?

That’s right. And maybe we worded it poorly, but part of our point would be that these inequalities are caused by unfair treatment. Sometimes that treatment happened quite a while ago, and the legacy of that continues, but acquitters would deny that there is basically any inequality at all, and so that’s where we think acquitters are wrong.

With gender, once I started listing out all of the ways that men are disadvantaged, it does feel a little bit more hard to parse, right? And I know my co-author would say that a lot of the gender stuff that men are more disadvantaged wasn’t caused by a system of women dominating and making things bad for men, and I think that’s a reasonable point. To her, that would suggest that maybe we shouldn’t call those things sexist, that they are inequalities, but not because women were in charge and made them so.

But yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that men suffer from, that women suffer less from, and vice versa — there’s a lot of gender inequality that still affects women much more than men. And acquitters wouldn’t see any of the inequalities that women suffer from more than men as real. And so I think they were wrong about that.

What would you say about the argument, which I’ve seen on both the left and the right, that there’s been an explosion in elite talk about racism and sexism that hasn’t always been productive? Are you sympathetic to the idea that class is getting overshadowed?

I’m totally sympathetic. Even our liberal respondents, who know so much now about racism and sexism, were pretty awful about understanding class inequality. So, every class inequality that they thought of, they see as foremost being about race. And so they kind of erased all of the experiences of low-income white people, which are a very big group of people, and were unsympathetic when we brought them up, because to them, it was like, “Well, they’re not experiencing racism, so maybe it is their fault they’re poor.” And they understood race as a structural inequality, but they didn’t understand class as a structural form of inequality, and so, when they’re white, they’re like “Why didn’t they get ahead?” And so yeah, there was an incredible lack of sympathy. And honestly, a lot of people on the right were more aware of class than people on the left, and that was surprising to me. Although I am always happy to see if anybody’s aware of class, so it was a welcome surprise.

---

Questions? Comments? Class reductionism? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com, on Twitter at @jessesingal, or on Bluesky at @jessesingal.com.

Image: CHARLOTTE, USA - JANUARY 28: People gather to protest against the police violence following the killing of Tyree Nichols on in Memphis on January 28, 2023 in Charlotte NC, United States. The US city of Memphis released January 27, 2023 graphic video footage depicting the fatal police assault of a 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, as cities nationwide braced for a night of protests against police brutality. Five Memphis officers were charged with second-degree murder in the beating of Tyre Nichols, who died in hospital on January 10 three days after being stopped on suspicion of reckless driving. (Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)