“White Americans’ attitudes about politics are inextricably linked to their attitudes about Latinos,” conclude Mark D. Ramirez and David A. M. Peterson in Ignored Racism: White Animus toward Latinos (p. 173). That a broad literature speaks to the centrality of racial attitudes in Whites’ politics, something only reinforced by the Obama and Trump administrations, may perhaps make such a conclusion seem unsurprising. But, investigations into racial attitudes’ political effects frequently consider Whites’ views of Black Americans. Often ignored are Whites’ attitudes about other racialized groups. This is a particularly glaring omission for Latinos who comprise almost one-fifth of the United States population. As Ramirez and Peterson persuasively document, accounting for an omitted attitude, and thus more faithfully capturing the breadth and variety of Whites’ intergroup attitudes, can shed important new light on White Americans’ politics in particular and American politics more generally.
At Ignored Racism's heart lies Latino racism-ethnicism (LRE), a socially acceptable way of expressing anti-Latino animus. LRE comprises four interrelated beliefs: “(1) Latinos fail to succeed because of personal shortcomings rather than institutional discrimination, (2) Latina/o culture is inferior to Anglo-American culture, (3) Latina/o migration is distinct from past immigrant groups as Latinos do not want to assimilate into U.S. society, and (4) Latinos are inherently criminal” (p. 12). These four themes, Ramirez and Peterson detail, have historical resonances and contemporary manifestations. LRE advances the racial attitudes literature by not only expanding our understanding of the set of attitudes Whites hold about Latinos, it likewise contributes by identifying an attitude directly engaging the content of debates about Latinos’ position in the United States.
Chapter 3 offers a rich investigation establishing LRE's empirical reality. Ramirez and Peterson operationalize LRE with four survey items that may be familiar to scholars of White racial attitudes. Respondents agree or disagree with statements such as: “Anti-immigration sentiment and racism have created conditions that make it difficult for Latinos and Hispanics to succeed in America.” They validate this measure several ways. They canvass existing focus group research to uncover how people talk about Latinos, conduct measurement analyses to demonstrate the items capture a unique construct, and use an experiment to contrast LRE's association with views of Irish versus Mexican immigrants. This mixed approach offers a rich set of evidence highlighting the attitude's contours. Not only does this offer helpful support for LRE's content and construct validity, the chapter itself has terrific pedagogical opportunity in showing how scholars can move from measure conceptualization to operationalization and validation.
In subsequent chapters, Ramirez and Peterson demonstrate that LRE contributes to myriad political debates. Drawing on analyses of survey data and experiments, the authors show LRE undergirds immigration policy judgments, beliefs about policing and voting restrictions, and voting behavior. They highlight LRE's domain specificity by showing it influences opinion on policies connected to Latinos in some capacity, not salient but unconnected policies such as abortion, gay marriage, or healthcare (p. 178). Of particular interest may be the authors flipping traditional public opinion investigations by using LRE to predict politicians’ behaviors. After constructing state-level estimates of LRE, they report that variation in LRE predicts Democratic senatorial and gubernatorial candidates taking hardline immigration positions, with no such effect for Republican candidates. Throughout, Ramirez and Peterson show how LRE contributes to opinions net other group-specific attitudes such as stereotypes of Latinos or general orientations such as ethnocentrism and partisanship. Accounting for LRE is, therefore, important for understanding which specific orientation underpins opinion, offering a richer understanding of White opinion by helping scholars understand when, why, and among whom views of Latinos matter.
LRE's conceptualization and measurement offer an important advancement but may also feature an important limitation. As Ramirez and Peterson note, scholars striving to conceptualize and measure racial attitudes face challenges (p. 55). Their validation of LRE follows a path blazed by maybe the most challenging of attitudes to date: racial resentment. But, despite these careful efforts a critic might claim the hearty associations the authors uncover between LRE and various outcomes are because LRE is similar to the things it strives to explain, muddying these associations’ interpretation. Despite this potential limitation, LRE offers a critical contribution by unpacking Whites’ attitudes about Latinos. Ignored Racism lays a foundation future work can, and should, build on.
Ignored Racism also raises several interesting questions. First, by calling attention to the multiplicity of attitudes Whites have about Latinos, it suggests the utility of synthesis, something from which the racial attitudes literature in general might benefit. Given individuals’ racial attitude repertoires, which matter, when, and for whom? Analyses typically highlight an association between an attitude and outcome with this net of complementary attitudes. Although these helpfully identify average associations, future efforts can work to specify, for instance, which types of people rely on LRE over stereotypes, affect, or ethnocentrism, and whether the type of judgment task makes LRE's relevance vary.
A second question takes LRE beyond White Americans. The attitude's content and origins may extend beyond this group. Consider racial resentment. Although originally designed to capture White Americans’ attitudes about Back Americans, recent evidence demonstrates the attitude manifests similarly for both Black and White Americans (Kam and Burge, Reference Kam and Burge2018). So, too, may LRE shed light on variation in Latinos’ beliefs. After the 2020 presidential election, political observers have sought to explain apparently greater Latino support for Donald Trump in 2020 compared to 2016. Perhaps LRE helps explain this. Ignored Racism may not only contribute new insight into Whites’ beliefs, it can set the stage for expanding scholarly understanding of group attitudes more generally.
Although political scientists have not ignored the political relevance of Whites’ attitudes about Latinos, Ramirez and Peterson require scholars to think more carefully about how the content of group evaluations contributes to political judgments. By introducing LRE and highlighting its myriad consequences, hopefully White animus toward Latinos will no longer be frequently ignored.
