A Historical Note on Whites’ Beliefs about Racial Inequality
利用盖洛普调查数据，发现1963年民权运动高潮时白人认为黑人和白人应共同为种族劣势负责，但1960年代末这一信念急剧转变，可能源于民权立法和城市骚乱，表明归因并非固定不变。
Beliefs about sources of the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by blacks have been investigated by major continuing surveys since the 1970s. Results indicate that most whites tend to place responsibility mainly on blacks themselves, with the primary emphasis on a presumed lack of motivation on the part of blacks. Drawing on two survey questions used by the Gallup organization, we show that at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963, white respondents tended to blame whites and blacks equally for racial disadvantages, but that this changed sharply in the late 1960s. The change, which may well have been a reversion to pre-1960s beliefs, was probably a result of both the enactment of civil rights legislation, which supposedly ended racial discrimination, and the eruption of riots in Detroit, Newark, and other cities, which differed drastically from the earlier nonviolent protests in the South. This shift in public beliefs indicates that attributions of blame for socioeconomic disadvantage are not as fixed as later data suggest. Our analysis makes strategic use of a split-sample experiment to distinguish substantive change over time from change resulting from variations in the wording of survey questions.