The Significance of Affirmative Action for the Souls of White Folk: Further Implications of a Helping Model

Journal of Social Issues, Winter, 1999 by Anthony R. Pratkanis, Marlene E. Turner

Interestingly, our three routes of helping correspond to Allport' s (1954) three forms of prejudice: (1) the bigot who approaches the world with a threatened, crippled ego, (2) prejudice with compunction or guilt over violating religious or national creed, and (3) the tolerant personality. It is also consistent with Kovel's (1970) three types of racist: (1) the dominant racist, who openly acts out racist beliefs, (2) the aversive racist, who tries to avoid and deny her or his racism, and (3) the unlabeled category of someone who doesn't reveal racist tendencies. In keeping with a field-theoretic approach, we prefer to emphasize the underlying social relationships (that is, how help is given) as opposed to calling them personality types. We now look at each route of affirmative action as help.

Race as Excuse: Rejecting the Helping Role

Timothy McVeigh grew up in predominately White Pendleton of Niagara County, New York (see Stickney, 1996, for biographical details). Racial prejudice had been passed on for generations in Pendleton, a small town of 5,000. In the 1920s, Klan rallies were common; in the late 1970s and 1980s, as McVeigh was entering adulthood, a national recession closed manufacturing plants in western New York, and racial passions were stirred once again (see analysis by Taylor cited in Stickney, 1996, p. 57). Further compounding the tensions in McVeigh's teen years, his mother, known in the community for her promiscuity, abandoned her family. He found some comfort by playing with his grandfather, who gave him his first gun at age 13. With little hope of finding a high-paying job in Pendleton as his father had, McVeigh entered the U.S. Army.

While in the Army, McVeigh was fascinated by The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of the terrorist activities of the "Organization" (a White supremacist group) as it tries to defeat the "System" (a liberal government that sees all people as equal) and cleanse America of liberals, Blacks, and Jews. McVeigh's dream was to become a Green Beret. He survived only 2 days of the training for this elite team. His hopes crushed, he dropped out of the Army and returned home a failure. To earn a living, McVeigh sold weapons at right-wing gun shows, where he found out more about racist organizations such as Christian Identity and the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord. These groups provided him with a reason for his failure to become a Green Beret: The government, Jews, and Blacks are the enemies of the White man. Wanting to be a good soldier in this battle with the government, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 persons.

The Antecedents of Bigotry and Scapegoating

The life of Timothy McVeigh illustrates many of the antecedents of racism as identified by the frustration-aggression model (Bettelheim & Janowitz, 1964; Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939) and its descendants (Allport, 1954; Berkowitz, 1962, 1993). According to the original model, intergroup hostility is the result of frustrations to a dominant group member who then takes out (displaces) this frustration on a minority group member. As both Allport and Berkowitz noted, although there is some empirical support for this model, the frustration-aggression hypothesis cannot account for some key questions, such as why frustration does not always lead to aggression and why certain outgroups are more likely to be the target of such frustrations. Both Allport and Berkowitz listed amendments to this model in the form of factors (such as demagoguery, cultural stereotypes, and autocratic relations) that would signal to the frustrated person that it is acceptable to attack a particular outgroup. For example, McVeigh was clearly frustrated by his Army experience and found a solution for that frustration in the norms developed during his childhood and by joining ra cist social groups. Based on the work of Allport and Berkowitz, we list five antecedents that may cause the blatant rejection of affirmative action and the overt support of White supremacy.