Yalidy Matos's "Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics"

Yalidy Matos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Matos applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, and reported the following:

The main findings of page 99 are as follows:

Ingroup favoritism for whites is relational in nature. There is a strong relationship between white group membership and the maintenance of the group, and one way to maintain the group’s position is to reject policies that aim at elevating an outgroup’s position, such as federal aid for Blacks and affirmative action in hiring and promotion.

Furthermore, support for or opposition to federal aid to Blacks is shaped by partisan identification. White Democrats are less likely to oppose aid to Blacks than Republicans, but higher levels of WRI (white racial identity) and white group consciousness correlate with opposition to aid to Blacks for white members of both parties.

WRI does not predict opposition among Republicans — indicating that WRI and Republican identity align for whites in terms of this question— but white group consciousness does. This suggests there are real differences between racial identity saliency and measures that are closer to how whiteness operates. For white Democrats, white racial identity and white group consciousness does matter, high levels of both decrease white Democrats’ support for ameliorative policies.

Readers who open to page 99 would get a good sense of my book and thus this is a good “test” of a reader’s shortcut.

On page 99, they won’t get the main framework, where I argue that whites’ political attitudes are at bottom moral, but they will get a good idea of one of the book’s main arguments which is that whites make decisions as part of a group and that their ingroup favoritism is inherently relational (they make decisions thinking about their group and other racial/ethnic groups as well).

Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics at bottom argues that non-Hispanic white Americans are a racial and racialized group that make decisions as part of the group. In the social sciences, the norm is that whites are individuals making individual-level political choices but I show that 1) whites make political decisions based on their membership within the white racial group and 2) that these choices are at bottom moral. In other words, the moral and epistemological norms dictated by the system of whiteness also dictate immigration attitudes.

Visit Yalidy Matos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue