Citation

Schulman GI. Am. J. Sociol. 1974; 79(5): 1260-1277.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1974, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

10.1086/225677

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The psychoanalytic view of racism, in contrast to more currently accepted theoretical formulations, predicts a widely distributed potential among white males for the expression of racism in the form of violence based in the specifically sexual threat of the black male. Without accepting the specifics of the psychoanalytic interpretation, and without denying the relevance of social structure and social change for explaining the known data on participation in violent expressions of racism, the present study was designed to examine the potential for the violent expression of racism among white males and to test the hypothesis that the black male may be sexually threatening to white males and that this threat may be involved in the potential for the violent expression of racism. This report presents support for these hypotheses from a controlled laboratory experiment. The evidence is particularly striking given the fact that the data are obtained from young, educated white males from relatively stable homes whose self-identification and attitudes as typically measured are weighted in a decidedly liberal direction.