Race Relations in America: Complacency All Along?

[...]racial bias is a deeply embedded attribute of American society that has existed since the founding of our nation. The author devotes chapter five and six to a statistical analysis of survey data on welfare, social security and health care reform. Based on this assertion, the author conducts an analysis of national survey data from 1984 to 2000 to demonstrate how white Americans associate welfare and social security with race by examining the difference in levels of support between racially conservative and racially liberal whites. The analysis of national survey data on the welfare, social security and health care reform debates complement the experiment in terms of wider generalizability of the results by demonstrating that the American public associate these issues with their racial and gender schemas, and that political elites succeed in framing issues that elicit the cognitive structures of the mass public to shape opinion.