The "Great Awokening" Had a Strong Upper-Class Accent

From Marco M. Aviña.

Abstract 

"Recent scholarship hails rising racial liberalism among white liberals as a racial reckoning and even a “Great Awokening.” I find that affluent white liberals led these changes. I develop a status-signaling account in which members of this group, embedded in dense, politically homogeneous social environments, face competing reputational and gatekeeping incentives to express alignment with racial equality in principle but not in policy. I leverage the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests as a focusing event when anti-racist norms surged. Using regression-discontinuity-in-time and event-study designs on national public opinion surveys and local public meeting transcripts, I show that post-Floyd movement was concentrated among high-income white liberals, centered on symbolic engagement rather than material policy commitments—whether universalistic or group-targeted—and short-lived. Finally, I provide evidence consistent with this account: post-Floyd, an income gap emerges in implicit bias testing, a form of self-monitoring, but not in implicit bias scores, which are less amenable to impression management. These findings complicate narratives of racial progress and recast the “Great Awokening” as recognitional politics without commensurate redistribution, consistent with concerns about elite capture in identity politics."