ABSTRACT
The central component of any dominant racial ideology is its frames or set paths for interpreting information. Individualism today has been recast as a justification for opposing policies to ameliorate racial inequality because they are “group based” rather than “case by case. DAS respondents also used individualism to justify their racial views and race-based preferences. When cultural racism is used in combination with the “minimization of racism” frame, the results are ideologically deadly. But, as social scientists know quite well, few things that happen in the social world are “natural,” particularly things pertaining to racial matters. And behind the idea of people having the right of making their own “choices” lays the fallacy of racial pluralism—the false assumption that all racial groups have the same power in the American polity. A tenet of liberalism whites use to explain racial matters is the Jeffersonian idea of “the cream rises to the top,” or meritocracy (reward by merit).
