Abigail Hebert

On Wednesday, Bowdoin faculty and students gathered alongside Brunswick community members in the VAC Beam Classroom to learn about the role of race and racial sympathy in American politics.

Jennifer Chudy, professor of political science at Wellesley College, briefly introduced herself before turning to her new book, “Some White Folk,” which was the focus of her lecture.

Churdy began the lecture by identifying the subject of her book as the white participants in the 2020 George Floyd protests, the 2008 and 2012 Obama rallies and the Civil Rights era demonstrations. Her work aims to fill in the gap in research about why some white people are distressed over Black suffering and how their distress factors into racial sympathy.

“There have been occasional but salient moments in which white Americans have advocated on behalf of increased rights and protections for Black Americans,” Chudy said.

The main question Chudy investigated was what motivated these white activists. The answer lies in the idea of racial sympathy, which Chudy defines as white Americans’ distress over the suffering of Black Americans.

“I don’t say anything [in interviews] about negative feelings that they may harbor towards Black Americans,” Chudy said. “The theory here is really just on this one dimension of, ‘Do you feel distressed over Black suffering or do you not?’ And that is racial sympathy.”

Through her research, Chudy found that most people referenced specific instances of discrimination that led them to feel racial sympathy, like witnessing a classmate being mistreated in their college dorm. What surprised Chudy was how most of the respondents made statements referencing contemporary personal instances of discrimination, rather than historical instances or general empathy for Black people experiencing discrimination.

Chudy then discussed a tool she created to measure how white people thought about discrimination. Through her investigation, she presented participants with stories she wrote in which white people were discriminated against implicitly because of their race. Participants read the stories and then answered questions in a survey about how much sympathy they felt for the people in the story.

“[The data suggests that] this wasn’t just a flash in the Black Lives Matter moment,” Chudy said. “This wasn’t a flash in the Obama moment. But actually, if we look out throughout contemporary American politics over the last few years, I think white distress over Black suffering shakes white people’s public opinion on important policy areas.”

To supplement her survey results, Chudy synthesized data from larger data sets such as the General Social Survey and the American National Election Study. Looking at data before and after the 2020 election, Chudy became inspired to embark on a new study where she interviewed the same people twice and put them into an index to find the distribution of racial sympathy.

“According to this distribution, actually the majority of white Americans carry a lot of sympathy for Black Americans,” Chudy said.

Chudy ended the lecture emphasizing, however, that sympathy alone does not necessarily translate into political action; rather, it needs to be paired with a sense of efficacy—the belief that one’s actions can lead to change. Chudy’s interviews suggest a theme of hopelessness among participants with how lawmakers handle the issues they are passionate about. The data also suggests that the majority aren’t voting, protesting or doing anything to make a tangible difference.

“Sympathy is not enough,” Chudy said. “It needs to be lifted into politics with another factor.”

Maya Tokioka ’27 attended the lecture after recently declaring her government and legal studies major.

“I thought it was really interesting, and I felt like I could learn a lot about it,” Tokioka said. “And I certainly did.… I thought that [the lecture] was very informative, very interesting to see how ideas translate into actual actions or how they don’t translate into behavior and actions.”

Beyond her general interest in government, Tokioka saw the bigger application of the material she learned.

“In Trump’s administration, there does seem to be this kind of idea of hopelessness and that ‘Oh, we really do have to rely or go back to the local or state government for action,’” Tokioka said. “It was interesting hearing about how people in that study had different beliefs in the efficacy of actions and civic engagement and how racial sympathy interacts with that. I thought that was a connection that I made because of just this general hopelessness feeling that I’m picking up on right now, at least in my little bubble.”