Racial Resentment Scale

The Racial Resentment Scale, developed by Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders in Divided by Color (1996), measures a modern, symbolic form of racial prejudice in which anti-Black affect is fused with the traditional American value of individualism. Rather than endorsing biological inferiority, racially resentful respondents express the belief that Black Americans violate norms of self-reliance and hard work and make illegitimate demands for special treatment. The standard battery of four agree-disagree items has become the dominant survey measure of racial attitudes in American political science and a powerful predictor of opinion on welfare, affirmative action, and racialized candidate evaluation.