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Reviews
| Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. By Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. xi + 276 pp. Photos, tables, graphs, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00 (cloth).
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"Save two walleye, spear a pregnant squaw." This, and a dozen similar phrases, all of them equally full of hatred, anger, resentment, and anxiety, punctuated the Wisconsin fishing rights dispute of the 1980s. The dispute pitted local Chippewa people—who claimed traditional fishing rights on Wisconsin waterways guaranteed in an 1837 treaty—against white Wisconsinites who viewed Indian spearfishing as everything from "wrong" to grossly "inhumane." The rhetoric produced during the dispute reveals that this seemingly minor clash revealed deeply held feelings on both sides. During the 1980s these tensions provoked loud protests, the disruption of fishing sites, and racial epithets targeting Indians who were neither Chippewa nor involved in the dispute. By 1989 state and national officials sent to investigate the escalating conflict warned that violence was almost assured. How could fishing rights become such a volatile issue? In Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute, Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan answer that question by leading us through a labyrinth of sociological theory, survey research, views about the impact of prejudice on politics, and the often confused and inconsistent feelings of white Wisconsinites about what they perceived as Indian violations of the moral order. |
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This is not a history of the treaty rights dispute, however, but a social-psychological study of the role of prejudice in politics. As such, this book proceeds on two fronts, one substantive and the other methodological. Substantively, the authors use sophisticated survey research techniques to explore white Wisconsinite's reactions to the Treaty Rights Dispute and the ways in which racism and prejudice informed people's political positions and views. The authors could not gain access to Indian respondents, making this, as the authors admit, a book about white attitudes alone. Methodologically, the authors use their data to evaluate a number of competing theoretical views of the relationship between prejudice and political action. Against older and still popular views about prejudice that perceive interracial friction as expressions of status anxiety or, more commonly, as the result of an always-existing reservoir of racialist sentiments, Bobo and Tuan find group position theory to possess much greater explanatory value. Reduced to its essentials, group position theory inserts socioeconomic factors into what is otherwise a social-psychological interpretation of prejudice. Group position theorists argue that prejudice manifests itself most strongly when social, economic, or cultural changes threaten to alter existing relationships between groups. It goes without saying that these relations occur in an unequal and hierarchical setting. |
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The heart of this study is an analysis of data gathered from 784 respondents in detailed telephone interviews. While fully 84 percent found the treaty rights to be a salient issue (the number rose to 93 percent in the affected northern counties), only 9 percent could answer three factual questions about the dispute correctly. Moreover, 75 percent of the respondents had a negative view of the protestors (68 percent in the northern counties). This was clearly not an issue of long-standing hostility or deep-seated racism. Instead, according to Bobo and Tuan, the survey results reveal the emergence of prejudice and political action as the position of white and Indian groups changed. Prejudice was not a cause of the conflict, but its result. This is exactly what group position theory would predict. |
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The authors' survey revealed that 82 percent of those surveyed (80 percent in the north) thought that it was important to obey court orders and it would be a series of court orders affirming Chippewa fishing rights and supporting Indian restocking and conservation efforts that eventually brought the conflict to an end. People accepted the situation and went home. In viewing the Wisconsin fishing rights dispute from a group position perspective, Bobo and Tuan invite us to view racial prejudice with a more complex and discerning eye.
Ronald Schultz
University of Wyoming
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