Although race relations in the United States has long been a vibrant area of research in political science, scholarly interest in the importance of racial attitudes in American politics increased after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Over the last decade, a large literature has now documented a resurgence of the effects of racial prejudice on vote choice and on attitudes toward a broad range of social policy issues. At the same time, the literature increasingly reflects a broader conceptualization of racial attitudes that goes beyond a singular focus on white prejudice toward Blacks. Instead, scholars have come to recognize the political significance of prejudice toward other racial and ethnic outgroups. In Ignored Racism: White Animus toward Latinos, Mark D. Ramirez and David A. M. Peterson contribute to this literature by offering a compelling account of how prejudice toward Latinos has come to rival the importance of anti-Black prejudice in contemporary US politics.

Ramirez and Peterson begin by tracing the history of the racialization of Latinos as “a phylogenetically and culturally (i.e., behaviorally) distinct group from whites” (p. 26). The historical origins of this racialization process can be traced to the colonial period when the first white European settlers began to inhabit the Americas. Early Spanish settlers eventually created a caste system in which the Spanish “pure blood” colonists enjoyed many rights and privileges that were denied to Mestizo people, including the right to hold either private or public positions of power. Many Mestizo cultural traditions were even defined as criminal. The authors conclude, “The early Mestizo people were viewed as ‘alien’ outsiders, with inferior, sometimes immoral traditions and subjugated to menial positions in society” (p. 34).

This caste system was largely continued after Anglo Americans eventually took control of what is now the south and southwest United States (i.e., Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas). The marginalization of Latinos became institutionalized through segregation laws that continued through the mid-twentieth century and that operated much like the Jim Crow laws that subjugated African Americans in the South. Like African Americans, many Latino families had their land seized, which stunted the growth of a Latino middle class. As the authors argue, these discriminatory and exploitive practices only served to reinforce deeply rooted stereotypes supported by racial narratives of Latinos as un-American, deviant, and unable to assimilate. This marginalized status has been inherited by newer generations of Mexican immigrants, as well as immigrants from other Latin American countries, such as Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Cubans.

Over the last two decades, the targeting of Latinos as a racial outgroup has only intensified, and it seems clear that anti-Latino prejudice has become an important force in US politics. Perhaps the clearest sign that anti-Latino prejudice has become a potent political weapon occurred when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015 by declaring his opposition to Mexican immigrants, whom he characterized as rapists and criminals. Yet, despite the obvious importance of white hostility toward Latinos in our politics, we are still struggling to understand it. Although there has been considerable attention paid to the individual-level and contextual factors that are related to anti-Latino prejudice, scholars have devoted far less attention to the conceptualization and measurement of such prejudice, especially when compared to the voluminous literature on the measurement of white prejudice toward Blacks. In Ignored Racism, Ramirez and Peterson tackle this question head-on in what is undoubtedly the most important contribution of their book.

The authors begin by recognizing that the racialization of Latinos has resulted in the classification of Latinos as nonwhite in the eyes of white Americans. Thus, it makes sense that the measurement of anti-Latino prejudice might benefit from what we have learned about the measurement of prejudice toward African Americans. As the authors note, symbolic racism theory suggests that white Americans in the post–civil rights era are generally reluctant to make overt expressions of racial prejudice toward African Americans. Rather, they express their prejudice in a different form—one that justifies their resentment by citing the failure of Blacks to adhere to American values of individualism and self-reliance. The authors claim that we should also expect this to be true regarding anti-Latino prejudice. They argue, “White opposition to many policies that appear to benefit Latinos might derive from racial animus cloaked in the language that Latinos fail to assimilate into Anglo-American society, adhere to inferior cultural norms, lack agency, and engage in criminal behavior” (pp. 44–56). They label this conceptualization of prejudice “Latino/a racism-ethnicism” (LRE).

Ramirez and Peterson measure LRE using a four-item scale that is very similar to the items used in the well-known racial resentment scale, but the LRE items are customized to reflect the distinct prejudices and discrimination faced by Latinos. Given the fact that the remainder of the book presents analyses of the validity and political significance of the LRE scale, it is worth a close examination. For each of the items listed next, respondents are asked to state their level of agreement–disagreement based on the same five-point scale used for the racial resentment scale:

• The Irish, Italians, Jews, and many other ethnic groups immigrated to the United States legally. Latinos and Hispanics should do the same without any special favors.

• Anti-immigration sentiment and racism have created conditions that make it difficult for Latinos and Hispanics to succeed in America.

• Latinos and Hispanics would be more welcome in the United States if they would try harder to learn English and adopt US customs like past immigrant groups have done.

• Critics of immigration and the media have overblown the number of crimes committed by Latinos and Hispanics within the United States.

Many scholars will recognize the first three items of the LRE scale, because they are very similar to three items in the racial resentment scale (albeit slightly adapted to the case of Latinos). The fourth item in the LRE scale is the most distinct: it taps stereotypes of Latinos as criminals (a stereotype that is not measured by the racial resentment scale).

After detailing the measurement of the LRE scale, the authors present a series of validity tests that convincingly show that the items are highly correlated and seem to measure the same underlying concept. In addition, the scale appears to be measuring something that is distinct from alternative measures of prejudice used in the literature, including measures of old-fashioned racism based on adherence to anti-Latino stereotypes and of ethnocentrism (as a measure of generalized prejudice toward racial outgroups). Ramirez and Peterson also present the results of a series of tests to show that the LRE scale is not simply a proxy for partisanship, ideology, or cultural preferences. Finally, in the most interesting test of the scale’s validity, they conduct an experimental analysis that finds that it is LRE and not other nonracial attitudes that drive opposition to Mexican immigration (compared to Irish immigration).

In the remaining chapters of the book, the authors present a series of analyses of the relationship between LRE and attitudes toward three policy issues. They begin with an examination of attitudes toward immigration policy. They then examine the effects of LRE on two ostensibly race-neutral policy issues: attitudes toward criminal justice policies and support for restrictive voting laws. The logic of these analyses is rooted in theories of the racialization of policies such as welfare and criminal justice that get coded as Black by many whites and for which research has found a consistent relationship between racial prejudice and support for punitive welfare and criminal justice policies. Presumably, criminal justice and voting laws have become racialized in an analogous way due to the association of these policies with Latinos. Finally, the authors conclude with an analysis of the effects of LRE on vote choice in the 2014 and 2016 congressional and presidential elections. The findings across all of these analyses converge on the conclusion that LRE has a strong effect on a variety of important political attitudes and behaviors, independent of other forms of racial prejudice. The results are impressive and robust to a variety of data sources and research designs—both experimental and observational.

Despite the breadth of these findings regarding the effects of LRE, there is no doubt that some scholars who study racial attitudes will remain skeptical of its importance, at least as measured by Ramirez and Peterson. Because the measure is rooted in symbolic racism theory and the LRE scale closely resembles the racial resentment scale, the authors will no doubt find themselves subject to the same criticisms that continue to surround the original racial resentment scale: Is it really measuring prejudice? The authors fully acknowledge this in their book. Throughout all of their analyses, they go to great lengths to control for partisanship, ideology, and other nonracial attitudes, which should satisfy at least some critics.

Perhaps a more significant criticism is that the analyses of the effects of the LRE scale fail to control for the effects of other types of racial attitudes that have been shown to have significant impacts on electoral behavior and social policy attitudes. For example, although the authors control for different types of measures of prejudice toward Blacks, none of their analyses use the traditional racial resentment scale. Although the racial resentment scale is highly correlated with other measures of hostility toward African Americans, given that the LRE scale, like the racial resentment scale, is grounded in the concept of symbolic racism, it seems oddly inconsistent with the authors’ own theoretical assumptions to not include the racial resentment scale as a control variable. The inclusion of a measure of racial resentment would seem especially important for the analyses of attitudes toward criminal justice policy and restrictive voting laws, as well as the models of vote choice.

The analyses of the political effects of LRE would also benefit from a consideration of the role of other types of racial attitudes. For example, some scholars have argued that in the current political environment, white voters are motivated by a strong sense of white racial identity, which may operate independently of various forms of racial hostility. Several studies have also found that hostility toward Muslims has had a significant effect on vote choice in recent elections. Anti-Muslim prejudice would also seem to be especially relevant to immigration attitudes, given the significant level of prejudice that white voters hold toward Muslim Americans combined with the fact that one of Donald Trump’s first and most controversial policy priorities as president was to implement a so-called Muslim immigration ban.

These criticisms are not meant to diminish the importance of the many contributions of Ignored Racism. The authors were undoubtedly constrained by the fact that their LRE scale was administered through the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which includes a very limited set of items that could be used to construct these alternative measures of racial attitudes. There is no question that based on the analyses of survey data presented in Ignored Racism, as well as the results of the several original experimental analyses presented in the book, Ramirez and Peterson have made a strong case for the importance of their measure of LRE, and we believe that this measure needs to be taken seriously. We hope that the LRE scale will begin to be included in other large national surveys so that other scholars can continue to work toward a better understanding of what has indeed been an important (and often ignored) form of racism.