Jennifer Chudy’s Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity is a major scholarly achievement that successfully accomplishes several key objectives. First and foremost, the book goes far beyond recent work (including my own) on the often-ignored role of white racial liberalism in US politics to provide the most comprehensive theoretical and quantitative account to date on the prevalence and power of racially sympathetic attitudes in shaping white Americans’ political opinions.

To do so, Chudy unites a long line of interdisciplinary social science research together with insights from her own in-depth interviews to construct an original survey measure that she calls the racial sympathy index. In a series of innovative vignettes, the new measure taps into distress over Black suffering by asking how much sympathy white respondents have for African Americans who have experienced tangible instances of racial discrimination in four different scenarios. These realistic situations include two instances of employment discrimination, along with a young Black man being unfairly frisked by police and high asthma rates stemming from a bus depot located in a primarily Black section of a mid-sized Northeastern city. When measured this way, at least, most white Americans scored high in racial sympathy on 2020 surveys, especially in the scenarios where qualified Black Americans were not hired because of their race.

That new measure, which is now being adopted by other social scientists, is itself a major contribution to the field. Chudy’s racial sympathy index is particularly valuable because of the careful efforts she undertakes in Some White Folks to establish the measurement’s validity. Those analyses convincingly show that racial sympathy is not merely the absence of racial prejudice or the general capacity to empathize with others experiencing distress. Despite being significantly correlated with scoring low in racial resentment and scoring high in general measures of sympathy, Some White Folks demonstrates that its racial sympathy index is a distinct and potent racial attitude that deserves a seat at the table with other venerable survey measures designed tap into white Americans’ feelings toward Black people.

Indeed, the book’s biggest contribution probably comes from the empirical analyses in chapters 5 and 6, which show that its racial sympathy index is a significant and independent predictor of several different policy opinions. Even after controlling for racial resentment and several other relevant variables, these findings reveal that racial sympathy is significantly associated with white Americans’ support for government assistance for Black businesses and schools, greater welfare spending, affirmative action programs, reparations, and police reforms. While a great deal of political science research shows that racial prejudice drives opposition to progressive racial and racialized policies, Some White Folks provides the strongest evidence to date that racial sympathy correspondingly bolsters white support for these programs.

Chudy also presents important data from survey experiments to show that the association between racial sympathy and policies like affirmative action and police reform is significantly stronger when the target of the policy is specified as Black (as opposed to poor). The link between racial sympathy and political participation does not appear to be quite as strong. But the data presented in Chapter 8 of Some White Folks suggests that racially sympathetic whites were most likely to participate in Black Lives Matter Protests and that racial sympathy is associated with other forms of participation among those who score high in political efficacy.

Taken together, these contributions are poised to make a major impact on the field, especially in a Trump era where issues pertaining to race and ethnicity are increasingly the defining cleavage between the two political parties. So much so, in fact, that I consider Some White Folks to be one of the discipline’s most important recent books published on race, ethnicity, and politics.

To be sure, there are still some questions that remain unanswered about the prevalence and potency of racial sympathy in American society and politics. The book’s data collection, for example, only goes through 2021 and, therefore, misses much of the Biden-era backlash against the so-called “Great Awokening” that took place during Donald Trump’s first term in office. White Democrats, in particular, were significantly less likely in 2024 than they were in 2020 to support Black Lives Matter, to say that Black Americans face a lot of discrimination, to believe that society systematically advantages whites, to think that white people should feel guilty about racial inequality, and to score low in racial resentment, as my colleagues and I documented in a 2024 report for the Democracy Fund.

It remains to be seen, then, where the racial sympathy index belongs on an attitudinal spectrum ranging from a deeply held predisposition to merely “cheap talk” survey reports that fluctuate dramatically with the times. I suspect the answer lies much closer to the former crystalized side of the equation here, but there are some notable overtime shifts in the distribution of racial sympathy from 2013 to February 2021 in Table 3.3 that are certainly worth unpacking in future research. It’s also noteworthy that the three vignettes in which specific Black people faced individualized acts of discrimination generated much more sympathy than the remaining scenario, where a Black neighborhood experienced elevated health risks from environmental racism. This difference points to some important limitations on racial sympathy that may make it more difficult to mobilize against the pernicious institutionalized forms of racism that continue to drive racial inequality in the United States.

These lingering questions, however, in no way detract from Some White Folks’ excellence. The book is outstanding and should be considered a must-read for anyone interested in American politics in general and racial politics in particular.