We thank Richard C. Fording and Sanford Schram for their excellent summary of our book and insightful commentary on some of its potential shortcomings.

At the heart of our book is an argument about how historically discriminatory institutions can contribute to how whites express animus toward Latinos by constraining Latinos into subservient economic, social, and political positions. This animus is rooted in the history of white–brown relations, and we document its expression in modern-day discourse using focus groups. Much of the focus group discussions mirror the operationalization of racial resentment (Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals, 1996) but differ in content—for example, a lack of assimilation rather than individualism leading to the development of our survey indicators.

Fording and Schram raise an important concern that our measure of Latino racism-ethnicism (LRE) might not be empirically distinct from other measures of racial attitudes, particularly the traditional racial resentment (RR) scale, attitudes about Muslims, and white racial identity. We agree that this is a central question that we know readers are likely to ask when reading our book. There are two distinct elements to this question. First, are whites’ attitudes about Latinos distinct from their attitudes about other out-groups? Second, if they are, which of these attitudes are responsible for explaining political attitudes? Given the different approaches that we and Fording and Schram take to understanding how racial attitudes influence public opinion, we are not surprised that we come to different conclusions.

Is LRE empirically distinct from other racial attitudes? We provide our most concrete evidence of this in chapter 3. The LRE items are correlated with the corresponding items in the racial resentment scale. These relationships show a moderately strong relationship ranging between .61 to .63—a result not too surprising given similarities in wording and an expectation that those who dislike Blacks are also likely to dislike Latinos. But there is also unique variation between the two measures representing the distinctive Latino content.

The empirical relationships between LRE and the dependent variables in our results are more conclusive about the second question. Whenever possible, we have included a range of measures of alternative racial attitudes in our models, and our focus was on comparing LRE to a host of different racial attitudes. We did not always compare the effect of LRE to the effect of racial resentment but instead compared it to ethnocentrism, old-fashioned racism, and stereotypes about African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. LRE rather than RR is associated with immigration policy preferences in five models using the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES; p. 69: Table 4.1). Not reported in the book, LRE rather than RR is also associated with support for gubernatorial and senate candidates who campaigned against immigration in 2014. Our models of 2016 support and vote choice for Trump did include a control for negative Muslim stereotypes, which showed no relationship with either outcome. We find similar results when we substitute that variable for beliefs about Syrian refugees. In other issue areas, the effect of LRE is robust to these additional measures when available.

None of our studies included measures on white in-group identity similar to those used by Ashley Jardina (White Identity Politics, 2019), but we do have measures of white racial stereotypes (i.e., are whites trustworthy and intelligent). When controlling for white stereotypes, LRE continues to explain public preferences on immigration, crime control policies, criminal sentencing, police body cameras, support for political candidates, and support and vote for Trump in 2016. We failed to find that the inclusion of this variable diminished the role of LRE in any of our models.