Recent scholarship demonstrates that whites’ racist actions require creativity as much as habit. Racial cognition is implicated in this behavior, as white people generate ignorance and apathy to overcome epistemic challenges that threaten white power, privilege, and wealth. Using Mueller’s (2020) Theory of Racial Ignorance (TRI), we demonstrate how these cognitive processes abide by an ends-based orientation—one whereby white people perpetually coordinate “anticipated futures” (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013) to maintain the spoils of racism without being racist. Examining papers produced by white undergraduates following a project investigating systemic racism and family wealth transmission, we reveal how students’ practical takeaways betray this ends-based orientation, which remains resilient even amidst critical racial learning. Our analysis challenges prevailing explanations that infer racism is propelled by a dominant structure of ideological “rules,” a stance that nurtures false hope in educational interventions to reduce white racism. We illustrate how TRI recalibrates that causal narrative by grounding white cognition in material ends rather than ideological rules.

Building on research conducted by sociologists on the predictors of abortion attitudes, through a secondary analysis of 2016 General Social Survey (GSS) data, with a total of 1571 respondents, I investigate the relationship between demographic identifiers, specifically age, sex, and religious fundamentalism, and approval rates of legal abortion. Using the age variable in GSS and drawing from Generational Cohort Theory, I isolate the generational cohorts baby boomers and millennials and hypothesize that baby boomers will approve of legal abortion in fewer instances than millennials. Moreover, I create Abortion Attitude Indexes from GSS questions on abortion, which enable me to separate the questions into two groups: hard and soft abortions. Drawing from Attribution Theory, I propose that there will be an overall higher approval of hard abortions than soft abortions across both generational cohorts. Ultimately, bivariate and multivariate analysis reported that age and sex are not statistically significant predictors of abortion attitudes. However, religious fundamentalism is moderately significant. Therefore, one hypothesis is supported that the more religiously fundamentalist an individual is, the fewer instances they are likely to approve of legal abortion.