EXPLAINING white America's opposition to redistributive policies in the 1980s, Seymour Martin Lipset (past president of the American Political Science Association and president-elect of the American Sociological Association) articulates a perspective that has gained currency among certain liberal and neoconservative sociologists. “Many whites,” he writes,

Racism, in this formulation, is not the reason why white Americans object to political strategies that would alter the organization of racial advantage. Rather, the problem is that two American values are in conflict: social equality versus personal freedom. White Americans, argues Lipset, are not opposed to social equality. They simply favor personal freedom. “White opposition to various forms of special government assistance for blacks and other minorities,” he writes, “is in part a function of a general antagonism to statism and a preference for personal freedom in the American value system” (Lipset, 1992:29, emphasis in original).

The conflict between black and white Americans, in this analysis, is a dispute over different versions of equality: One that centers on the individual versus one that emphasizes the group. The dispute is not about scarce resources. Rather, it revolves around alternative values: freedom versus equality. In this formulation, political actors do not use values strategically to articulate culturally acceptable explanations for social location.