Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.
There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.
There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.
Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.
In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.
The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.
The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.
It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.
These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.
Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.
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