Tag Archives: racialization

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, , , ,

One question has dominated the conversation among political scientists attempting to explain the presidential election: Were Trump’s supporters motivated primarily by economic anxiety or racial resentment? So far, I’ve avoided weighing in on this question, hoping that the definitive study would appear. It hasn’t yet, but a new experiment by Michael Tesler is interesting enough to warrant giving you a progress report.

The corporate media narrative clearly favors the economic explanation. In a typical article, we are told (correctly) that the family incomes of working class families have been stagnant for 35 years, that trade agreements and the 2008 recession have caused widespread unemployment and underemployment, and that both political parties have ignored the plight of these Americans. This is followed by interviews with a couple of Trump supporters who express pain and anger over the way they have been treated. However, this is anecdotal evidence. The answers given by Trump supporters are partially driven by the questions they are asked. For the media, framing the election in terms of economic anxiety rather than racism avoids offending Trump and his supporters.

Much of the evidence available prior to the election failed to support the economic anxiety narrative. Surveys showed that racial attitudes predicted Trump support better than economic attitudes—for example, these two, and this one. This large sample Gallup poll also cast doubt on the economic explanation. The median household income of a Trump supporter in the primaries was $72,000, higher than the median income of Clinton supporters ($61,000) and the general population ($56,000). In addition, post-election analyses showed that Clinton received more votes in economically-distressed communities—those with a higher percentage of their population below the poverty line.

Michael Tesler has been studying the racialization of politics for over a decade. Racialization refers to the tendency of racial attitudes to influence opinions toward a variety of other issues not obviously related to race, such as health care or gay marriage. Tesler embedded an experiment within a YouGov/Huffington Post national survey of 1000 voters conducted on December 6 and 7. Half the participants were asked if they agreed with the following statement:

Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

Ths is an item from the Symbolic Racism Scale, which is used to measure racial resentment. The remaining respondents were presented with this statement.

Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.

Most people assume an “average American” is White. In 2005, Devos and Banaji conducted a series of five studies showing that the category “American” is more strongly associated with the category “White” than either “African-American” or “Asian-American.” Based on this evidence, Tesler assumed that respondents would interpret the second statement as referring to Whites. He then compared the responses of people who reported that they had voted for Clinton and Trump to these two questions.

This study pits the economic anxiety and racial resentment explanations against one another. Would Trump voters be more likely than Clinton voters to agree that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve? Or would differences emerge only when the question referred to Black Americans?

The results on the left show a typical racial divide between Black and White respondents. White participants were more than twice as likely to think that average Americans had gotten less than they deserve than to think that Blacks had gotten less than they deserve. Black participants thought everyone had gotten less than they deserve. Since there were more White than Black participants, the averages for the full sample resembled those of Whites.

The data on the right address the research question. Clinton voters were almost as likely (57%) to say that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve as Trump voters (64%). Since this was a large sample, this 7% difference is probably statistically significant, but it is small in comparison to the difference on the racial resentment item. Only 12% of Trump supporters agreed that Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, compared to 57% of Clinton supporters—a difference of 45%. The data are more consistent with the racial resentment interpretation of Trump’s victory.

Tesler frames the responses of Trump supporters as an example of the ultimate attribution error. Attribution is the processes by which we infer the causes of behavior. The ultimate attribution error is the tendency to take personal credit for our own successful behavior and that of our in-group, and blaming our failures on environmental obstacles, while at the same time blaming members of out-groups for their failures, and attributing their successes to unfair advantages. Given this bias, it follows that Whites have gotten less than they deserve, while Blacks have gotten more.

Were the election results caused by economic anxiety or racism?  We still await a more definitive study. It will require a larger sample of voters and a valid measure of economic anxiety, with statistical controls for other variables known to influence voting decisions. If I see such a study, I’ll let you know.

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Trump’s Trump Card

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Framing the Debates

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

Economic inequality in the United States is at record levels. In surveys, Americans say they would prefer a more equal distribution of wealth. However, the majority consistently votes against public assistance programs that redistribute wealth. Political scientist Martin Gilens, in his 1999 book Why Americans Hate Welfare, attributes this primarily to racial prejudice. Gilens examined the photographs that accompanied stories about poverty in the news magazines Time, Newsweek and U. S. News. African-Americans accounted for 62% of the poor people shown in the photos. On the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs, 65% of poor people shown in reports on poverty were Black. In reality, as of 2010, 32% of welfare recipients were Black, 32% were White and 30% were Hispanic.

Gilens also did an experiment in which a “welfare mother” was identified as either White or Black. Participants who read about a Black welfare recipient were more opposed to welfare than those reading of a White recipient. The implication of Gilens’ research is that White Americans’ disdain for welfare is explained in part by racial prejudice. Americans hate welfare because they overestimate the percentage of recipients who are African-Americans. However, there is a missing link in this analysis. Gilens implies, but does not show, that Americans are influenced by these misleading media reports—that is, that the average American’s mental image of a welfare recipient is a Black person.

A research team headed by Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi of the University of Kentucky sought to measure their participants’ mental representations of a typical welfare recipient using an unusual technique. I’m not sure I completely understand it without seeing a demonstration, but the image generation phase of their study goes something like this: First, they constructed a computer-generated “base face,” a composite of a Black man, a Black Woman, a White man and a White woman. Then, on each of 400 trials, the computer introduced noise which altered the base image in two opposite directions. The participants were asked to choose which of these two altered faces most resembled a welfare recipient and which one resembled a non-welfare recipient. (Race was never mentioned.) The computer then generated a composite image of a typical welfare recipient and a typical non-welfare recipient, based on all the responses of all the participants.

This was done twice, with 118 college students participating in Study 1 and 238 internet volunteers in Study 2. The composite faces from the two studies are similar and are shown below. Although the composite faces of the welfare recipients look like African-Americans, I presume this was less apparent to the participants as they made their 400 decisions.

During the second phase of these two studies, 90 different participants were shown one of the composite faces and were asked to rate the person on a number of different dimensions. No mention of welfare was made to these participants. The raters judged the welfare recipient composites as more likely to be African-American (rather than White) than the non-welfare recipient composites. The welfare recipients were also rated more negatively on 11 different traits, including lazier, more incompetent, more hostile, less likeable and less human(!). These studies fill in the missing link in Gilens’ research. The average person’s mental image of a typical welfare recipient is of an African-American.

Finally, Brown-Iannuzzi and her colleagues did a third study, an experiment in which 229 internet volunteers were shown one of the composite images—either a welfare recipient or a non-welfare recipient—and asked a number of questions. The critical items were whether they would support giving this person food stamps and cash assistance. The other questions repeated some of the ratings used in the previous studies. Here are the results. This study replicates the Gilens experiment mentioned in the second paragraph.

In summary, the first two studies showed that when asked to imagine a typical welfare recipient, people generate a mental image of an African-American, while their mental image of a non-welfare recipient is that of a White person. The third study demonstrated that when other people are shown these mental images, they were less supportive of giving welfare to the composite typical welfare recipients than the composite non-welfare recipients.

Finally, the authors did a mediational analysis to see which variables mediated between the composite images and the decision to support or not support giving welfare to that person. The data were consistent with the following causal chain (see below): The image leads first to an inference that the person is either Black or White. This, in turn, leads to a judgment of how deserving the person is. (Black people are less deserving.) Finally, the judgment of deservingness leads the decision of whether to support giving welfare to the person.

We are going through a period of extreme racialization of politics. Americans’ racial attitudes influence their opinions about other political issues that may or may not be related to race. In some cases, survey participants’ racial attitudes determine their attitude toward a policy merely because they believe President Obama does or does not support the policy. Not only do racial attitudes appear to have been the strongest predictor of support for Donald Trump, they mattered more in electing Trump than Obama.

Nowhere is racialization more evident than in attitudes toward financial relief for the poor. People support income redistribution in principle, but they overestimate the percentage of poor people who are Black. As a result, their racial prejudice discourages them from supporting income redistribution policies.

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Old-Fashioned Racism

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Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Education, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

The spillover of racialization hypothesis proposes that white racial attitudes are significant predictors of their opinions about a variety of race-neutral social policies. For example, Martin Gilens found a strong relationship among whites between anti-black prejudice and opposition to welfare, which was explained by the fact that whites greatly overestimated the percentage of welfare benefits going to African-Americans. Racialization has increased during during Barack Obama’s presidency. Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes have become a stronger predictor of attitudes toward health care reform in recent years. In addition, attitudes toward two specific health care plans were more strongly affected by prejudice when the plans were attributed to Obama than when they were attributed to Bill Clinton.

It is difficult to reconcile the conflicting estimates of the amount of money generated by college sports, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reports revenue approaching $1 billion per year. In 2013, the University of Texas athletic program alone generated $166 million, and 13 universities took in over $100 million. The NCAA will receive $7.3 billion to broadcast the College Football Playoffs between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billion for the NCAA Basketball Tournament for 14 years.

On the other hand, the college students who play in these games, whose labor is at least the equivalent of a full-time job, and who risk permanent injury, are only permitted to receive athletic scholarships that cover tuition, books, fees, room and board. Preventing athletes from receiving compensation while everyone else profits so greatly has to qualify as one of the great economic injustices of our time. Yet a 2015 HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans are opposed to paying college athletes for their labor.

There are a number of possible explanations for this result. It could be partly a matter of self-interest, since people might reasonably infer that ticket prices, cable television fees and college tuition will increase if the athletes are paid. However, most people, when asked about student athletes, probably think of college football and basketball, and since the majority of college football and basketball players are African-Americans, racial attitudes may also be relevant. In fact, the HBO poll found that 55% of African-Americans favor paying college athletes, compared to 42% of Latinos and only 26% of whites.

This led economist Kevin Wallsten and his colleagues to look into the possible racialization of this issue. (This post is based not on their journal article, which is as yet unpublished, but on an article they wrote about it for the Washington Post.) With the help of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they conducted a survey in which respondents were asked about paying student athletes and also completed a measure of “racial resentment,” two items from the Modern Racism Scale. In a statistical analysis that controlled for other influences, they found that racial resentment was the most significant predictor of white opposition to pay-for-play.

Nevertheless, these data are correlational. It’s possible that some other variable associated with racial resentment is responsible for this outcome. Therefore, they did a followup experiment in which they manipulated the salience of race prior to asking about paying student athletes. They did this by showing one group pictures of young African-American men identified as student athletes prior to asking the question, while another group was not shown any pictures. This is a priming manipulation, similar to Tesler’s experiment in which he attributed health care plans to either Obama or Bill Clinton. The results are shown below.

Both among all whites, and the subset identified as most racially resentful, opposition to paying college athletes was greater following the priming of race. That is, merely inducing the participants to “think about” black people, either consciously or unconsciously, reduced support for the policy.  While race may not be the only factor affecting attitudes toward pay-for-play, these results clearly imply that it plays a causal role.

It reminds me of a study in which whites were more in favor of voter I. D. laws when primed with a picture of black people voting than when the voters in the photo were white. We seem to be in a historical period in which attitudes toward most domestic political issues, as well as party affiliation, are affected by racialization. Many white people oppose social policies if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the policies primarily benefit blacks, although they may not be aware that this is the reason for their opposition and would probably deny it.

The myth of the “student-athlete” is one of the most embarassing hypocrisies in higher education today. Since most of those who control decisions about possible payment are white, it’s hard to be optimistic about obtaining justice for college athletes through any mechanism other than the courts.

You may also be interested in reading:

A Darker Side of Politics

Guarding the Hen House

Voter I. D. and Race, Part 1