Anger in Black & White: Racial Resignation & the Anger-Action Linkage

• In Event: Politics of Emotions and Race

Abstract

Across the political spectrum, recent history bears witness to numerous accounts of people rising up in anger to take up political action, be it in the voting booth, at town hall meetings or at #Resistance rallies. These instances corroborate the scholarship on affect and political decision making, which indicates anger is an effective mobilizer of political behavior (Huddy, Cassese, & Feldman, 2007; Valentino, Brader, Gregorowitcz, Groenendyk, & Hutchings, 2011). But with few exceptions (see Banks, White and McKenzie 2018, Burge 2014), this scholarship has not grappled with how emotions shape the political decision making and behavior of racial minority groups, leaving unresolved questions about whether anger plays the same mobilizing role among African Americans that is does for Whites. To help fill this gap, we present results from an experiment conducted on a large national sample of Black and White subjects. This experiment demonstrates that the political behavior of African Americans is significantly less responsive to anger primes relative to Whites. We examine how the distinct manners in which Black individuals process and translate anger to political actions are shaped both by their sense of racial group consciousness and their perceptions of the collective political efficacy of Blacks as a group. We highlight the influential role of Black Americans’ sense of racial resignation in their political decision making. Understanding how group identity and racial resignation inhibit the mobilizing effect of anger on Black participation illuminates how this group responds emotionally and behaviorally to contexts of political threat—which the group is constantly facing in a racially stratified world.

Authors

• Davin Lanier Phoenix, University of California, Irvine

• Nathan Kar Ming Chan, University of California, Irvine