21st Century Drum Majors: Economic Anxiety and Racialized Class Politics

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Inequality and Class Politics

Abstract

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached that “there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.” King and others have long noted that status craving encourages racial resentment, especially among those who struggle economically. Some observers have argued that this pattern of economic threat and racialized comparison is at the core of our politics today, driving attitudes about immigration, redistribution, and even environmental regulation (Hochschild 2016). In this paper, we put this theory to a direct experimental test.

We conduct a series of novel experiments in which subjects are induced to feel economically anxious and then given choices about political and media messages highlighting other people in various circumstances. We show that Americans across social and economic groups prefer messaging that draws their attention to those who are worse off when they are first made to feel economically anxious. Such messages about disadvantaged others boost their perception of their own socioeconomic status and lessen anxiety. By varying the name of the person in the message, we demonstrate that among white Americans, the status boost they get from downward comparison is even larger when they compare themselves with a Latino person. Finally, we test whether inducing economic anxiety causes white Americans to prefer racialized political and media messages about economically disadvantaged others. We examine heterogeneity in each experiment, exploring how effects differ by gender, class, partisanship, and geography.

This paper demonstrates experimentally that economic anxiety does indeed prime the pump, generating an audience hungry for a political focus on a racialized economically disadvantaged other. This connection is not merely about attitudes about the racialized other - it is driven in part by the economically anxious person’s own self-concept. Racialized downward comparison messages can be crafted to evoke sympathy, empathy, scorn, or outright racism. But they all meet a desire among economically anxious white Americans to alter uncomfortably low status perceptions. In this way, economic anxiety generates an appetite for an increasingly racialized class politics.

Authors

• Meghan Condon, Loyola University Chicago

• Amber Wichowsky, Marquette University