The Causes and Consequences of Racializing Pit Bulls

• In Event: The Rhetoric of Race

Abstract

Several academics and journalists have argued that prejudice and discrimination against Pit Bulls is rooted in their association with African American owners and black culture. Yet, there has been almost no empirical inquiries into the causes and consequence of racializing dog breeds. This study fills that void by providing a detailed empirical analysis of the causes and consequences of racializing Pit Bulls. Using automated content analyses, we show that news stories about Pit Bulls are much more likely to contain racial language than stories about other dog breeds. Moreover, the net sentiment of racialized news stories about Pit Bulls is substantially more negative than both racialized stories about other popular breeds and the already high rates of negativity in non-racial news stories about Pits. We then show that this link between African Americans and Pit Bulls extends into public opinion. Overtly racist attitudes are a significantly stronger predictor of negative attitudes about Pit Bulls, compared to other dog breeds. Our national surveys further reveal that experimentally associating pit bulls with African Americans makes the breed even less popular. This racialization of Pit Bulls has important consequences for public policy, too. We find a sizable independent relationship between precinct-level white voting population and precinct-level support for Miami-Dade’s 2012 vote to keep the county’s Pit Bull ban. And perhaps most importantly, we show that Pit Bull bans are most likely to be passed in areas of the country high in white racial prejudice, especially in places where African Americans are the most underrepresented in local government.

Authors

• Mary McThomas, University of California, Irvine

• Michael Tesler, UC Irvine