Author Meets Critics, "The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Published by Cambridge in December 2019, The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotions in Politics integrates theories from psychology, political behavior and Black politics to argue that both the stigmatization of Black anger in the public consciousness and the lack of collective agency felt by African Americans make anger over politics less prevalent and politically potent for Black Americans than White Americans. The book utilizes original experiments, forty years of survey data, and emotion discourse analysis to test this argument.

Key contributions of the book include the introduction of the novel concept of racial resignation to explain how Black individuals’ perceptions of politics as unresponsive to Black demands inhibits the activation of an action-inducing anger among the group. Additionally, the book demonstrates how elite rhetoric—from both Republicans and Democrats—legitimizes White expressions of grievance while stigmatizing such expressions from African Americans, contributing to the anger gap in politics. The book makes a critical distinction in how emotions translate to behavior across racial groups. Whereas Whites are mobilized by anger toward a wide variety of electoral and communal actions, anger’s mobilizing effect among African Americans is essentially limited to system-challenging actions such as protest. In contrast, the book demonstrates that positive emotions such as hope and pride are substantially more effective at motivating increased action among African Americans than among Whites. The book illuminates how the anger gap widens the Black-White participation disparity and shapes the tenor of partisan politics, interracial coalitions and Black organizing in the post-Obama era.

I propose this panel to stimulate a conversation among scholars at the intersections of REP, behavior and political psychology to assess how this book fits within (and departs) from broader paradigmatic approaches to explore how people of color engage politics—individually and collectively, intuitively and strategically, emotionally and behaviorally. The conversation can also assess the capacity of the novel contributions of the book—such as the racial bounds of anger (and the political costs of being “angry while Black”), the concept of racial resignation, and measures of racial group efficacy—to inform understanding of how African Americans (and members of other racial minority groups) respond dynamically to political contexts that vary from promising to threatening. Finally, the conversation can offer critical perspective on how the author can further develop some of the ideas raised in the book across a set of follow-up projects. These include examinations of the predictive power of racial efficacy in determining people of color’s political participation in contexts of threat, a deeper analysis of the intersection of race and gender in shaping the anger gap, and an exploration of the emotional content present within the rhetoric of the leadership of the Black Panther Party.

Author: Davin L. Phoenix
Critics: TBD

Sub Unit

• Division 32: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Chair

• Nathan Kar Ming Chan University of California, Irvine

Presenter

• Davin Lanier Phoenix University of California, Irvine