Collective Emotions: Getting to the Heart of White Democrats’ Racial Liberalism

• In Event: Reckoning with Racism

Abstract

Since the protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, books with titles including White Fragility, White Tears, and White Rage have all made national bestseller lists. White Americans’ emotions about racism — and white liberals’ emotions in particular — are highly salient in the popular consciousness. As public opinion scholars have documented a marked leftward shift in white Democrats’ racial attitudes (McElwee 2018), there has also been greater academic attention focused on “positive” racial attitudes among this group (Engelhardt 2021). There has been a proliferation of studies identifying different types of racial attitudes among progressives (DeSante and Smith 2019; Chudy, Piston and Shipper 2019; Chudy 2021). But neither popular discourse nor political science scholarship seriously interrogated which positive racial attitudes matter when, nor how these attitudes might be interrelated.

This project takes a step towards this task of synthesis, focusing on three affective components of positive racial attitudes: white guilt, white shame, and anger about racism. White guilt is defined as a self-focused, negative emotion about one’s (or one’s group’s) actions that perpetuate racial inequality and outgroup suffering. White shame, often conflated with white guilt in the literature, is defined as a self-focused, negative emotion about one’s identity as white, distinct from specific actions or behaviors. By contrast, anger about racism is an other-focused emotion that emphasizes how the actions of others contribute to inequality and suffering. Work by DeSante and Smith (2019) and Chudy, Piston, and Shipper (2019) tells us that anger about racism and white guilt, respectively, are associated with more liberal attitudes on race-related issues. But because these emotions have not yet been measured as part of a single study, we don’t know the extent to which they are interrelated.

We also don’t know whether these liberal attitudes translate equally into impactful political behavior. Anger generally mobilizes people to engage in politics (Valentino et al. 2011), but expectations about how guilt and shame affect political outcomes are more mixed. Guilt may spur corrective action (Iyer et al. 2003), or it may cause people to shut down: Steele argues that “guilt that preoccupies people with their own innocence blinds them to those who make them feel guilty” (1990, 503). Perhaps the tendency of this literature to conflate guilt and shame explains this disagreement. If guilt is defined as a negative emotion focused on behavior, it may motivate corrective behavior in a way that shame, a negative emotion focused on immutable characteristics, does not. Accordingly, in addition to measuring all three of these emotions in the same study, it is important to assess their relationship to political behavior as well as political attitudes.

This paper presents results from a large-N survey of white Democrats on Lucid Marketplace that uses novel measures of white guilt, shame, and anger about racism. Preliminary findings suggest that white guilt and anger about racism share a closer relationship with each other than to white shame: rather than focusing on one’s own wrongdoing or the wrongdoing of others, the more meaningful distinction between these three emotions seems to be the emphasis on outgroup suffering because of racism, which anger and white guilt share, in contrast with an emphasis on one’s own suffering as a result of white shame. This finding underscores the importance of differentiating between guilt and shame in this literature. Additionally, I find that white shame is associated with a different and more limited set of liberal policy preferences than white guilt and anger about racism, and that of the three emotions, only anger about racism is predictive of increased political engagement — although neither white guilt nor white shame seems to actively demobilize white Democrats.

Chudy, Jennifer. 2021. “Racial Sympathy and Its Political Consequences.” The Journal of Politics 83(1): 122–36.
Chudy, Jennifer, Spencer Piston, and Joshua Shipper. 2019. “Guilt by Association: White Collective Guilt in American Politics.” Journal of Politics 81(3): 14.
DeSante, Christopher D., and Candis Watts Smith. 2019. Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics. University of Chicago Press.
Engelhardt, Andrew M. 2021. “Observational Equivalence in Explaining Attitude Change: Have White Racial Attitudes Genuinely Changed?” American Journal of Political Science.
Iyer, Aarti, Colin Wayne Leach, and Faye J. Crosby. 2003. “White Guilt and Racial Compensation: The Benefits and Limits of Self-Focus.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29(1): 117–29.
McElwee, Sean. 2018. “The Rising Racial Liberalism of Democratic Voters.” The New York Times.
Steele, Shelby. 1990. “White Guilt.” The American Scholar 59(4): 497–506.

Author

• Anna Mikkelborg, UC Berkeley