Multi-Group Attitudes towards Contemporary Black Political Action

• In Event: 4354 - Social Psychology

Abstract

Evaluating attitudes towards black political mobilization is a window into the broader racial structure and the intergroup relations within it. In this study, I analyze public attitudes towards the recent wave of black political action in the United States from a multi-group perspective. Drawing on 2016 American National Election Studies data, I offer an empirical account of collective perceptions towards black political mobilization for Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites by documenting the attitudinal variation between groups. I then demarcate three potential mechanisms that may explain public attitudes towards black political action: collective discrimination model, system justification model, group conflict model. I test the explanatory power of these perspectives to account for support for contemporary black political action across racial groups. The most consistent mechanism is the conflict mechanism, which significantly predicts negative attitudes towards black political action for all racial groups except blacks. Contrary to expectations that collective discrimination would be a unifying mechanism between minorities in support of black political action, I found that the only significant result was for white respondents. In line with research on reverse discrimination, whites that reported higher levels of collective discrimination were significantly less likely to support black political action. I also found that the system justification model strongly predicts negative attitudes towards black political action for white respondents but is significantly less consistent and even generates certain inverse effects for other racial groups. These findings are evidence against the notion that Asians and Latinos are absorbed into the US racial structure in a linear fashion that attitudinally positions them more closely either to whites or blacks. Rather, this analysis suggests that current explanations of intergroup attitudes and relations are most applicable to white and blacks groups whose positions are structurally crystallized in the racialized social system compared to Latinos and Asians.

Author

• Karen Lee, University of Texas-Austin