To Help or not to Help: Does Family Racial Configuration Matter?

• In Event: 2362 - Social Support across the Life Course

Abstract

Where most research on racial discrimination focuses on harm, this paper focuses on the process of withholding help. I, therefore, ask the research question: does variation in whether someone will intervene on behalf of a child depend on the child’s family racial configuration? I answer this question using experimental vignettes by randomly assigning 511 Amazon MTurk users into five conditions, representing one of five black and white family racial configurations. I find that people would directly intervene on behalf of a child victim with a black father and white mother significantly less than a comparable child with two white parents. I also find having a black father reduced the likelihood a participant would intervene on behalf of the child. Lastly, the children’s and mothers’ race show no significant difference in intervention. This paper provides evidence towards a meso-level theory of racialization that specifically considers the intersection of race, gender, and family racial configuration. Also, my finding highlights how people’s acts of kindness in situations where someone needs help are not random but are conscious and subconscious calculations based on these intersections.

Author

• Emmanuel Cannady, University of Notre Dame