The "Racist Card": How Accusations of Racism Are Losing Political Power

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Attitudes (Table 17)

Abstract

The implicit-explicit (IE) model of racial priming suggests that White voters, wanting to uphold the norm of racial egalitarianism, will self-monitor and limit the impact of their racial resentment (or “symbolic racism”) on their support for implicitly racist policies or appeals once the nature of their racist content is called out as “racist” (see Mendelberg 2001). More recent tests of this model have failed in an era of right-wing populism, and scholars have attributed this to the deterioration of racially egalitarian, colorblind norms. With a mixed-methods approach, we offer an alternative explanation. We posit that conservative and Republican leaders have developed a rhetorical strategy we call the “racist card,” which does not explicitly attack the content of racial egalitarian norms but the legitimacy of elite Democrats’ and liberal groups’ attempts to enforce them—if they are ascribing the “racist” label with credible intentions, or doing so for political gain and to silence conservative Christians. We explore this hypothesis with interview, ethnographic, and experimental evidence.

Authors

• Rachel Brown-Weinstock, Princeton University

• Derek Wakefield, Bucknell University