The Racial Gradient Thesis and Public Attitudes towards Salient Criminological Events

• In Event: Public and Social Media Responses to High Profile Events

Abstract

In a previous study Unah and Wright (2016) found strong support for the racial gradient thesis in the Trayvon Martin killing. African Americans were more like to attribute the delayed arrest of George Zimmerman to racial discrimination than were whites, with Hispanics falling in-between in their sentiments. A similar tendency was reported for the acquittal of Zimmerman: Whites were more likely to report that the jury’s decision was just and African Americans were least likely to think so, again, with Hispanics falling in-between. In the current study, we shall explore the application of the racial gradient thesis in racialized versus non-racialized criminological events that are nationally salient. The racialized criminological event is the racially motivated killing of nine African American worshipers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina and the non-racialized event is the ideologically-motivated bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. We compare public attitudes towards these two events to determine whether racial gradience and polarization cut across both racialized and non-racialized salient criminological events. We shall rely on the CBSNews McVeigh Execution Poll of 2001 and the CNN Poll on the Charleston South Carolina shooting of 2015.

Authors

• Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Valerie Wright, Cleveland State University

• Ryan Krog, George Washington University