Understanding African-Americans’ National Attachments through a Racial Lens

• In Event: Reconsidering Racism and Racial Identity

Abstract

Since W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) coined the term “double-consciousness,” scholarship on African-Americans’ social identities have been characterized by the mutually-exclusive pulls of racial identity and national identity. This approach has yielded research that shows how American identity is synonymous with whiteness (Devos & Banaji 2005), and African-Americans -- due to their lack of racial prototypicality -- express weaker American identities (Sidanius et al. 1997; Huddy & Khatib 2007; Theiss-Morse 2009). We challenge and expand upon this perspective, by proposing that racial considerations directly and indirectly inform African-Americans’ national attachment and patriotism.

We first argue that African-Americans’ national attachments are structured by a latent psychological process of racialized ideology that taps into a general acquiescence with a white-oriented social power structure, as measured through racial resentment, SDO, and Black racial grievances. We then hypothesize direct and indirect relationships between this latent process and American identity and patriotism among African-Americans, as they work through sentiments towards Black and White Americans. Specifically, African-Americans who are higher in SDO, racial resentment, and racial grievance should experience more psychological distance from fellow Black individuals, instead feeling closer to White individuals and, ultimately, exhibiting a stronger American identity.

We fielded two national surveys of African-Americans, in 2017 and 2021, that each assessed American identity, patriotism, and SDO. The earlier survey includes sentiments towards White and Black individuals, racial resentment, while the later includes a new measure of Black racial grievances. Overall, we demonstrate that for Black individuals, strong American identity reflects a distancing with the racial in-group (Black individuals) in favor of the racial out-group (White individuals), with racial resentment playing an outsized role in this process.

As a result, African-Americans’ racial and national identities are not necessarily separate identities, but anchors on a unidimensional scale. For them, a latent racialized ideology (i.e. racial resentment, SDO, and Black racial grievances) shapes their national attachment, where closeness to Whites relates to and mediates feeling American. We conclude that African-American national attachment is jointly informed by racial group and ideological considerations.

Authors

• Julie Wronski, University of Mississippi

• Jennifer St. Sume, University of Maryland, College Park