“No, You're Playing the Race Card”: Testing the Effects of Anti‐Black, Anti‐Latino, and Anti‐Immigrant Appeals in the Post‐Obama Era

Abstract

Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti‐immigrant and anti‐Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti‐minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump's rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit‐Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti‐black appeals, sometimes fails for anti‐immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti‐Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti‐black and anti‐immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used, congruent issue‐group pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.

The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially Inflammatory Elite Communication

“…Our findings connect well with prior work on the effect of implicit and explicit racial cues in campaigns. Like some newer work in that area (Valentino, Neuner and Vandenbroek 2017; Reny et al 2019), we find that it is no longer the case that explicit racial cues fail to activate negative racial attitudes. While we only considered rhetoric by Trump, this other work shows that explicit racial cues by other elites also activate negative racial attitudes in the domain of candidate evaluations.…”

The Persistence of Racial Cues and Appeals in American Elections

“…Building on previous research, Reny et al (2020) fielded two survey experiments designed to test whether an anti-Latino appeal associated with criminality and an anti-Latino appeal associated with immigration trigger a racial priming effect in a manner similar to an anti-black appeal-in this case, an anti-black appeal that associated African Americans with criminality. They found no evidence of the anti-black appeal being associated with a racial priming effect, mixed evidence that the anti-Latino immigration appeal was associated with a racial priming effect, and strong evidence of a racial priming effect in the anti-Latino gang appeal.…”

The target/perpetrator brief-implicit association test (B-IAT): an implicit instrument for efficiently measuring discrimination based on race/ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, weight, and age

“…One possible reason for the difference in results observed in our study and the prior studies is that White people may show implicit recognition towards some specific race/ethnicity groups (e.g., Black people) but not towards other race/ethnicity groups that still belong to the category people of Color (e.g., Latinx and Asian). In the U.S., extensive research has documented both the specificities of anti-Black racism, as tied to enduring impacts of histories of enslavement, along with racism directed against other groups (e.g., American Indians/Native Americans in relation to histories of settler-colonialism, and racism against Latinx and Asian groups tied to histories of immigration) [ 41 – 43 ]. Future studies, in which implicit recognition of exposure to discrimination towards each specific race/ethnic groups (i.e., Black, Latinx and Asian) is measured, would be thus useful to quantify and compare discrimination against different social groups categorized in the U.S. as people of Color.…”