True Left

To subject the whitelash hypothesis to a more rigorous test, I conducted a survey experiment from Aug. 1-29, 2019. In total, 1,527 white respondents were treated with “primes” representative of contemporary discussions of race and then questioned on topics of identity and group attitudes. I focused specifically on self-identified conservative and high white-identifying respondents.

To capture the effects of critical rhetoric, I used an excerpt from Macy Sto. Domingo’s “18 Things White People Seem To Not Understand (Because, White Privilege).” Among white conservatives, this “critical prime” predicted 8 percent increased support (weighted mean) for whites “work[ing] together to improve the position of their group,” in comparison to the “control group.”

To further probe the effects of critical themes on identity, I asked respondents to rate the importance of certain factors to being “truly American.” Here, critical prime exposure appears to have narrowed the boundaries of the “in-group.”

For example, conservative whites expressed 12 percent greater agreement that only those with “American ancestry” are truly American. High white-identifiers expressed 20 percent greater agreement with this same claim and 8 percent greater support for restricting American identity to those “born in the U.S.” Critical prime exposure also increased conservative “ethnocentrism,” or net “feeling thermometer” preference for whites over minorities by 5 percent.

In most cases, findings were the opposite for white leftists. Exposure to the critical prime thus created a wider gap between the racial attitudes reported by left-leaning and conservative (also low/high white-identifying) whites.