Local Racial Diversity, Intergroup Contact, and Exclusionary Organizational Preferences Among Whites

Abstract

The demographic landscape of the United States is rapidly changing and by 2045 the U.S. will become a “minority White” country. We leverage several unique datasets to examine (1) how experiencing zip-code-level racial diversity affects Whites’ intergroup attitudes and professional decisions and (2) whether gatekeepers to historically White institutions maintain policies that serve to perpetuate interracial barriers. Matching survey data to local Census data (N = 1,046,120), we find that Whites express more anti-Black bias in more versus less diverse communities, but that this bias is attenuated when intergroup contact is higher. Next, using data from every tennis (N = 10,542) and golf (N = 10,933) facility in the U.S., we find that local diversity is positively correlated with the maintenance of exclusionary barriers (e.g., guest policies, monetary fees, dress codes). Finally, two experiments (total N = 1,117) demonstrate that Whites avoid organizations in diverse geographical locations and organizations that espouse diversity values, further impeding intergroup contact. Importantly, this aversion is driven by Whites’ anxiety (generalized and resource-based). Despite the debiasing promise of increased intergroup contact that living in a diversity community provides, Whites’ reactions to diversity may serve to reduce contact instead, thus perpetuating a cycle of intergroup aversion.