When Race Matters and When it Doesn’t: Racial Group Differences in Response to Racial Cues

Abstract

When George W. Bush went public in 2005 to convince Americans that his administration had the right plan for Social Security reform, he played what the NAACP called “the race card”: he appealed to Blacks’ racial group interest in Social Security reform. The President called the current system “inherently unfair” to African Americans because of their lower life expectancies, implying that his plan would fix the resultant racial discrepancy in benefits.1 This attempt to generate support for an ostensibly nonracial policy among Black Americans through appeals to racial group interest, while not an uncommon political strategy, is not the sort of “race card” that scholars have attempted to study systematically. Rather, the focus has been on how the media and political elites can racialize ostensibly nonracial political issues by priming White Americans’ racial attitudes, most effectively through the use of “implicit” racial cues, such as images of racial minorities or racial “code words” (Mendelberg 1997; 2001; Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; Valentino, Hutchings and White 2002), and how such racialization of political issues can result in significant reductions in White Americans’ support for these policies (Gilens 1999; Bobo and Kluguel 1997).KeywordsRacial GroupFood StampMilitary ActionRacial AttitudeFeeling ThermometerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.