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6 - White Democrats’ Tolerance for Negative Racial Appeals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2026

Leah Christiani
Affiliation:
Hunter College, City University of New York
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Summary

Previous chapters largely identify that it is Republicans and white Americans with higher levels of racial animus who accept racist rhetoric when threatened. However, the book’s theory about the way that whiteness is fundamentally linked to a desire for dominance would predict that a similar process could be at work for white Democrats as well. Chapter 6 introduces an original survey experiment that demonstrates that when white Democrats learn about a growing Latine population that is increasingly voting for the Republican Party, they come to feel threatened and, as a result, approve of negative, explicit racial appeals from a co-partisan politician. This provides troubling evidence of the way that a commitment to white dominance persists across partisan lines, and that the current arrangement we see (where Republicans accept and use negative racial appeals more than Democrats) is context-specific and unstable. This novel contribution casts doubt on recent findings that indicate white Democrats are increasingly egalitarian in their racial ideologies, as it demonstrates that they are willing to endorse racist rhetoric when they do not perceive the minoritized ethnoracial group as helping their partisan group interests.

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