Negative racial appeals have a long history in American politics. Chapter 4 synthesizes the literature on racial priming to highlight the mixed findings that have emerged. Some studies, especially those conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s, found that white Americans rejected negative racial appeals when they became explicit, but others, especially those conducted in the 2010s and beyond, no longer detect this backlash. The chapter explains these mixed findings with the theory of dominance destabilization: when white people feel that their dominance is unstable, their prejudice activates, and they come to approve of negative, explicit racial appeals. This chapter tests this claim with two original survey experiments. In the first experiment, it finds that a negative frame on diversification leads to an increased approval of racist rhetoric. Then, it tests the proposed causal mechanism (i.e., feeling threatened) directly, with an emotional induction experiment. It finds that feeling anxious and angry both motivate support for negative explicit racial appeals – but that anger does so more strongly. This chapter offers key evidence to make sense of the mixed findings in the racial priming literature, as it demonstrates that white Americans accept negative, explicit racial appeals when they feel threatened.