The cover of Antoine J. Banks’ Anger and Racial Politics features a Tea Party “Protest Rally Demonstration Against Government” at the U.S. Capitol (photo credit). A sign in the foreground that reads “I’m mad as HELL and I’m not going to take it ANYMORE!” is surrounded by American flags and yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. A banner that reads “Will bleed for liberty” waves in the distance. Missing are pitchforks and torches, but the whole evocation of the Boston Tea Party is an attempt to tap into the same sort of outrage that led to that iconic historical event. We do not see the hands that are holding up the banners and flags, but we know that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white and this leads to the question of whether racial identity has inspired this movement and how much it is driven by racial issues.

Banks uses the Tea Party, and the obvious emotion that gives it energy, as a jumping off point, as an opportunity to study the impact of anger on racial attitudes. Previous scholars of contemporary racial attitudes have not focused on the emotional components of racial attitudes. While so much of the previous work in this area has dealt with the cognitive sources of contemporary racial attitudes, Banks examines what he believes to be the “emotional antecedents” of racial attitudes and argues—rather convincingly—that emotions, particularly anger, often explain where racial attitudes come from. More specifically, he examines how anger catalyzes the relationship of prejudice and political attitudes, and contends that emotion enhances the impact of both racially liberal and racially conservative belief systems in the formation of policy attitudes. How does this work? “Simply experiencing anger,” he writes of emotional priming, “should activate the corresponding racial attitude from memory and boost the impact of this belief system on relevant political judgments” (p. 30). But it is more than this. Later, he argues that emotion in general, and anger in particular, should “determine how much cognitive effort people engage in—such as searching out new information or learning about politics” (p. 124).

Banks begins the book by arguing that emotions underlie different kinds of racial hostility. It is disgust, he hypothesizes, that triggers “old-style racism,” the racism of Jim Crow and the overt expressions of prejudice that have almost completely gone out of style in the post-Civil Rights era. Likewise, it is fear—the fear of a loss of power or standing for one’s group at the expense of an outgroup—that underlies the experience of threat. In Banks’ conception, it is anger that propels contemporary racial conservatism, and symbolic racism in particular.

The argument, to this point, is provocative, but it is a causal argument and the standard for demonstrating a causal relationship is particularly high because one can well imagine that beliefs come first, with emotions to follow. Banks attacks this problem by experimentally evoking an emotion, asking a survey respondent to recall and think about a time when she experienced fear/anger/disgust, and then testing to see if this priming leads to a stronger relationship between beliefs and attitudes. The results are not completely consistent across all three hypotheses, but the relationship of anger to racial conservatism is, as hypothesized, quite robust, and there are no obvious competing explanations for why this would be the case. The author is on to something seemingly important, and certainly distinctive, when he writes on page 68, “Simply experiencing anger or disgust in general provides another avenue for racial bigotry to have a larger impact on public opinion” (emphasis added).

This still leaves one wondering where this generalized anger (or disgust or fear) comes from. Is it just lingering under the surface waiting to work its effects? Though Banks writes throughout the book of “emotional antecedents” to racial attitudes, it becomes clear in the second half of the book, when he introduces Tea Party rhetoric and the conservative campaign against Obamacare into the argument, that emotions are not really antecedents, but rather play an intermediary or intervening role between political stimuli and political attitudes. Anger, in other words, is stoked by political elites and their strategies. These emotions then come to bear upon racial attitudes and their application to political issues. Banks shows that the health care political battle stirred emotions, that it evoked anger on both sides, and notably, that this anger generated a striking racial divide over health care reform. Likewise, he argues, the emergence of Tea Party rhetoric and the clash of Tea Party ideals with progressive values in the course of electoral campaigns contributed to anger on both sides that, in turn, led to heightened racial division.

Seeing as how the book and its main points are so provocative and fresh, there are some odd moments in the manuscript where the author is too reliant upon old literature and old examples when explaining contemporary attitudes. The symbolic racism literature is now almost five decades old, so when the author cites it as “characterizing the white racist in American society today,” (p. 9) it calls for an update. Likewise, the Willie Horton and revolving prison door political advertisements were aired almost 25 years ago; it is an old example upon which to build an argument about the impact of “context” in evoking the anger that leads to a heightened sense of racial resentment. The contexts that he uses to explore the relationship between emotion and attitude—the health care debate and the Tea Party—are contemporary and meaningful, so it is surprising that, in the more theoretical sections of the book, his citations and references are not more recent.

In my opinion, the author also gives short shrift to the racial threat literature. He does test some ideas about the emotional precursors to racial threat, but his hypothesis is that fear is the emotion behind threat, not anger. Because the focus of the author is overwhelmingly on symbolic racism and the value of symbolic racism theory vis-a-vis principled politics theory, this alternative is not pursued. But the premise of group conflict theory is not just that people fear loss, but that the gain is experienced by some other group. There is resentment, and yes, anger, embedded in that response. The author’s strong focus on symbolic racism means that he misses this point—and this opportunity.

These complaints aside, there is much of value here. The author introduces something new into the discussion about the origins of contemporary racial attitudes. And he does so at a particular historical moment when our politics are laden with emotion. This emotion, many fear, short-circuits pragmatism, conciliation, and compromise. Of course, society is not just experiencing Tea Party emotion, but also “Black Lives Matter” emotion. Anger and Racial Politics was published before the Black Lives Matter movement began to flourish so Banks does not address it, but both of these movements are clearly motivated by anger and perhaps feed each other. From the perspective of this book, the prognosis is troubling. As Banks writes, “under states of anger, racial conservatives and racial liberals will move further apart in solving America’s racial problem and remain steadfast in their positions” (p. 167). This leaves one hungry for prescriptive work on how to mitigate the anger that has seeped into our ailing polity.