Emotional substrates of whites' racial attitudes

My dissertation considers the role of emotions in Whites' racial attitudes. I posit that Whites' contemporary racial prejudice is linked primarily to anger while old-fashioned bigotry is driven primarily by disgust. This considers whether, as Sears, Kinder and their colleagues suggest, racial prejudice has been transformed from old-fashioned bigotry based on social distance and ideas about biological differences between the races into a new and subtle form driven by perceived violations by Blacks of basic American values. This happens, at least for recent generations, because the public debate on race is filled with attributions of blame, certainty and control. Simply experiencing anger (even unrelated to race or politics) should bring racial attitudes closer to the surface in memory. Utilizing a local sample in the Midwest and a nationally representative sample collected through an Internet survey (Polimetrix), I explore whether priming negative emotions boost the impact of various forms of racial and non-racial attitudes: old-fashioned racism, symbolic racism, group conflict and others as well. Understanding the emotional underpinnings of racial attitudes reveals an important insight. The emotional context matters in determining which belief system (racial attitudes or non-racial political ideology) will be applied to Whites' racial policy opinions and candidate evaluations.