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As a growing number of states and municipalities consider reparative policies for Black Americans, it is important to understand what shapes support for and opposition to these policies. We explore the role that awareness of racial inequality plays in shaping attitudes. Drawing on data from a large, representative survey in Detroit and one national survey, we find that awareness of racial inequality plays a powerful role in the likelihood of supporting reparative policies. Yet, in follow-up surveys, we find that exposing respondents to information on the rationale for and importance of reparations does not shift public support. These findings suggest that it is the awareness of racial inequality that is cultivated over time that appears to be the dominant force in building support for reparations. These findings are particularly important during a time when many school districts are severely restricting access to information about the history of Black Americans.

One explanation for the post-1965 shift in the vote choice of White Americans posits that it was driven by a shift in the racial imagery of the two major parties. The growing role of Latinos in the Democratic Party has brought new changes in the racial groups associated with the parties. In this paper, I explore whether the increasing attention to Latinos in Democratic Party politics is having an effect similar to that which followed African-Americans political repositioning 50 years ago, and decreasing support for the Party among White Democrats. Drawing on three survey experiments, from two elections, I demonstrate that as White Democrats learn about Democratic outreach to Latinos, they become less supportive of Democrats. This pattern, I find, is driven by the effects that such information has on the racial prototypes associated with each party. All together, these findings point to a new phase of racial realignment in the American political system.

Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party are among the many movements that have reignited media attention to protest activity. Yet, there is much to learn about what this media coverage conveys. In particular, how much does who is protesting matter for how the media portray protesters and their objectives? In this paper, we draw on an extensive content analysis of cable and broadcast news media coverage of protest activities to demonstrate substantial differences in how protests are covered depending on the race and objective of the protesters. We find that media are much more likely to depict protests by people of color using language that evokes a sense of threat by using anger- and fear-laden language than comparable coverage of protest activity involving mostly White individuals. Our results demonstrate that racial biases in news coverage are much broader than previously thought. In doing so, our work highlights the powerful role that a protester’s race plays in whether the media will condone or challenge their political voice.

In this study, I use two population-based survey experiments to consider the role that Spanish-language political media plays in shaping views of Latino political identity. Drawing from social psychology, communication and cultural studies literatures, I hypothesize that both the use of the Spanish-language and the pan-ethnic label serve to increase perceptions of a politically distinctive, Latino collective. To explore this theory, a nationally-representative sample of 829 Latino adult respondents was exposed to a 30-second, televised Obama campaign ad. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the ad, either in English or Spanish. The study's results showed that exposure to Spanish-language media did, in fact, affect perceptions of Latino political homogeneity in an intriguing way. In a second study, a nationally representative sample of 875 bilingual Latinos saw a brief news clip about the elections. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a control condition, or to view a version of the story either in English or Spanish, and using the pan-ethnic label or excluding references to specific subgroups all together. The results underscore the importance of the language of the political content, but also draw attention to the importance of using the pan-ethnic label. Together, these findings provide some of the first empirical evidence of how Spanish-language political media affects how Latinos perceive themselves in the context of American politics.