Altruistic concern: how racial ideologies explain racial differences in concerns for Black victims of crime and the police

Abstract

We explore how concerned Americans are about the risk of violence faced by Black Americans. Using a 2022 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, we compare concern for Black Americans as the victims of crime versus the police. We find White Americans to be the least concerned about both kinds of victimization, Black Americans the most concerned, and Latinx Americans in between. Interestingly, White Americans expressed significantly less concern about Black Americans being victimized by the police than by civilians. People’s racial ideologies play the largest role in explaining the average differences in concern between people with different racial identifications.

Keywords:

• Altruism
• police violence
• public opinion
• racism

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Funding

The authors did not receive funding to conduct this research.

Data availability statement

The data used for this study is publicly available from the ANES (electionstudies.org).

Notes

1 A few notes on language. We capitalize references to both Black and White Americans to emphasize the socially constructed nature of race, using these to refer to those racialized as Black or as (non-Latinx or Hispanic) White. We use Latinx to refer to those racialized as Hispanic or Latino/a to be inclusive to a range of gender identities, though we recognize that most people racialized as such do not identify with the term. In our results we refer to those who are Hispanic or Latinx to reflect self-identification as Hispanic while also connecting to our discussion of those racialized as Latinx.

2 There are a variety of reasons why some Black Americans may embrace an ideology that preserves White privilege, from repeated exposure to pervasive racial stigmas in society to a strategy to individually transcend racial boundaries by mimicking the actions of the boundary-keepers.

3 Multiple alternative formulations were tried, including a simple index of the six items (alpha = 0.92). The alternative formulations, including the simple index, all produced substantively identical results (coefficients in the same direction, the same significance, and comparable magnitudes). We chose this measure for its theoretical concordance with the two dimensions.

4 Wilcoxon-Mann–Whitney tests suggested the differences between Black and both White and Hispanic respondents were highly significant, but that the differences between White and Hispanic respondents were not significant.

5 Wilcoxon-Mann–Whitney tests suggested the differences between all three were highly significant.

6 Paired tests suggest the difference between the two is significantly different than zero for White but not for Hispanic or Black respondents. Additionally, tests suggest that the difference in differences is significant: that the answers change more among White respondents than Black or Hispanic respondents.

7 Before adding racist ideology, conservative was a small significant negative association with concern, suggesting a modest suppression effect. In fact, although it is not the focus of this article, it appears that a racist ideology mediates some of the effect of Republican and conservative identification on concern about Black victimization.

8 As an additional check, we created a measure of our custom measure that excluded the two racial resentment measures, and this also produced substantively identical findings. This suggests both that the reported findings for our custom measure are not dependent on the effects of the racial resentment items and also that all the measures are highly related and capture closely related dimensions of racial attitudes.

9 We present the results for our contemporary racism measure, but the results for racial resentment were substantively the same (the estimates of mediation were significant and in the same direction), with one exception: the role of racial resentment in explaining the difference in fears of the police between Latinx and White respondents is not significant, whereas the mediation effect for contemporary racism is small but significant. The mediation effect of resentment is generally slightly smaller: mediating, as an example, approximately 61 versus 69% of the difference between Black and White respondents in concerns about crime victimization, and 58 versus 78% of the difference in concerns about police victimization between these same groups. Results available from the corresponding author.

10 As Table 2 reveals, conservative is positively associated with concern (despite White respondents identifying more strongly as conservative) and thus is not a candidate for mediation.

11 We ran models identical to those in Table 2 but with Black rather than White as the reference category to confirm this, and did see signs of mediation comparing Models 1 and 2.

12 Black and Hispanic or Latinx respondents did not significantly differ in the strength of their identification as conservative.

13 Although notably the 95% confidence interval for the estimate of the proportion of the difference that was mediated overlapped with zero. The direct effect of conservative was not significant in this model, so it was not considered as a potential mediator.

14 This also had a 95% confidence interval for the estimate of the proportion of the difference that was mediated overlapped with zero. Notably Latinx respondents only differed modestly in their concerns about police violence relative to White respondents, so there is far less variation to explain in this model.

15 As above, we ran models that made Black the racial reference category. Also as above, there are no significant differences between Black and Latinx or Hispanic respondents in the strength of conservative identification.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Drakulich

Kevin Drakulich is a professor in and the Associate Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. His research broadly focuses on perceptions of race, crime, and justice both within communities and in broader social and political contexts.

Cassidy Pereira

Cassidy Pereira is a PhD student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Her research interests include neighborhoods and crime, racial equity, and community-police relations.