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Post-Hurricane Katrina Racialized Explanations as a System Threat: Implications for Whites’ and Blacks’ Racial Attitudes

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Abstract

This experiment drew upon theoretical perspectives on group and system justification to examine whether exposure to media coverage arguing that racism was responsible for the ineffective Hurricane Katrina disaster response affected White and Black Americans’ intergroup attitudes. Consistent with a system justification perspective, Whites exposed to video clips arguing that the hurricane Katrina disaster response was due to racism displayed greater racial ingroup attachment and ingroup love compared to Whites exposed to videos conveying that the government’s incompetence was to blame for the disaster response. In contrast, Blacks displayed strong levels of ingroup attachment and ingroup love across both video conditions. This research highlights how insights from social psychology are valuable in understanding psychological responses to social justice-related events, such as the tragic response to hurricane Katrina.

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Notes

  1. A Lexis Nexis search of articles published in major newspapers in the 6 weeks following hurricane Katrina located 187 articles that mentioned “hurricane Katrina” in combination with the keywords “discrimination” or “racism” in the headlines or lead paragraphs. Additionally, popular magazines, carried cover stories about the potential role of racism in the hurricane Katrina disaster response (e.g., Newsweek’s September 19, 2005 issue was titled: “Poverty, Race and Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame.”)

  2. Although racialized explanations can describe discrimination perceptions made by members of any social group, for the sake of simplicity and clarity the term “racialized explanations” is used to refer specifically to claims of anti-Black racism. Additionally, the term racialized explanation does not imply that these discrimination attributions are accurate or inaccurate. The question of whether Whites and Blacks are accurate or inaccurate in their perceptions of prejudice has been addressed in great detail elsewhere (see Major, Quinton, & McCoy, 2002 for a review), and it is beyond the scope of the present investigation.

  3. An alternative possibility is that Blacks who encounter racialized explanations might attempt to cope with this reminder of discrimination by increasing the extent to which they identify with their group and by displaying increased ingroup favoritism (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999).

  4. Racialized explanations are judgments of blame (Major, Kaiser, & McCoy, 2003). Thus it is appropriate to compare racialized explanations with other types of non-discriminatory blame judgments.

  5. The videos came from a sampling of media outlets (e.g., ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and Democracy Now) that aired in the days and weeks following hurricane Katrina. Footage of both Black and White speakers was utilized in both the race blame and government incompetence conditions—although African Americans represented the majority of speakers in both conditions. Because of our desire to begin the study as quickly as possible (i.e., immediately after securing IRB approval and research funds), we were limited to those videos that were readily available to us. Thus, we deemed temporal proximity to the Katrina disaster as a more pressing concern relative to precisely balancing the videos in terms of the race, gender, and social status of the speakers. The use of multiple speakers and clips within each video condition helps to lessen concerns about whether the idiosyncrasies of any given feature of a video would bias the results. These videos are available from the authors.

  6. When the analyses are run with only those participants who correctly recalled the manipulation, the results are unchanged, with one exception. The interaction term on the attitudes toward Whites measure becomes marginally significant (p = .07) as does the simple effects comparison for White participants (p = .09). As the means are virtually unchanged in this analysis, the marginal findings are likely due to reduced statistical power. As this was a free recall open-ended measure, it is possible that some participants who did not provide the correct response actually did detect this information.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grants BCS-0554951 (Kaiser) and BCS-0554960 (Eccleston). We thank Laurie O’Brien for thoughtful comments on this manuscript as well as the undergraduates in Cheryl Kaiser’s Social Identity Lab for competently assisting with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Washington, P.O. Box 351525, Seattle, WA, 98195-1525, USA

    Cheryl R. Kaiser

  2. Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Collette P. Eccleston

  3. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Nao Hagiwara

Authors
  1. Cheryl R. Kaiser
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  2. Collette P. Eccleston
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  3. Nao Hagiwara
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Correspondence to Cheryl R. Kaiser.

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Kaiser, C.R., Eccleston, C.P. & Hagiwara, N. Post-Hurricane Katrina Racialized Explanations as a System Threat: Implications for Whites’ and Blacks’ Racial Attitudes. Soc Just Res 21, 192–203 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-008-0065-0

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