Racialized Emotions When Thinking about Slavery: Associations Between Group Identification and Feelings of Threat, Shame, and Guilt Among White Americans

Abstract

This paper highlights the relationship between group identification and racialized emotions among white Americans when asked to think about slavery on U.S. soil. Previous scholarship focuses on the consequences of such emotions or stimuli that increase them; however, there is limited work focusing on threat as a racialized emotion, or more broadly who is likely to experience heightened emotions when asked to think about historical racial violence that implicates their group. Using Group Position Theory and Identity Theory, I elevate work on racial threat as an emotion, and demonstrate how it is linked to white Americans’ group identification with their racial, national, and class identities. Then I compare this relationship to other commonly studied emotions—guilt and shame—to demonstrate threat’s unique relationship with these identities. Using survey data collected from a Survey Sampling International panel ( n = 869), I find that feelings of threat are maximized among white Americans who strongly identify with their racial and national identities. In contrast, guilt is heightened among whites who strongly identify with their racial identity, but weakly identify with their national identity, while shame has no significant relationship with these identities. Feelings of threat are also more likely in respondents who self-identify as members of the lower or working class (in comparison to the middle class). The results highlight one way that threat is a distinct emotional experience for white Americans when compared to other emotions. I conclude by discussing how understanding emotions as an outcome of white Americans’ self-perceptions of their identities as group members stands to advance the study of intergroup relations and racism in the United States.