Confronting racism of omission: experimental evidence of the impact of information about ethnic and racial inequality in the United States and the Netherlands
Date
2023-10-18
Authors
Mijs, Jonathan J. B.
Regan, William
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Mijs JJB, Herrera Huang AD (Nikki), Regan W. Confronting Racism of Omission: Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Information about Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the United States and the Netherlands. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. Published online 2023:1-23. doi:10.1017/S1742058X23000140
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have brought ethnic and racial inequalities to the forefront of public conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. However, research shows that people routinely overestimate the progress made towards equality and underestimate disparities between racial and ethnic majority and minority groups. Common among the American public is a naive belief in equal opportunity that stands in sharp contrast to the reality of structural racial inequity. Across the Atlantic, Dutch people’s self-perception of a tolerant, progressive, and egalitarian society means that racism and discrimination are topics often avoided, rendering invisible the stigmatization of ethnic and racial minorities. The result is racism of omission: ethnic and racial disparities are minimized and attributed to factors other than discrimination, which leads to legitimize inequities and justify non-intervention. Against this background, we field an internationally comparative randomized survey experiment to study whether (willful) ignorance about racial and ethnic inequality can be addressed through the provision of information. We find that facts about ethnic and racial inequality, on the whole, (1) have the greatest impact on people’s perceptions of inequality as compared to their explanations of inequality and policy attitudes, (2) register most strongly with majority-group White participants as compared to participants from minority groups, (3) cut across partisan lines, and (4) effect belief change most consistently in the Netherlands, as compared to the United States. We make sense of these findings through the lens of how ‘shocking’ the information provided was to different groups of participants.
Description
License
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.