Research Symposium

BIO

Junior student majoring in Psychology and Criminology. Research interests include characteristics of social injustice in the U.S., prejudice, and analyzing risk and protective factors of juvenile delinquency.

What do Racial minorities think of White allies?

Abstract

The current work investigates racial minorities’ suspicions about White people’s antiracist motives. Believing White people’s nonracism (i.e., their refrainment from racist behavior) is externally motivated by social pressures (rather than internally motivated by egalitarian values) affects how racial minorities perceive Whites’ positive interracial behaviors. For example, a sample of Latina women reported greater uncertainty, threat, and worsened self-esteem after receiving positive feedback from a White person when they believed White people’s nonracist motives were more external than internal (Major et al., 2016). Similarly, our primary hypothesis was that perceiving White people’s antiracism (i.e., their promotion of racial equality) as increasingly externally motivated would produce negative perceptions of White allies. Using a series of self-report measures, we asked Black, African American, Hispanic, and Latino participants to report their perceptions of White people’s antiracist motives, the source of those motives (internal vs. external), their perceptions of White allies, and their beliefs about White people’s collective action for racial equality, amongst other measures.

Keywords: Emmerich,Intergroup relations, white allies