Do Democrats Have a White Racism Problem?
American identity, status threat, and the dilemma of white racial backlash
Among the many jokes in Woody Allen’s classic film Annie Hall, there is this one:
“a guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. Then the doc says, why don’t you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs.”
I’ve been thinking about this joke as I’ve pondered what the heck the Democratic Party should be doing right now, as the Trump 2.0 Administration continues its descent into an apparently bottomless pit of incompetence, cruelty, and chaos.
Much like Woody Allen’s farmer, the Democratic Party faces a dilemma: it wants to win back voters it lost in 2024, but many of those voters seem to hold beliefs and values that are antithetical to the beliefs and values the Party has championed for decades — beliefs like “equal protection under the law” and values like diversity, equity, and inclusion. What should the Party do? If the Americans it needs to attract are more racist and bigoted than it would prefer, should the Party embrace their values and jettison its own, or should it find some other way to bring these voters back into the Democratic camp?
This is the Democrats’ Dilemma. If, and how, it is resolved may will determine the outcome of our next Congressional and Presidential elections.
The root of the Democrats’ Dilemma: White fright, status threat, and racial backlash
What the Democrats’ Dilemma revolves around is a dirty little secret that has been known to social scientists for at least a decade: White Americans, regardless of political orientation, tend to perceive racial minorities as competing outgroups, not as fellow Americans. (source, source, source). The key to this perception is something called “status threat”. Individuals experience status threat when they perceive that the influence or position of their group within the social hierarchy may be in danger. Although status threat is a weapon that has been wielded successfully by Republicans for decades, its effects are not limited to one side of the ideological divide. It is also an issue, albeit somewhat less severe, for white Democrats, especially white male Democrats.
Researchers first observed in 2014 that when white Americans are informed that the US is likely to become a “majority-minority” country by 2046, they tend to experience (often without conscious awareness) a rightward shift in their political opinions. This effect is very robust and has been replicated many times. When this potential demographic shift is made salient to white individuals, it consistently triggers status threat, which, in turn, has been associated with a range of effects, including support for radical rightwing policies, exclusionary attitudes, and increased political polarization. Researchers have called these various consequences of status threat backlash, that is, a dominant group’s averse reaction to diversification and liberalization of American society (source).
For quite some time, both researchers and political operatives believed that status threat could be minimized by invoking shared American identity — that is, by exposing people to stimuli emphasizing patriotism, the flag, freedom, the Constitution, the American “melting pot”, etc. So it was quite a surprise when two political scientists released a preprint of a study last year that showed that when white Americans were presented with “shared American identity” as a prime, they actually experienced more, not less, status threat. In turn, that status threat translated into significantly greater racial backlash among all white participants, not just Republicans (source).
There is an implicit causal model being tested here, and it looks like this:
Across four experiments, the authors of this study came to the following conclusions: White Americans do tend to perceive “demographic diversification” as a status threat. In all four studies, priming status threat evoked racial backlash and was associated with (1) less warmth toward racial outgroups, (2) a greater tendency to view racial minorities as less than fully American, (3) less support for racially-beneficial policies, and (4) more racist attitudes in general. In no study did introducing an American identity prime moderate or diminish these effects, nor did it have any positive effect on reducing affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans.
Why is this relevant? The Harris campaign invested heavily in associating itself with a flurry of America identity imagery. Democrats talked enthusiastically about “taking back patriotism”, American flags were everywhere, and Liz Cheney became a living example of how uniting as Americans, rather than dividing as Democrats or Republicans, could bring us together. What this research tells us is that this effort may have backfired. When we look at why so many potential Democratic voters stayed home in 2024, we have to ask whether the campaign’s emphasis on American identity might have contributed to triggering a racial backlash among its white Democratic base that ended up benefiting Trump and hurting Harris.
Democrats are no less susceptible to status threat and racial backlash than Republicans. This is because there is a ubiquitous “White Racial Frame” that dominates American thinking about race across all political persuasions. It is alive and well in Blue and Red America alike, not limited to right-wing fanatics. As sociologist Joe Feagin describes it, the White Racial Frame is:
… an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions, and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate. Over time these aspects become imbedded in most whites’ character structure, to varying degrees. For centuries, it has been a dominant and foundational frame from which an overwhelming majority of white Americans — as well as many other people seeking to conform to white norms and perspectives — view our still highly racialized society. (source, p. 11)
How endemic are implicit racial bias and the “othering” of non-white groups in the Democratic Party? If you’re interested in building a political coalition that reaffirms the promise of America as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation, you need to worry about findings like these from Pew surveys conducted in April 2024 and February 2025:
- 62% of white Democrats disagree with the statement “The legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in American society a great deal today.”
- 65% of white Democrats disagree with the statement “White people benefit a great deal from advantages in society that Black people do not have.”
- 36% of white Democrats do not believe that diversity “strengthens American society.”
- 33% of all Democrats approve of increasing deportations (Feb 2025).
- 30% approve of sending additional military forces to the border.
- 18% approve of suspending asylum applications.
- 16% approve of cutting federal funds for cities and states if they do not help federal deportation efforts.
- 17% of Biden supporters say they are not comfortable with people speaking a language other than English in public.
Most of these percentages are minuscule compared to the rampant racism and anti-immigrant bias expressed by Republicans and Trump supporters in the same survey. But when every Presidential election seems to come down to a 1% or 2% difference between the Parties, it is imperative that Democrats reach out to every potential Democratic voter, including those who may hold beliefs or values that do not conform perfectly with the vision of America the Party is committed to pursue.
But how to go about doing it? On the one hand, Democrats could choose to pull the Party more to the “center”, even though this may require abandoning or deemphasizing long-held Democratic values in order to pursue voters who may be more racist and immigrant-unfriendly than the Party would like them to be. On the other hand, Democrats could attempt to bypass completely this landmine of racial and ethnic biases and status-threat triggers. They could base their case to the American people on a reformulation of Democratic principles first articulated by Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights — a nation-wide commitment to enhancing the lives of all working-class and middle-class Americans, while undoing much of the power and influence of super-rich plutocrats who can be held responsible for handing the American government over to a cabal of incompetent misfits led by an incoherent, angry madman.
Which way should the Party go? Which way will it go?
