In the wake of the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, many Americans were compelled to collectively assert the value of Black lives. That watershed event was followed in 2014–2015 by several high-profile police killings of unarmed African Americans including Michael Brown, laying bare institutional and societal devaluing of Black lives and serving as a catalyst for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and broader Movement for Black Lives. The widespread attention to and BLM mobilization against police killings of unarmed African Americans seem to shatter any lingering myths of a post-racial America. We examine disparities in the emotional response to such events and the connection between these emotional responses and assessments of blame and proposed punishment.

Such disparities appear to have increased in recent years. In the midst of economic recovery, political dysfunction, and a host of challenges related to foreign policy, a striking 15% of African American respondents in a late 2014 Gallup poll indicated race relations as the most important problem facing the US. That was up from just 3% in early 2014 and stands at five times the rate of mentions by white respondents (3%), opening up the widest gap in Black-white mentions of race relations as the country’s top problem in over a decade (Brown 2015). Although more recent data suggest increasing awareness of racial inequality among white respondents (Pew 2016),¹ the racial divide in the lived experiences and perceptions of white and nonwhite Americans remains entrenched.

In this article, we use the familiar police script to analyze how those divergent perceptions and media frames based on race and criminality mediate individual behavior affect respondent opinions toward police. Continuing our previous research (Philpot et al. 2010; White et al. 2007), we contend that police killings will elicit distinct emotional responses from whites versus Blacks contingent upon the race of the victim. The findings highlight how identity moderates the connection between emotions and politics while also contributing to our understanding of race relations today.

Theoretical expectations

While there are many reasons for a differential response to events such as the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown killings, particularly ideas about how people sort themselves into in-groups and out-groups (Tajfel 1981) and the high levels of group consciousness (Miller et al. 1981) or linked fate (Dawson 1994) among African Americans, we believe that media framing elicits group-based responses through racialized frames of criminality. Often, media present stereotypical depictions of African Americans as criminals. African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be shown as lawbreakers, while whites are most often depicted as law defenders (Dixon and Linz 2000; Dixon 2015). Entman and Rojecki (2001) also find that whites are most often shown as victims and Blacks as perpetrators. The Black criminals also are more likely to be unnamed, have their mugshots shown, and be shown in prison jumpsuits. Gilliam and Iyengar (2000) explain these components are so prevalent that they have become a crime “script” recognizable to viewers of all races.

Jackson (2019) gives a comprehensive account of how media frames such as the typical crime script produce different opinions and behaviors for African Americans and whites. Yet regardless of the frame, non-Black respondents are less likely than African Americans to blame police for police-involved shootings (Boudreau, MacKenzie, and Simmons 2019). Different groups often seek out information to confirm their preconceived notions of blame (Jefferson, Neuner, and Pasek, n.d.). Gilliam et al. (1996) find that the public believes African Americans bear most of the responsibility for societal criminality, to the point that when a description of a crime is devoid of any mention of race, respondents still believe the perpetrator is Black, and that these feelings negatively influence other attitudes about African Americans (Gilliam and Iyengar 2000). African Americans, however, tend to reject these scripts, which, along with the narratives proffered by the police, are processed amidst historical and recent experiences engendering distrust of police. More generally, racialized issues can activate group-based responses (Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002).

Tuch and Weitzer (1997) speak to racialized differences in perceptions of and reactions to police, focusing on the shooting of Eulia Love in 1979 and the recorded beating of Rodney King in 1991. Experimental studies echo those findings: Mbuba (2010) finds that blame toward police actions varies based on the race of the respondent, with whites less likely to assess blame toward officers in similar incidents, and Yadon and Crabtree (n.d.) find that whites express stronger reactions to a white victim or even a dog than an African American victim. Such differences in opinion have policy implications. Burge and Johnson (2018), for example, find that the race of the victim affects support for increased prison sentences.

There has been less consideration, however, of the mediating role of emotions (but see Phoenix 2018). We believe examining the affect produced by familiar police incidents highlights an intervening variable between identity (e.g. race) and behavior (e.g. placing blame, advocating for punishment). More generally, this article contributes to the growing literature previewed in this special issue on the influence of emotions in Black politics.

Design and hypotheses

To test how emotion and racial identity affect opinion about police actions we employ an embedded survey experiment. We gave students at the University of Richmond and James Madison University a fictional news article about a male youth being shot in a confrontation with a police officer. The conditions varied the race and criminality of the victim, with the control condition specifying neither. Our randomization by condition had a high of 48 respondents and a low of 43. We then asked respondents about their emotional response to the incident, which party was to blame, and whether the officer should face charges as well as standard demographics. The experiment was conducted between March 18, 2016, and April 5, 2016.²

Respondents were given the following prompt: “We are going to ask you a few questions about the following news story where a male youth named Keith Simmons is encountered by a police officer and was subsequently shot.” The treatments vary the race of the victim between Black and white. We also vary the encounter between the victim being “suspected of having completed a drug deal” in which the officer “noticed an exchange between two individuals and proceeded to inquire of one of them” or “was asked by police why he was in an area known for drug dealing” as the officer had “noticed two men talking and proceeded to inquire of one of them.” In the familiar narrative, the police chief reports “the officer feared for his life.” Community officials express concern and officials indicate that the victim was unarmed. The article informs that the officer had been on the police force for six years and has submitted to an interview. There is no mention of disciplinary action in the story, nor is there mention of the officer’s race.

Following the story, respondents answered a battery of questions about the incident. We asked about their primary emotional reaction to the incident. The answer choices were (in order): anger, disappointment, indifference, satisfaction, or none of these (see White et al. 2007; Gallup/USA Today September 2005, and Pew September 2005, December 2017 for similar emotion questions). Next, we asked who was to blame (the police officer, Keith Simmons, or both), and what should happen to the officer (nothing, suspension, termination, or criminal charges). Hypotheses:

As stated, we believe these stories fall into a familiar pattern where the tragedy of a death would trigger some negative emotion. However, as previous research has shown, African Americans and whites react differently. We expect African Americans to have the more reactive response.

Hypotheses 2 and 3 fit into the influence of repeated incidents and familiarity with the media narrative around these events. This particular treatment is presented without any thematic prompt about previous incidents. However, we believe the sheer consistency of this narrative lends itself to a punitive or acquitting projection based on the identity of the respondent in even the most generic descriptions of police killings.

Experimental results

We use independent sample t-tests of means to analyze differences between racial groups and experimental conditions. One emotion was most prevalent – disappointment. Most respondents chose this emotion irrespective of the suspect’s race or purported level of culpability. Given the tacit acceptance of police-related shootings by many whites indicated in public opinion polls (Woodly 2016), it is interesting that most (56%) respondents chose disappointment (Table 1). The white-crime condition had the highest rate of indifference at 29.2% – nearly double the rate for the next highest conditions, white-no crime (15.2%) and the control (14.9%). The Black-no crime condition had the highest proportion of respondents choosing “none of these” at 20.9%. Respondents choosing “none of these [emotions]” to police shootings occurred at an average 19.7% with a Black victim and just 6.5% with a white victim. Anger was actually the third most commonly expressed emotion (15.0%) behind the aforementioned disappointment and indifference (15.9%).

Emotional response, blame, and punishment

Stratification by race shows the same disparities from previous research. Across conditions, 37.5% of African Americans expressed anger at the incident compared to just 14.4% of white respondents, a statistically significant gap of 23.1 percentage points (Table 2). African Americans were also 14.3 percentage points less likely to express disappointment. Looking deeper into this finding, we examine who the respondents blamed for the incident. Overall, 46.7% of respondents blamed only the officer³ and 29.5% recommended criminal charges (Table 2).⁴ However, any ambiguity about this finding disappears when accounting for race. A full 68.7% of African Americans faulted the officer compared to only 44.9% of whites, a difference of 23.8 percentage points with a p-value of .069. The difference was even starker as to the suggested punishment. When asked whether the officer should face criminal charges, the African American rate of agreement was 62.5% compared to only 26.9% for white respondents, a statistically significant difference of 35.6 percentage points. Again, this is without regard to the race of victim or perceived criminality.

In an interesting twist of the randomization, half of our African American respondents received the control condition. For whites, there is little change between their responses from the control and the treatments: in the control condition, disappointment is almost unchanged and indifference is slightly higher, as would be expected. In addition, fewer white respondents fault the officer. For African Americans, half of the sample (8 of 16) received the control condition. This is proportionally higher than the Black representation at our respective universities. The control is devoid of any explicit racial or criminality cues. One can view respondents’ reactions as similar to hearing a news story about a police interaction with little information and no constructed racialized narrative. Examining the responses to the control by race, we see that Blacks’ affect is still one of anger (Table 3). African Americans in the control condition were nearly three times more likely to express anger (37.5%) than whites (12.9%), a difference that approximates statistical significance (p-value =  .112). The racial gap between faulting the officer was also larger when compared to all other conditions (control difference =  30.3; all other conditions difference = 26.8%). African Americans in the control condition were also more likely to recommend criminal charges for the officer (75.0%) than were whites (25.8%), a statistically significant difference of 49.2 percentage points compared to just 22.3% cross all other conditions. Despite the low number of Black respondents, the substantively and statistically significant differences are suggestive and warrant further examination.

Race of victim and criminality

As stated earlier, the vast majority of our respondents identify as white. This makes a closer examination of their responses by condition appropriate. When one of these incidents happens, the response from the African American community, its elites, and its institutions is almost monolithically one of outrage. What follows is a demand for change and the hope that the white mainstream sees the persistence of these inequalities and will work to address them. As they understand this to be rooted in systemic racism, the exact circumstances of the encounter are not paramount and do not mediate the response. The data show this is different from the white mainstream. In most instances, white respondents will err on the side of defending the police, who society tasks with the maintenance of the status quo, privileging whites at the expense of minorities. Therefore, examining when and where whites change their responses to a situation will help us understand better why whites react how they do and what type of events may lead to societal, and eventually, policy changes.

There is no significant difference between the emotions of white respondents based on the race of the victim (Table 4). However, predicted differences emerge when assessing blame and recommending punishment. As alluded to earlier, whites who read about a Black victim (without respect to criminality) are more likely to choose no emotion (“none of these”) as a response compared to whites in the white-victim condition (Black victim = 18.0%; white victim = 5.3%). As hypothesized, white respondents were statistically less likely to fault the police officer for the shooting. While the majority of white respondents who read about a white victim blamed the officer (56.0%), white respondents who read a story about an African American young man were almost 20 percentage points less likely to fault the officer (37.7%). There were also no differences between whites in the crime versus no crime conditions. Multivariate analysis based on the race of victim or criminality did not reach the conventional levels of statistical significance. However, the relationships were in the hypothesized directions. Particularly, white respondents who read about a Black victim were less likely to say the officer was to blame (p-value = .111) or recommend criminal charges as punishment (p-value = .141). Again, the evidence is clear that for whites confronted with an African American victim they are less likely to blame the officer or recommend criminal charges. We saw this same phenomenon in public opinion surveys (Woodly 2016) and in the real-life actions of the majority white grand juries like in the Michael Brown case.⁵

Conclusion

In Megan Ming Francis’ poignant examination of the BLM movement and American Political Development scholarship, she reminds us that “racial violence … is a foundational component of American politics” (2018, 134). Yet as demonstrated in this article, racial disparities in responses to racial violence persist, at once illustrating broader patterns of group-based responses to racialized political events and the salience of emotions in Black politics. The differential emotional responses to police killings have important implications for race relations generally, and the societal demands on police specifically. When individuals perceive these incidents as normal occurrences, done by sanctioned authority figures, to protect “the people,” then they assume the system is doing its job and criminals are being punished. However, if these events signal a larger (even if unconscious) bias toward African Americans, then the justice system – particularly the use-of-force guidelines for police officers – exacerbates these issues. In such an environment excised attention, protest, and anger are warranted responses. Decades of surveys have proven that racially disparate views of society exist and it does not appear this divide is dissipating; rather, with each subsequent event that takes on a racialized frame, the gap appears to be widening. The documentation and explanation of the causes and consequences of such racial disparities is a critical step in the truth and reconciliation process, and implore a long-overdue societal reckoning with how the state’s coercive power “shape(s), reinforce(s), and then naturalize(s) patterns of racial inequality” (Thurston 2018, 162).

Future studies should further examine connections between individual attention, perceptions, and emotional responses to racialized political events, which will enhance our comprehension of such divides and the role media play in sustaining racial tensions. The costs of such disparities carry profound political implications.⁶ When group-based responses condition empathy to such an extent that the pain of “others” is naturalized, and cross-racial interactions remain shaped by media narratives reifying stereotypes rather than open intergroup dialogue and personal relationships, the possibilities for cultivating inclusion and dismantling the legacies of racial hierarchy are diminished.