Angry White Parents: Emotions and Participation in Local School Board Politics

• In Event: Educational Legacies and Racial Dynamics

Abstract

National media has recently turned its attention to local school board elections and race has become a contentious issue in local education politics. Is increased attention to teaching race in schools changing participation rates among Whites in school board meetings? In this paper, we theorize that attention to teaching about white privilege in schools matters for participation in local school board politics when it induces anger in respondents. We test this theory through a novel survey experiment conducted with YouGov in the summer of 2023. We randomly assign respondents to read one of three paragraphs about racial differences in unemployment under consideration for curricula in their district. We find that as anger increases among white parents, so does their propensity to participate. Furthermore, we find that parents who are the angriest do more than just attend the meetings: they are more likely to register a complaint to the board, make a comment in a public hearing, join a group of like-minded parents, and volunteer to participate more in the future. Our findings have implications for scholarship focusing on the relationship between emotions and Whites’ racial attitudes.

Scholars of race and politics have long identified patterns of white backlash in response to perceived “threat” from non-white groups. This perceived threat drives whites to participate more in politics and adopt more conservative policy attitudes. However, previous work on the “power-threat” hypothesis is limited in two ways. First, this work has not considered the role of emotions in motivating political behavior in response to threats. While previous work shows that anger can fuel racial animus, much less attention has been paid to if and how racial animus causes increased anger. Second, existing studies operationalize the salience of racial threat through the physical presence of minorities, especially Blacks, in a local environment. We argue that non-white groups need not be physically present to activate racial threat among whites. Richeson et al, for example, find that merely reading a news article about the growing number of non-whites in the United States is enough to activate threats in whites. We contribute to this emerging area of research by proposing that racial threat can also be activated by openly discussing white racial privilege and non-white racial disadvantage in a public space. Similar to the way that increased proximity (real or imagined) to Blacks and other non-white groups raises the salience of racial threat, we propose that increased attention to teaching about white racial privilege in public schools is also threatening. We further argue that this increased sense of threat generates anger, an emotion that has been linked to increased political participation. Anger then drives whites to become more engaged in local politics to protect against threats to their privilege.

We test this theory through a novel survey experiment conducted in July of 2023. We randomly assign respondents to read one of three paragraphs about racial differences in unemployment from a hypothetical textbook under consideration for curricula in their district. In the racial discrimination condition, the excerpt describes racial discrimination as a potential cause of racial group differences in unemployment. Relative to a control condition that does not discuss discrimination at all and a third treatment that discusses national origin rather than racial discrimination, we find that participants report more anger after exposure to the racial discrimination condition. That is, as anger increases among white parents so does their propensity to participate. Furthermore, we find that the angriest participants are more likely to engage with local school board politics. Anger mediates participants to do more than just attend school board meetings: they are more likely to register a complaint to the board, make a comment in a public hearing, join a group of like-minded parents, and volunteer to participate more in the future. These findings hold across partisanship. Our findings have implications for studying the relationship between emotions and Whites’ racial attitudes.

This paper informs research on local politics, particularly along the lines of race. We draw a specific connection between emotions and white racial attitudes and empirically show that white parents are more likely to participate in otherwise mundane local political activities when they are emboldened by an angry response to a perceived threat to their racial group. We also provide a new theoretical approach to examining white political behavior that includes analyzing the link between racial animus, threats, and emotions.

Authors

• Hilary Izatt, SUNY Binghamton

• Francy Dayana Luna Diaz, University of Michigan

• Zoe Walker, University of Michigan