Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Vincent Hutchings

"If They Only Knew": Informing Whites about the Racial Wealth Gap

Vincent Hutchings, Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Hanes Walton, Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan

Abstract: In the wake of the 2020 protests for racial justice, renewed attention has been focused on persistent levels of inequality between Blacks and Whites. Arguably, the most staggering measure of inequality is the racial wealth gap. Previous scholarship has shown that White Americans, both liberals and conservatives, are generally misinformed about the magnitude of this economic divide. However, researchers know very little about whether informing Whites about this phenomenon would dispel these misperceptions and induce greater support for policies designed to reduce or eliminate it. In this paper, we examine these questions with four online survey experiments, and one focus group, regarding what Whites know about the racial wealth gap, whether their misperceptions can be corrected, and whether exposure to accurate information about this gap leads to greater support for race-targeted or race-neutral policy remedies. Across each of our studies we find fairly consistent evidence that misperceptions can be dispelled, but at best only uneven support for the proposition that such interventions lead to greater support for remedial policies. Further, we also find troubling yet consistent evidence that confronting misperceptions about the racial wealth gap sometimes leads to a White backlash. We discuss possible explanations for this pattern of results in our conclusion.

Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton, Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Hutchings' general interests include public opinion, elections, voting behavior, and African American politics. He recently published a book at Princeton University Press entitled Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn About Politics, that focuses on how, and under what circumstances, citizens monitor (and consequently influence) their elected representative's voting behavior. In addition to this project, Professor Hutchings also studies how the size of the African American constituency in congressional districts can influence legislative responsiveness to Black interests. The most recent product of this research was published in the Journal of Politics. Finally, he is also interested in the ways that campaign communications can "prime" various group identities and subsequently affect candidate evaluations. This study examines how campaign communications can subtly---and not so subtly---prime voter's racial (and other group-based) attitudes and subsequently affect their political decisions. Research from this project, co-authored with Professor Nicholas Valentino and Ismail White, has been published in the American Political Science Review. Professor Hutchings, and collaborators Ashley Jardina, Rob Mickey, and Hanes Walton, are currently exploring how different news frames can diminish or exacerbate tensions among Whites, Blacks and Latinos. Professor Hutchings was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar (2000-2002) and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, most recently (2009) for his project entitled “Elite Communications and Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century.” He is currently the University of Michigan Principal Investigator for the American National Election Study for the 2012 election cycle.

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