Testing message strategies that minimize White Americans’ backlash to racial equity information

Abstract Scholars have worried that messages about racial equity can produce backlash from White respondents. Drawing upon psychological reactance theory, we compared cognitive and affective responses to a message emphasizing how a redistributive policy would benefit everyone (universalist message) to a message that also emphasized how the policy would especially benefit minoritized racial groups (targeted universalist message) among a sample of 871 White Americans. Participants in the targeted universalist condition experienced more anger, endorsed more harmful stereotypes about racial outgroups, and saw the government as less responsible for addressing poverty than participants in the universalist condition. Mediation analyses suggest that anger, stereotyping, and perceived government responsibility have a negative, indirect effect on policy support. Our findings underscore the need for future work to identify strategies for communicating about racial equity that avoid activating harmful stereotypes.