Status Threat and American Identity in a Multiracial Democracy

Recent papers suggest that shared American identity primes may reduce partisan conflict, but this intervention’s potential for another prominent political conflict remains untested: racial animosity. In this paper, we argue that white Americans often show backlash against multiracial democracy––the ideal of equal rights and liberties for all––because they tend to feel status threatened by racial outgroups. In turn, we posit that reminding them of their shared American identity may attenuate the status threat mechanism and subsequent backlash. Four experiments (three pre-registered, total N = 4,062) support the first claim but not the second. Despite various American identity primes and accounting for confounding variables, we find little indication that a shared American identity could reduce racial (and, in exploratory analyses, partisan) conflict in America. We discuss the implications for future research and the practical use of a shared identity when little remains that is shared.