Racial Bias Masquerading as Nostalgia: Nostalgic Longing and Opposition to Increased Racial Representation in the Media

Racial/ethnic minority diversity in the mass media has increased in recent years, in part due to racebending—non-White performers portraying traditionally White characters. Racebending is, however, frequently met with backlash, with opponents expressing nostalgia for original representations and decrying racebending as deviating from traditional portrayals. Although expressing nostalgia is seemingly race-neutral, we reasoned that expressing nostalgia to decry racebending is, for some people, an indirect means of expressing biased attitudes that allows racially biased people to oppose racebending without having to appear biased. Three studies ( N = 694) found that White supremacist attitudes predicted self-reported media nostalgia, which in turn predicted racebending opposition. However, nostalgia was inconsistently predictive of opposition to media changes. Specifically, we found that people higher in nostalgia opposed racebending, but not other deviations from traditional presentations (i.e., Whitewashing). These results suggest that nostalgia is used by some to indirectly oppose racial diversity in the media.