Abstract

We explore how concerned Americans are about the risk of violence faced by Black Americans. Using a 2022 American National Election Studies survey, we compare concern for Black Americans as the victims of crime versus the police. We find White Americans to be the least concerned about both kinds of victimization, Black Americans the most concerned, and Latinx Americans in between. Interestingly, White Americans expressed significantly less concern about Black Americans being victimized by the police than by civilians. People’s racial ideologies play the largest role in explaining the average differences in concern between people with different racial identifications.

Key words: Altruism; police violence; racism; public opinion

Disclosure and Funding Statement: The authors did not receive funding to conduct this research and report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Data Availability Statement: The data used for this study is publicly available from the ANES (electionstudies.org).

Black Americans are disproportionately negatively affected by crime and our justice system.[1] They are more likely to be victimized, particularly by violent crime (e.g. Harrell, 2007), and are more likely to be mistreated by the police, particularly violent and lethal mistreatment.

Black Americans are more likely to be stopped and have other negative experiences with the police (Crutchfield et al., 2012; Gelman et al., 2007). They are also more likely to be shot and killed by the police while unarmed (Correll et al., 2007; Nix et al., 2017; Ross, 2015). Overall, Black Americans represent less than a seventh of the U.S. population but constitute one-quarter of those fatally shot by the police—they are more than twice as likely to be killed than people of any other racial or ethnic group (Fagan & Campbell, 2020).

Black Americans are justly concerned about both of these kinds of violent victimizations. Importantly, however, many Black Americans appear to be even more concerned about the potential for harm at the hands of the police (Pickett et al., 2022; Smith Lee & Robinson, 2019). Black Americans are substantially more likely to be concerned about encounters with the police relative to White Americans (Graham et al., 2020; Pickett et al., 2022). This may not be surprising: police hold structural and legal power over civilians, are rarely held formally accountable for violent actions against civilians (e.g. Gonzalez Van Cleve, 2017), and, problematically, are the institution nominally tasked with providing civilian safety.

Persistent racial segregation and long-standing biases in media coverage in the past insulated many Americans from knowing about these victimizations of Black Americans (Peterson & Krivo, 2010; Stabile, 2023). However, the Black Lives Matter movement has succeeded in bringing widespread attention to the issue of police violence against Black Americans, and specific killings of Black Americans have received widespread attention in the news media and in political discourse and have been widely shared on social media.

In short, Black Americans are at substantial and disproportionate risk of violent victimization by other civilians and by the police, and this issue has received widespread public attention.  Our first question is about how concerned the public in general is about this. Despite the widespread attention to the issue, we suspect—and find—that many Americans, disproportionately White Americans, are not all that concerned. Our second question is how we should understand differences in concern across Americans. Our proposed answer focuses on racial and political ideologies.

In particular, we focus on the logic of a particular modern racial ideology that pairs a preference for individualistic attributions for socially disparate outcomes—described as an abstract liberalism—with a downplaying of the historical and contemporary contexts that help explain social inequalities—a minimization of racism (Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Jackman & Muha, 1984). We suspect this ideology allows some Americans to avoid having to feel concern for the well-being of Black Americans. As this ideology is disproportionately, but not exclusively, held by White Americans (Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Kam & Burge, 2018; Simmons & Bobo, 2018), we also suspect it may help explain some of the average differences in concerns among people with different race-ethnic identities.

The question of public concern about Black violent victimization has obvious importance for any efforts to address this victimization. In fact, as we argue the connection to racial ideologies illustrates, a lack of concern about harm to Black Americans is a significant justification for maintaining status quo racial inequalities. Concern for the well-being of Black Americans, by contrast, may motivate efforts to take ameliorative political action.

So how should we understand people’s level of concern about the victimization of Black Americans by other civilians and by the police? We begin by setting up the idea of an altruistic concern for Black Americans, distinguishing concerns about victimization by the police versus other civilians. Following this, we develop our potential explanations for these concerns—focusing on race, racial ideologies, and political ideologies—and for differences both between Black and White Americans. We then explore these questions empirically using a recent wave of the American National Election Study, which agreed to add questions about these concerns.

Altruistic Concerns about Crime and the Police

Our core interest is in the most basic question of whether Americans are concerned about the well-being of Black Americans. Black Americans are more likely to experience violence at the hands of civilians and the police. Despite an overall decrease in violent victimization rates, Black Americans continue experiencing the highest rate of violent victimization—in 2021, 7.7 per 1,000 Black Americans are estimated to experience violent victimization compared to only 5.4 White Americans, 5.4 Hispanic Americans, and 2.9 Asian Americans (Thompson & Tapp, 2022). Additionally, Black Americans are more likely to experience police use of force, including lethal force (Edwards et al., 2019; Nix et al., 2017; Ross, 2015). While making up 13.6% of the United States population, Black Americans make up a quarter of those killed by the police (VerBruggen, 2022). Black Americans also experience unjust police stops and searches at higher rates (Gelman et al., 2007; Rojek et al., 2012), and having darker skin is associated with an increased chance of arrest (Kizer, 2017; White, 2015).

Black Lives Matter has brought substantial attention to police violence perpetrated against Black Americans and the violence and discrimination faced by Black Americans more broadly (Cobbina, 2019; Drakulich et al., 2021; Drakulich & Denver, 2022; Taylor, 2016).  In other words, Americans have had the opportunity to learn about this. Given this, our question is quite simple: do Americans care about these disproportionate harms to Black Americans? 

Generating public concern about an issue is a core goal of political actors hoping to effect change. One of the core framing tasks of a social movement is motivational framing, those frames generating the essential call to arms that motivate people towards political action on a particular issue (Benford & Snow, 2000). For some issues, like climate change, social movements may try to emphasize the personal impact of the issue on all people.  But the likelihood of being hurt or killed by the police or another civilian is not just stratified by race, it is also highly determined by age, socio-economic status, and neighborhood disadvantage (Sampson, 1985; Thompson & Tapp, 2022; Washington Post, 2023).  For instance, for young Black men, police use of force is one of the leading causes of death, while for other intersectional sets of identities, the risk is negligible (Edwards et al., 2019)Thus, to generate the kind of broad public concern that may motivate political action, that concern would need to be fundamentally altruistic rather than selfish for the vast majority of Americans.

This notion of altruistic concern has parallels in several interconnected theoretical ideas. It is closely related to the ideas of empathy and sympathy. People may support harsh criminal justice policies (including aggressive policing), for instance, if they fail to empathize with a social construction of the typical offender (Unnever & Cullen, 2009). Some people fail to empathize specifically with victims of police shootings (J. Johnson & Lecci, 2020). And people may fail to empathize with the Black Lives Matter movement more broadly (Luttrell, 2019). A broader lack of racial sympathy may have important political consequences (Chudy, 2021).

Altruistic concern is also closely connected to work that argues for expanding beyond personal concerns about crime and the police. For instance, fear of crime for others appears more common than personal fear (Drakulich, 2015a; Drakulich & Rose, 2013; Snedker, 2006; Warr & Ellison, 2000). While some of this work focuses on fears for family members, Snedker (2006) distinguishes this from a more truly altruistic concern for others in society. These altruistic concerns appear to have different consequences: people tend to acquire guns and other weapons when they are afraid for their partner rather than themselves (Drakulich, 2015a; Warr & Ellison, 2000), while those with a more truly altruistic fear—in this case for students and teachers—support gun control in schools more strongly (Burton et al., 2021). Research has similarly distinguished a personal fear of the police (Cobbina-Dungy, 2021; Pickett et al., 2022) from a more altruistic concern about others facing harm at the hands of the police (Pickett et al., 2022).

In short, we are interested in what we describe as an altruistic concern for the well-being of Black Americans relative to their disproportionate risk of harm from civilian and police violence. In the midst of substantial public attention to these harms, we want to know whether people care about them. And if, as it turns out, many do not, we are interested in learning why not.

Potential Sources of Concern about the Safety of Black Americans

Why is it that some people may lack concern about these harms to Black Americans? And why does it appear that White Americans are especially unlikely to hold these concerns?

The answer to these questions begins with a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary sources of these pattern of harms. Both kinds of victimizations are at least in part the product of systemic and institutional racism. Historical and contemporary forces, including segregation and discrimination, have concentrated many Black Americans in neighborhoods with significant socio-economic disadvantages—among the best predictors of serious violent crime—which are simultaneously over- and under-policed (Braga et al., 2019; Peterson & Krivo, 2010).  The police, both historically and contemporaneously, have been a primary mechanism by which systemic racism is enacted (see Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Hinton, 2021). This can be seen in its roots in controlling enslaved and free Black Americans historically, in the role of law enforcement in confronting civil rights organizers and protests (Hinton, 2021), in the simultaneous over- and under-policing of marginalized neighborhoods through a ghetto-carceral continuum of confinement and control (Wacquant, 2003), and in modern forms of carceral liberalism that extend to other state and non-state actors (Tillman, 2022).

These historical and contemporary forces focus our investigation on three potential sets of factors potentially relevant to concern about Black victimization: race, racial ideologies, and political ideologies. We describe our theoretical rationale for each below, linking them to these broader historical and contemporary forces and rooting them in work on how people understand crime and justice as broad social issues.

First, we suspect racial differences in concerns for Black Americans may exist. There are stark racial differences in a variety of perceptions of crime and justice, including views of the police (Wheelock et al., 2019; Wu & Miethe, 2022) and support for punitive policies (D. Johnson, 2008; Unnever & Cullen, 2010).

Whether people worry about Black people being the victim of civilian or police violence is, as we described above, essentially a question of empathy and sympathy. Do Black Americans have more empathy for their fellow Black Americans than White Americans have sympathy for them? It appears, for instance, that a racial empathy gap exists between White and Black Americans in support for punitive approaches to crime (Unnever & Cullen, 2009). Similarly, White American’s unempathetic responses to racial injustices may also structure their feeling towards social movements like Black Lives Matter (Drakulich et al., 2021; Luttrell, 2019; Vani et al., 2023), whether they believe the violence perpetrated by the police against Black Americans is justified (Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023), and whether they have empathy for those Black victims (J. Johnson & Lecci, 2020). Relatedly, White Americans vary in their sympathy for the distress of Black Americans (Chudy, 2021).

Why would this racial empathy gap exist? Race only matters, of course, because of racism (Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Graves Jr. & Goodman, 2021). The systemic and institutional racism described above is supported by a nexus of shared racial ideologies that justify it. For this reason, we suspect racial ideologies play a major role. Concern for the fate of others matters because of the possibility that it will provoke action to help Black Americans, whether that action comes in the form of interpersonal connections, donations, political activism, or voting behavior. In other words, concern about the fate of Black Americans may provoke actions that threaten status quo racial group positions (Blumer, 1958). As a result, those who are concerned about the relative group positions of Black and White Americans may be especially resistant to expressing concern about harms experienced by Black Americans.

After the Civil Rights Movement challenged the more explicit racial logic behind the laws that codified racial discrimination during the Jim Crow Era, a new ‘contemporary’ racial logic began to emerge (Bobo & Smith, 1998; Jackman & Muha, 1984; Sears & McConahay, 1973), one variously described as modern, symbolic (Sears, 1988), laissez-faire (Bobo et al., 1997), or colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Two dimensions of this racial ideology work in concert. The first dimension is a minimization of the relevance of racism as a factor explaining disparate outcomes for Black and White Americans. This includes a minimization of the contemporary relevance of historical forms of institutional racism (including legal chattel slavery) as well as the prevalence and importance of contemporary institutional and interpersonal discrimination.  

The second dimension is abstract liberalism. Bonilla-Silva (2018) suggests that the modern racist ideology has coopted the principle of equal opportunity from the Civil Rights movement, using the language of liberalism (Bobo et al. (1997) make a related argument in their description of laissez-faire racism). But to apply this language of liberalism to explain racial inequalities necessarily requires an abstraction: intentionally ignoring the unlevel playing field on which people who are racialized as Black or White compete. The abstraction is necessary because there is nothing about an economically liberal ideology that would prevent people from acknowledging historical or contemporary discrimination. In fact, chattel slavery and the ‘Jim Crow’ laws legalizing discrimination are obvious perversions of the free market.  The two dimensions work in concert to produce an ideology that suggests persistent racial inequalities are in fact both fair and deserved (and those not in need of amelioration). Just as explicit biological racism helped justify the explicitly different legal status of Black Americans under slavery and Jim Crow systems, this contemporary form of racism helps justify the ostensibly race-neutral modern policies that disproportionately harm Black Americans and protect white privilege without explicitly using race as a legal category. This ideology can be found across race-ethnic identities (Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Kam & Burge, 2018),[2] but non-Hispanic White Americans are substantially more likely to possess it, suggesting it may help explain some of the racial differences in concern for Black Americans.

Prior work has directly connected racial ideologies to related phenomena. Anti-Black racial ideologies increase concerns about crime in predominately Black neighborhoods (Drakulich, 2012; Quillian & Pager, 2001, 2010). People high in racial resentment are more likely to support police use of force (Carter et al., 2016; Carter & Corra, 2016). Those with anti-Black racial ideologies are also more likely to support punitive approaches to crime (Bobo & Johnson, 2004; Drakulich, 2015c; D. Johnson, 2008; Pickett et al., 2014; Unnever & Cullen, 2010).

Finally, given the political attention to crime and police violence in recent years (Drakulich et al., 2017, 2020), people’s political views may also be relevant to their level of concern for harms to Black Americans. Political actors seek to actively shape understandings of Black victimization through framing processes (Drakulich et al., 2020). This is significant because many politicians have taken positions on issues related to race, crime, and policing in recent years. Some Democrats and liberal political actors place an emphasis on the differential treatment experienced by African Americans, while some Republican and conservative actors report police force is necessary, just, and emphasize ‘Black-on-Black' crime. There are also stark differences in party identification along racial lines (Pew Research Center, 2015), making this a potential candidate to explain some of the racial differences in concern for Black Americans.

Prior work has also connected political identities to broader views of crime and justice, which may be related to concern for the victimization of Black people. People who identify as Republican or conservative tend to hold more favorable—and less critical—views of police (Callanan & Rosenberger, 2011; Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Drakulich, Rodriguez‐Whitney, et al., 2023; Fine et al., 2019; Pickett et al., 2018). And relatedly, those who identify as Republican or conservative are more likely to oppose Black Lives Matter (Drakulich et al., 2021; Drakulich & Denver, 2022).

However, political identities may also be the product of the other factors discussed here, particularly racial ideologies (Drakulich, 2015b; Matsueda et al., 2011). The Republican ‘southern strategy’ explicitly aimed to attract voters who were uneasy with changing race relations (Beckett & Sasson, 2004; Tonry, 2011). More recently, racial ideologies played a role in voting decisions during the 2008 election (Krupnikov & Piston, 2015), the emergence of the Tea Party movement (Hochschild, 2016; Tope et al., 2015), and the 2016 election (Drakulich et al., 2017, 2020).

Research questions

Based on this, we have a few simple research questions. First, and most basically, what are the average levels of concern about Black Americans being hurt or killed among people with different race-ethnic identities? Based on prior work on views of racialized social problems, we expect Black Americans to have the most concern, White Americans the least, with Latinx Americans and others in between.

Second, how are people’s political and racial ideologies associated with these levels of concern? This is an especially important question in the midst of a civil rights movement shining public and political attention on the issue of Black victimization. And finally, do people’s political and racial ideologies help explain race-ethnic differences in levels of concern for the safety of Black Americans?

Data, Measures, and Methods

To explore these questions we submitted a proposal to the American National Election Studies (ANES) to include the topic in their pilot survey conducted during the 2022 midterm elections. Recent data are key to answering this question, given the increased public and media attention to the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police in the Black Lives Matter era, particularly after the murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests in the spring of 2020. The study was conducted online between November 14^th and 22^nd, 2022 drawing on 1500 respondents selected from the YouGov panel by sample matching, using prior estimates of the U.S. population along the lines of gender, age, race, and education. All analyses use included weights to match population characteristics for 2020 presidential choice, own or rent, geographic region, plus two- and three-way stratifications of gender, age, race/ethnicity, and education.

Measures

Concern for Black Americans. Our central interest is in capturing Americans’ concerns for the safety of Black Americans from violent crime victimization and violent police victimization—both of which Black Americans are exposed to at disproportionately high rates. To capture concern for crime victimization, respondents were asked “how worried are you about black citizens being the victims of violent crime?” For police victimization, they were asked “how worried are you about black citizens being hurt or killed by the police?” In each case, respondents were asked to answer on a five-point scale from “not at all worried” to “extremely worried.” Table 1 presents means, standard deviations, and the number of missing cases for each of the measures. The average respondent placed themselves roughly in the middle of each scale, indicating moderate worry.

***TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE***

Contemporary racist ideologies. To capture adherence to the contemporary racist ideologies described above, we use two alternative measures in separate models: a widely familiar and a more theoretically customized measure. The first is racial resentment, which has been widely used in prior work. The measure captures key dimensions of the modern racial ideology identified in work on symbolic, laissez-faire, and colorblind racism: the rejection of structural explanations for racial inequalities, the embrace of individualistic explanations, and a resentment of perceived line-cutting (e.g. Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Henry & Sears, 2002; Hochschild, 2016). This measure captures social concerns about relative racial group positions (Simmons & Bobo, 2018) that are independent from a non-racial political conservatism (e.g. Enders, 2021; Wallsten et al., 2017), though we also include a separate measure of conservative ideology to distinguish these views. There is variation in these views among respondents of all race-ethnic identities (Kam & Burge, 2018). The average respondent was in the middle of the scale, neither agreeing nor disagreeing on average with the statements. A Cronbach’s alpha of .88 suggests high reliability.

However, we also constructed an alternative (and partially overlapping) measure. As described above, we focus on two broad and closely related dimensions of a contemporary racist ideology, as identified in work by Bonilla-Silva (2018) and Bobo and colleagues (1997). The first is a minimization of the relevance of racism both in historical institutional forms like legal chattel slavery and also in contemporary discrimination. This is captured by three indicators. The first is a single question from the racial resentment scale, asking respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks/Black people to work their way out of the lower class.” In the second question, respondents were asked “in the United States, how serious a problem is racism.” Finally, respondents were also asked whether they believed racial differences in social and economic outcomes were “due to racist policies and practices.” The first of these questions reflects a minimization of historical forms of institutional racism, the second two questions tap into the minimization of contemporary racism.

The second dimension is abstract liberalism, capturing an ideology that uses the language of liberalism specifically to explain racial inequalities, and only by ignoring the unfair playing field on which people who are racialized as Black or White compete. Thus, this dimension is closely related to the other two dimensions, tapping into denials of historical and contemporary racism.

Three indicators tap into this dimension. The first two reflect assumptions about a level playing field.  Respondents were asked, separately, whether being White or being Black “comes with advantages,” coded as perceptions that being Black is an advantage and that being White is a disadvantage. The third indicator is a question from the racial resentment scale asking respondents how strongly they agreed with the statement “It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Black people would only try harder they could be just as well off as White people.” This speaks to a core tenet of liberalism: that outcomes are determined in strong ways by individual effort, but ‘abstracted’ to specifically explain racial differences.

We built a confirmatory factor analysis using the lavaan package in R (Rosseel, 2012) to produce estimates of these two latent constructs (see Figure 1). The model fit reasonably well (e.g. RMSEA of .06, SRMR of .02). Each of the indicators loaded is relatively similar ways on their respective factors (see the standardized loadings in Figure 1). The errors for the two measures taken from the racial resentment scale (‘generations of slavery’ and ‘trying hard enough’) were allowed to be correlated. The two factors were very highly correlated and thus combined into a final measure reflecting the average of the two factor scores.[3]

***FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE***

Notably, this is not an attempt to develop a new measure of something like colorblind racism from scratch, as others have (e.g. Neville et al., 2000), but is instead an attempt to use the wealth of rich questions about racial attitude that already exist in the data to construct a measure that better aligns with our theory. We see this as having at least two modest benefits over using the traditional measure of racial resentment. First, although we see racial resentment as a reasonable proxy for laissez-faire and colorblind racism (Drakulich, Rodriguez‐Whitney, et al., 2023; Sidanius et al., 1992; Simmons & Bobo, 2018), it was not specifically designed to capture them. Second, some scholars have argued that racial resentment captures, in a primary way, non-racial political ideologies. We reject this interpretation in the strongest terms for reasons that have been well-described elsewhere (Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Enders, 2021; Simmons & Bobo, 2018; Wallsten et al., 2017). But this new measure does have the benefit of excluding the two items that are most often the target of these criticisms: the ‘special favors’ and ‘less that they deserve’ questions. Although these questions tap into interesting and related concepts like ‘ressentiment’ and deservingness, we see them as less critical to capturing the specific racial ideology described here (an abstract liberalism rooted in the minimization of racism).

Politics. To capture political ideology, we use a measure of self-identified conservatism on a 7-point scale ranging from strong liberal to strong conservative and a measure of party identification on a 7-point scale ranging from strong Democrat to strong Republican. The average respondent was in the middle of both scales.

Demographic and Biographical Controls. We also include a set of controls for alternative explanations that may be associated with basic demographic or biographical characteristics, including sex, age, marital status (with single people as the reference category), educational achievement (with a high school degree or less as the reference category), and income categories (with family incomes under $30K as the reference category). We are particularly interested in differences in these concerns by race-ethnic identity. To this end we also include measures of self-identification as Black, Latinx, Asian, and American Indian or Alaska Native. In order to make non-Latinx White respondents the reference category, we also include a catch-all measure of those identifying as something else, but given the substantial heterogeneity of this measure, we do not recommend directly interpreting the coefficients for it. Notably, respondents were allowed to select multiple identities, so only our reference category of White is captured as those who only selected White as their race-ethnic identity.

Methods

As Table 1 suggests, missing data was exceedingly rare (less than 1 percent) for all of the measures with the exception of family income (missing ~11 percent) and identification as a conservative (14 percent). To address this missing data, we employed a multiple imputation strategy (Allison, 2002), which does not depend on the assumption that data are missing completely at random, but rather that the data are missing at random after controlling for other variables in the analysis. To this end, twenty data sets were imputed in a process that used all the variables from the analyses as well as an auxiliary variable to add information and increase efficiency using the mice package in R (van Buuren & Groothuis-Oudshoorn, 2011). Auxiliary variables included information on home ownership as well as self-identification as a conservative reported on the respondent’s panel profile.

The survey was conducted online using the YouGov panel, a large and diverse set of potential respondents, who were selected by sample matching. Respondents were matched to U.S. citizens in the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) sample by gender, age, race, and education. Matched cases were weighted to the ACS frame using a propensity score model based on the prior variables as well as the presidential vote in 2020, own or rent, and geographic region. After data collection, the sample was weighted by YouGov using post-stratification weights to match population characteristics for 2020 presidential candidate choice, a three-way stratification of gender, age, and education, a three-way stratification of gender, age, and race, and a two-way stratification of race and education. These weights are used in all analyses.

The outcomes are captured as ordinal variables. The results from ordinal and linear models were substantively identical, so we present the latter for ease of interpretation.

Our final research question involves mediation. We estimate average mediation effects, bootstrapping 1000 samples (and including all the controls in models predicting the mediators) using the ‘mediation’ package in R (Imai et al., 2011; Tingley et al., 2014). Mediation effects are estimates of the indirect effect, and an examination of the confidence intervals is analogous to examining the significance of an indirect effect in a structural equation modeling framework. Based on this analysis, we present estimates for the average mediation effects and the proportion mediated (of the total effect—direct effects can be observed in the model).

Results

Race-Ethnic Identification and Concern about Black Americans

We begin with a basic comparison of levels of concern about Black Americans among those respondents who selected one of the three most common race-ethnic identities. Figure 2 presents the proportion of respondents reporting each of the five levels of concern for Black Americans being the victims of crime. More than half of White respondents reported being no more than moderately worried, with less than 20 percent of White respondents reporting extremely high levels of worry. Hispanic and Latinx respondents gave answers very similar to those of non-Hispanic White respondents, with a slightly larger number reporting being ‘extremely’ rather than ‘very’ worried. On the other hand, more than 40 percent of Black respondents reported being extremely worried, and less than twenty percent reported being unworried or only slightly worried.[4]

***FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE***

Figure 3 presents comparable results for the proportions of respondents reporting concern for Black Americans being hurt or killed by the police. More than 60 percent of White respondents reported being no more than moderately worried, and nearly 30 percent reported not being worried at all. Hispanic respondents, on average, appeared more worried than non-Hispanic white respondents, with larger proportions reporting being moderately and extremely worried, in particular. Once again, nearly half of Black respondents report being extremely worried, with less than twenty percent reporting no worries or slight worries.[5]

***FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE***

In sum, White Americans appear to be the least concerned for the safety of Black Americans, and Black Americans the most concerned. But it also appears White Americans were mostly likely to change their answers between the two questions, expressing even less concern for Black people being victimized by the police than by other types of crime.[6]

Concern about Black Americans being victims of crime

Table 2 presents three models exploring how concerned people are about Black Americans becoming the victims of violent crime. Model 1 presents just basic demographic and biographical characteristics. As expected, Black Americans were substantially more likely to be concerned about the violent victimization of fellow Black Americans relative to White Americans. Consistent with Figure 1, Latinx or Hispanic Americans are not significantly different in their concern than White Americans. Asian Americans, by contrast, express less concern, on average, than White respondents. Among the other covariates, those with more education and income and those who are unmarried are more likely to express worry for Black Americans.

***TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE***

Model 2 adds measures of political and racial ideologies. Those who identify more strongly as Republican expressed lower levels of concern about the victimization of Black Americans. Those who identify more strongly as conservative were slightly more likely to express concern, at least in models that controlled for a racist ideology.[7] By far the strongest effect in the model, however, is a contemporary racist ideology—a standardized coefficient of .49 is by far the largest in the model and suggests that a one standard deviation increase in racist ideology is associated with nearly a half standard deviation decrease in concern, holding constant the other covariates.

As discussed above, we use a custom measure of a contemporary racist ideology, so as a check of content validity, we also run a model that replaces this with the widely used (and conceptually related) measures of racial resentment. The results are substantively nearly identical (see Model 3).[8] A stronger identification as Republican is still associated with less concern, and conservative identification is positive but not significant. Most importantly, those who are more racially resentful are substantially less likely to report concern for Black Americans being the victims of violent crime—once again, by far the largest standardized coefficient in the model.

Concern about Black Americans being victims of the police

Table 3 follows the same structure as Table 2 to present three models exploring how concerned people are about Black Americans being hurt or killed by the police. Model 1 presents coefficients for basic demographic and biographical characteristics. Once again, Black Americans are substantially more likely than White Americans to express these concerns. Latinx or Hispanic Americans are also slightly more likely than White Americans to express concern, while Asian Americans are no more or less likely.

***TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE***

Model 2 reveals that those who identify as more Republican or more conservative are significantly less likely to express concerns about Black Americans being hurt or killed by the police. Those who more strongly subscribe to a contemporary racist ideology are substantially less likely to express concerns about the fate of Black Americans at the hands of the police. The effect appears even larger than in the model predicting concerns about criminal victimization and is once again by far the strongest in the model (according to the standardized coefficient of -.62).

Model 3, the content validity check using racial resentment, once again reveals substantively identical results. Most strikingly, racial resentment remains by far the largest effect in the model, judging by the standardized coefficient.

Explaining racial differences in concern about Black Americans

Looking at Tables 2 and 3, when political and racial ideologies are added to the models, the differences in concerns between White and Black Americans are substantially reduced. In the first model of Table 2, Black Americans are, on average, about three-quarters of an answer category more concerned about Black Americans being the victim of a violent crime than are White Americans (even after controlling for other socio-demographics). Once political and racial ideologies are added in Model 2, this drops to about a quarter of an answer category. Similarly, in model 1 of Table 3, Black Americans are nearly a full answer category more concerned about Black Americans as victims of police violence, and this drops to about a fifth once political and racial ideologies are included in Model 2.

This is clearly suggestive of mediation, so we use Imai-Keele-Tingley tests of mediation (Imai et al., 2011) to explore this possibility. Specifically, we simultaneously consider potential mediation effects of racial differences in concerns for each of the three measures of political and racial attitudes, as appropriate (when those measures are racially stratified and significantly associated with the outcome in the appropriate direction). Table 4 presents estimates for the average mediation effect (the indirect effect) as well as the proportion mediated.[9]

***TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE***

The top half of the table presents results for concerns about Black Americans being the victims of violent crime. Columns 1 and 2 present results exploring the mediation of differences in concern between White and Black respondents.[10] White Americans identify more strongly as Republicans, and this difference in identification appears to explain about a quarter of the difference between average levels of concern about Black crime victimization between White and Black respondents. White Americans are also more likely to subscribe to a contemporary racist ideology, and this difference explains a significantly larger portion of the variance: about two-thirds (95 percent confidence intervals for the estimates did not overlap).

There are no significant differences between White and Latinx or Hispanic respondents in their concern about Black crime victimization, but Hispanic or Latinx respondents do have significantly lower levels of concern than Black respondents.[11] Much like the difference between White and Black respondents, some of the difference between Hispanic or Latinx respondents and Black respondents is explained by the generally stronger Republican identification among Latinx Americans, but an even larger portion—about two-thirds—is explained by stronger beliefs in a contemporary racist ideology among Hispanic or Latinx Americans (see columns 5 and 6).[12]

The bottom half of Table 4 presents results for concerns about Black Americans being hurt or killed by the police. Columns 7 and 8 examine potential mediation effects for the differences in levels of concern between Black and White respondents. Stronger Republican identification among White respondents helps explain some of the lower levels of concern about police violence against Black Americans among White respondents. However, once again, higher subscriptions to a racist ideology among White Americans explains even more of this difference: more than three-quarters of it.

For concerns about police violence, there does appear to be a possible mediation effect between White and Hispanic or Latinx respondents. Stronger Republican identification among White Americans appears to explain some of this (columns 9 and 10).[13] White respondents’ greater adherence to a contemporary racist ideology also explained some of the difference between White and Hispanic or Latinx respondents.[14]

Finally, there was once again evidence of a potential mediation of the difference between Black and Hispanic or Latinx respondents.[15] A stronger average identification as Republican among Hispanic and Latinx respondents does appear to explain some of these differences (columns 11 and 12). But once again, the stronger adherence to a contemporary racist ideology among Hispanic or Latinx Americans explains an even larger portion: more than three-quarters.

Discussion and Conclusion

Black Americans are disproportionately the victims of violence, both by the police and by other Americans (Nix et al., 2017; Thompson & Tapp, 2022). Our findings suggest that there are significant average differences in levels of concern for the safety and well-being of Black Americans by race-ethnic identity. White Americans appear to be the least concerned, with Black Americans the most concerned, while Hispanic and Latinx respondents fall somewhere in between. Interestingly, White Americans expressed more concern about Black Americans being harmed by other civilians and less concern about harmlis caused by the police. By contrast, Black and Latinx Americans both expressed similar levels of concern about harms to Black Americans caused by civilians versus police.

Black Americans are more likely to express concern for the well-being of fellow Black Americans as victims of both crime and police violence. This is perhaps not surprising, but why is it that many White Americans fail to empathize with this position?

Both crime and the police are highly politicized issues (Beckett, 2000; Drakulich et al., 2020; Drakulich & Denver, 2022), and those who identified more strongly as Republican were less likely to report either kind of concern. However, by far the strongest predictor of either kind of concern was a modern racist ideology. We developed a custom measure for this based on theoretical work by Bonilla-Silva (2018) and Bobo (1997), though we also presented results using racial resentment that told the same story.

Further, adding these measures appeared to explain some of the average differences in concern based on race-ethnic identity. Republican identification mediated between a quarter and a third of the differences, while a contemporary racist ideology moderated between two-thirds and three-quarters. These two factors also explained some of the average differences in views between Latinx and Black respondents, with a contemporary racist ideology again playing the larger role.

In other words, a contemporary racist ideology that emphasizes individualistic attributions for unequal outcomes at the expense of explanations rooted in the racist social context helps explain whether people express concern about violent harms to Black Americans. In particular, it helps us understand why both White Americans and Latinx and Hispanic Americans express, on average, lower level of concern for the well-being of Black Americans than do Black Americans themselves. Interestingly, White and Latinx Americans held similar average concerns about Black victims of crime and expressed comparable levels of anti-Black racist ideologies, though Latinx and Hispanic Americans did express more concern for victims of police violence. This is potential evidence of the shifting place of Hispanic and Latinx Americans in the racial landscape, particularly for issues specifically about Black Americans (Corral, 2020; Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023; Vani et al., 2023).

The fact that White respondents were more likely to express concern for Black victims of civilian violence than Black victims of police violence is particularly interesting. Our theoretical frame leads us to several potential interpretations of this finding. First, disproportionate Black victimization by the police and by civilians are both the product of systemic racism—including the broader forces that have concentrated Black Americans in segregated spaces with higher concentrations of disadvantageous socio-economic conditions and disproportionate exposure to aggressive policing (Peterson & Krivo, 2010). However, for many Americans, Black police victimization may be more clearly connected to an acknowledgment of racism and a call for ameliorative action to address racial inequalities. In fact, Black Lives Matter social movement actors have often highlighted this point directly. Additionally, the police have become a potent symbol of racial control (Drakulich et al., 2020; Drakulich, Rodriguez‐Whitney, et al., 2023), and thus those interested in defending the racial status quo may be especially resistant to acknowledging that police violence against Black Americans is common or consequential (Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023).

On the other hand, ‘law and order’ and ‘urban crime’ dog whistles have been used historically and contemporaneously to signal to voters who wish to maintain status quo racial inequalities (Drakulich et al., 2020; Haney-López, 2014). These were common during recent elections, including in 2022 when crime was a substantial focus for Republican politicians (Price & Bedayn, 2022). So it is possible that some people may be expressing concern for Black American crime victims as part of a broader support for increased policing or as a criticism of Black Lives Matter’s critical focus on the police. It may also be that acknowledging that Black people are the victims of crime reinforces a ‘Black on Black’ crime narrative (Jones-Brown et al., 2021; Wilson, 2005), a phenomenon in which crime stereotypes of Black men in particular can lead to victim-blaming (Dukes & Gaither, 2017; Russell-Brown, 1998). In other words, it nominally acknowledges Black victimhood, but only when paired with Black criminality. This paints Black people as a whole as responsible for their own problems and thus less deserving of help, even while acknowledging victimizations. In any case, we see these differential levels of concern about Black victimization at the hands of the police versus civilians—which we found only among White Americans—deserving of further study.

Limitations and future research

This research has several basic limitations that suggest future work. As described in the methods section, the survey used sampling matching rather than a true random sample, and there was missing data (both of which limit generalizability). The analysis is also cross-sectional, preventing us from making any causal claims. Additionally, we were limited by the availability of questions. While our interest was in an altruistic concern, it would be useful for future work to compare personal and altruistic concerns more directly. Following the findings described above, we encourage future studies including questions capturing the racial typification of crime perpetrators and victims to help sort out the meaning of the higher level of concern about Black crime victims versus police victims among White respondents.

Conclusion

The concentration of problematic encounters with the police among Black Americans means that personal fears will not be enough to motivate broader change. Residential and social segregation protect many White Americans from having Black family and friends, meaning that familial fears may also not be enough. Instead, this victimization of a specific minoritized population requires empathy and a truly altruistic concern for more vulnerable members of society. It is notable, then, that many White Americans do not appear to hold these concerns about harms to Black people. 

These findings also have important social implications. First, and most simply, if White people are, on average, less concerned about the safety and well-being of Black people, that has obvious and concerning implications for the many places in U.S. society where White Americans have direct influence over the well-being of Black Americans, including in policy-making and practice relevant to social services, the criminal justice system, and other spheres of public life.

More broadly, this lack of concern serves to justify a lack of action that might otherwise help protect Black Americans from violence. As we argued, Black Americans’ disproportionate exposure to both civilian and police violence are the product of systemic and institutional racism. It is notable, then, that people’s concern about this violence is driven, in primary ways, by people’s racist ideologies. Racist systems and institutions are, after all, maintained and enabled by the support of individuals who are concerned about threats to their racial privileges (Bobo et al., 1997; Bobo & Smith, 1998; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; e.g. Drakulich, Robles, et al., 2023).

Notes

[1] A few notes on language. We capitalize references to both Black and White Americans to emphasize the socially constructed nature of race, using these to refer to those racialized as Black or as (non-Latinx or Hispanic) White. We use Latinx to refer to those racialized as Hispanic or Latino/a to be inclusive to a range of gender identities, though we recognize that most people racialized as such do not identify with the term. In our results we refer to those who are Hispanic or Latinx to reflect self-identification as Hispanic while also connecting to our discussion of those racialized as Latinx.

[2] There are a variety of reasons why some Black Americans may embrace an ideology that preserves White privilege, from repeated exposure to pervasive racial stigmas in society to a strategy to individually transcend racial boundaries by mimicking the actions of the boundary-keepers.

[3] Multiple alternative formulations were tried, including a simple index of the six items (alpha = .92). The alternative formulations, including the simple index, all produced substantively identical results (coefficients in the same direction, the same significance, and comparable magnitudes). We chose this measure for its theoretical concordance with the two dimensions.

[4] Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests suggested the differences between Black and both White and Hispanic respondents were highly significant, but that the differences between White and Hispanic respondents were not significant.

[5] Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests suggested the differences between all three were highly significant.

[6] Paired tests suggest the difference between the two is significantly different than zero for White but not for Hispanic or Black respondents. Additionally, tests suggest that the difference in differences is significant: that the answers change more among White respondents than Black or Hispanic respondents.

[7] Before adding racist ideology, conservative was a small significant negative association with concern, suggesting a modest suppression effect.  In fact, although it is not the focus of this paper, it appears that a racist ideology mediates some of the effect of Republican and conservative identification on concern about Black victimization.

[8] As an additional check, we created a measure of our custom measure that excluded the two racial resentment measures, and this also produced substantively identical findings. This suggests both that the reported findings for our custom measure are not dependent on the effects of the racial resentment items and also that all the measures are highly related and capture closely related dimensions of racial attitudes.

[9] We present the results for our contemporary racism measure, but the results for racial resentment were substantively the same (the estimates of mediation were significant and in the same direction), with one exception: the role of racial resentment in explaining the difference in fears of the police between Latinx and White respondents is not significant, whereas the mediation effect for contemporary racism is small but significant. The mediation effect of resentment is generally slightly smaller: mediating, as an example, approximately 61 versus 69 percent of the difference between Black and White respondents in concerns about crime victimization, and 58 versus 78 percent of the difference in concerns about police victimization between these same groups. Results available from the corresponding author. 

[10] As Table 2 reveals, conservative is positively associated with concern (despite White respondents identifying more strongly as conservative) and thus is not a candidate for mediation.

[11] We ran models identical to those in Table 2 but with Black rather than White as the reference category to confirm this, and did see signs of mediation comparing models 1 and 2.

[12] Black and Hispanic or Latinx respondents did not significantly differ in the strength of their identification as conservative.

[13] Although notably the 95 percent confidence interval for the estimate of the proportion of the difference that was mediated overlapped with zero. The direct effect of conservative was not significant in this model, so it was not considered as a potential mediator.

[14] This also had a 95 percent confidence interval for the estimate of the proportion of the difference that was mediated overlapped with zero. Notably Latinx respondents only differed modestly in their concerns about police violence relative to White respondents, so there is far less variation to explain in this model.  

[15] As above, we ran models that made Black the racial reference category. Also as above, there are no significant differences between Black and Latinx or Hispanic respondents in the strength of conservative identification.

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