In The Race Card, Tali Mendelberg tackles a highly controversial and the- oretically complex set of questions surrounding the strategic use of racial appeals in modern political campaigns. Her thesis rests upon two fairly straightforward, though not uncontested, premises. First, there are strong incentives for candidates in the modern era to capitalize on racial cleavages and employ racial appeals in order to build support among white voters. Second, a basic norm of racial equality now pervades mass opinion and elite political discourse, such that the explicit use of racist language would be harmful to most candidates’ electoral prospects. The central proposition, then, is that racial rhetoric in American politics is much more subtle than in previous historical periods. The dominant mode of racial appeals is now indirect and implicit, not overt, blatant, or explicit.
Some will argue that this thesis attempts to prove the existence of the dog that doesn’t bark: If less is more when it comes to the power of racial rhetoric, how do we know it is about race at all? Is it race baiting any time a candidate discusses issues such as crime, welfare, and affirmative action? Furthermore, if messages that do not explicitly refer to race are the ones that most powerfully activate racial attitudes, how could candidates reliably craft messages that harness the power of such attitudes? If racism is a default decision-making criterion, then one might conclude that candidates do not have much flexibility in manipulating its salience during any given campaign. If racism is omni- present, it becomes a blunt political weapon.
Mendelberg carefully and systematically responds to these potential criti- cisms, harnessing historical evidence, media content analysis, public opinion surveys, and experiments. Mendelberg shows that though racial appeals are common, they are not constant. And though the dog she describes may not bark, it often bites. Mendelberg finds that implicit racial appeals powerfully shape public opinion and voting behavior in contemporary elections, while explicit racial appeals do not. She documents the transition from explicit to implicit racial appeals in the twentieth century, showing how politicians have, with varying degrees of success, calibrated their campaign strategies to the prevailing norms about race in America.
One of the book’s largest contributions, therefore, is illuminating the boundaries of racial priming: it tells us when racism will not drive political decisions. The role of racism in the 1988 presidential campaign was weak to nonexistent before the Willie Horton story broke. The impact of racial attitudes on candidate evaluations peaked when the Horton message was loudest but still not overtly centered around race. Then the impact of racism declined again when Democratic elites and the press began to explicitly discuss possible racist motivations behind the message. Experimental evidence also demonstrates that the racial impact of a given appeal is dramatically reduced when racism is either central—when the press or opposing elites “call” the source on it—or absent, as in the case of a counterstereotypic message featuring whites. Finally, the book tests several implications of the moderating role that norms play in this process, discovering that the violation of the norm of equality drives the suppression of racial thinking in the presence of explicit appeals. Race is not always important, so elites can boost the likelihood that citizens will employ racial thinking while making political decisions. Elites are constrained, how- ever, by prevailing norms.
The book is groundbreaking on a number of levels and deserves attention from students of race, mass media effects, campaigns, elite behavior, and public opinion. Below, I suggest a few areas where future scholarship might extend and further test Mendelberg’s theory of implicit communication.
First, the theory demands that implicit appeals operate via an automatic psychological process. If conscious effort is dedicated to processing the implicit message, its racial content will be identified and racist thoughts sup- pressed. Some might suggest an alternative: that implicit appeals work only because so many whites are quite consciously looking for an excuse to dis- criminate against blacks. Whites, in other words, will allow prejudice to guide them whenever they have plausible deniability (Gaertner and Dovidio 1986). In other words, Mendelberg’s presumed psychological mechanism is not the only one that could produce her results. Previous work in cognitive and social psychology demonstrates the existence of automatic psychological processes underlying priming. However, recent work by Miller and Krosnick (2000) and Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley (1997) give us some reason to believe that framing and/or priming, at least in the ways they effect political decisions, may not work via an automatic process at all. These studies suggest that people intentionally process alternative criteria presented in the media and then decide which one is most important for a given decision. Unfortunately, the book provides no direct test of the psychological process posited by the theory. Future research must test this linkage before we can accept the full architecture of Mendelberg’s theory of implicit communication.
Second, Mendelberg’s conceptualization of “explicit” versus “implicit” racial appeals seems to be categorical, not continuous. At least in order to operationalize and test the theory, Mendelberg treats any appeal in which the narrator uses racial language (in the case of her welfare experiment, it is the use of the word “blacks”) as an explicit racial message. Any appeal in which such language is absent but visual representations of African Americans are present is considered implicit. Though she discovers clear and substantively important differences between these two conditions, one wonders whether the variable she is describing is actually continuous, illuminated at two discrete points of her choosing. While Mendelberg admits that her operationalization is somewhat arbitrary, she still seems to be convinced of a fundamental difference between the two types of appeals. It is possible, however, that explicit and implicit racial cues are different in degree, but not kind.
When racial cues (either audio or visual) are sparse, few members of the audience will even perceive them, and the resulting automatic racial priming effect will be small. As the volume of the racial cues increases, more will perceive them, but still few will be consciously aware of them. At higher levels of volume, intentioned thought will be triggered about the racial stimulus that will serve to undermine the priming effect. For a given individual, there- fore, there exists a categorical distinction between intentioned and automatic processing, but the volume dimension underlying the racial stimulus producing either of these psychological processes is continuous. The point along the volume dimension where intentioned processing is triggered should be mod- erated by the individual’s sensitivity to racial content, as Devine (1989) and others have pointed out. Future research might test multiple points along the continuum from less salient to more salient racial cues to see if this or some other pattern of priming effects appears.
Finally, Mendelberg’s normative suggestion for dampening the impact of implicit racial appeals is likely to cause controversy. She argues that one way to combat implicit racism is by identifying and publicly criticizing it, by “outing” the source. At the point during the 1988 presidential campaign when elites and the media began to point out the racial content of the “revolving- door” appeal, which was a more implicit version of the actual Willie Horton ad, the impact of racial resentment on candidate evaluations all but disap- peared. Ironically, however, the public debate about the Horton and revolving- door appeals may have undermined subsequent attempts to neutralize im- plicitly racial messages. Those who make such charges now risk exposing themselves to a damaging countercharge: that of “crying racism.” This coun- tercharge is made plausible only because such appeals contain no explicitly racial content upon which to focus. The charge is also rendered less effective by overuse, another irony produced by the frequency of racially coded appeals in modern political campaigns. In other words, some readers may be skeptical that attempts to identify and publicly denounce subtle racism will be effective at reducing their effectiveness or frequency.
No single book could fully specify and test a theory of the subtle ways race and racism are employed during contemporary campaigns. Yet The Race Card makes great progress. It should be praised for the sheer volume of empirical evidence it presents and for the high risk of disconfirmation this poses for its central thesis. It should be read not only by those interested in the historical and contemporary role of racial appeals in modern American campaigns, but also by those seeking a model for rigorous, multimethodo- logical, empirical social science research. Though some will contest one or another of Mendelberg’s inferences, they will be hard-pressed to deny the overarching pattern of evidence she presents. The book demonstrates that the impact of racial appeals depends fundamentally on the skill with which pol- iticians can mask their true meaning while still triggering thoughts about race. The findings should play an important role in the ongoing discussion about the continuing impact of race and racism in America.