Stephens-Dougan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work In American Politics, discusses the results of an survey experiment that was fielded on a nationally representative sample of 515 White respondents. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to read about a Black Democratic politician who had recently given a speech that encouraged people to get out and vote. There were three versions of the article, a deracialized version, an implicitly racial version, and an explicitly racial version. The aim here was to see whether some White voters would evaluate a Black candidate who did not mention race (deracialized message) more positively than a virtually identical Black Democratic candidate who did mention race, either implicitly or explicitly.Visit LaFleur Stephens-Dougan's website.
There is a long line of research that suggests that Black candidates should avoid the topic of race to allay the fears of White voters. This strategy, which is referred to as “deracialization,” presumes that if a Black politician is talking about race, then they are assuming a posture of racial liberalism that will turn off White voters. Less explored, is whether Black politicians are advantaged when they indicate that they are not “too liberal” on matters of race, by invoking negative stereotypes about other Black people—a strategy that I refer to as “racial distancing.”
The page 99 test works for Race to the Bottom because this page illuminates the central argument of the book, which is that racially moderate and racially conservative White Americans have a preference for politicians who distance themselves from the interests of Black people. The discussion on page 99 indicates that White voters in the sample were more likely to vote for the Black Democratic candidate in either the implicit or explicit versions of the article, relative to the Black Democratic candidate with the deracialized message. They also rated the racialized versions of the speech more positively. In other words, a message from a Black Democratic candidate that emphasized unity and universalism was actually less popular than messages that invoked stereotypes of Blacks as complaining and not taking personal responsibility. Since most White Americans are moderate to conservative on matters of race, this has troubling normative implications for the representation of Black interests in the American political system.
--Marshal Zeringue
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