Black and White Americans' Affective Experiences and Perceptions of Discrimination in Mundane Social Contexts

Abstract

The list of disparate experiences and outcomes lived by Black versus White Americans is a long one. The plethora of ubiquitous differences in extant literature offer some interesting questions: Just how different are the day-to-day experiences of Black Americans compared to their White counterparts? And how do these contrasting experiences influence affective reactions and perceptions to seemingly mundane social interactions? The proposed study aimed to answer these questions by evaluating the affective experiences from individuals within each racial group after experiencing a mundane, ambiguous, yet race-salient event. Prolific users (N = 203; Black = 103, White = 100) were presented three low (LRS) and three ambiguous race-salient (ARS) events via vignettes. Participants were prompted to read the vignettes as if they were experiencing the events themselves, then reported their subsequent affective reactions and perceptions. Contrary to hypotheses, results indicated no significant differences in affective or perceptual reactions between Black and White participants in the ARS condition after controlling for reactions in the LRS condition. Among Black participants, analyses revealed an interaction between negative reactions in the LRS condition and Black Identity Centrality (BIC) on negative reactions in the ARS condition. When negative reactions to events in the LRS condition were low, participants high in BIC reacted more negatively to events in the ARS condition than those low in BIC, but when negative reactions to the LRS condition where high, participants low in BIC reacted more negatively to events in the ARS condition than participants high in BIC. A similar interaction was found for positive reactions and scores on the Modern Racism Scale (MRS) among White participants.