Beyond Busing: Does I/E Priming Work in Whites’ Support for Spending on Black Schools?

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of I/E priming on White support for spending on Black kids’ schooling. Early studies showed weak White support for such funding. Furthermore, racial prejudice emerged as a key driver of opposition to school integration. The I/E theory has never been tested in the education context a domain with positively constructed targets. Recent studies have cast doubt on the I/E model, suggesting that both forms of priming work equally well, or that priming does not work at all. We test whether implicit (“big city/urban”) or explicit (“Black”) priming dampens Whites’ support for public school and early education funding and if the effect is stronger among racial conservatives. We analyze four experiments, two from the 2004 ANES and two from 2021. We find that exposure to explicit and implicit cues dampens White support for education spending in both 2004 and 2021. However, we find no evidence of implicit or explicit priming. Furthermore, correlational analyses of the 2004-2020 ANES, confirm that racial resentment is not a significant predictor of support for public education spending among whites except in 2020. These results suggest that racial priming may be domain-specific and not work in education or policies with positively constructed targets.

Keywords: Racial priming, racial resentment, education, school funding policy