Research Shows Critical Race Theory Is Actually Making People More Racist

To capture the effects of critical rhetoric, I used an excerpt from Macy Sto. Domingo’s “18 Things White People Seem To Not Understand (Because, White Privilege).” Among white conservatives, this “critical prime” predicted 8 percent increased support (weighted mean) for whites “work[ing] together to improve the position of their group,” in comparison to the “control group.”

To further probe the effects of critical themes on identity, I asked respondents to rate the importance of certain factors to being “truly American.” Here, critical prime exposure appears to have narrowed the boundaries of the “in-group.”

For example, conservative whites expressed 12 percent greater agreement that only those with “American ancestry” are truly American. High white-identifiers expressed 20 percent greater agreement with this same claim and 8 percent greater support for restricting American identity to those “born in the U.S.” Critical prime exposure also increased conservative “ethnocentrism,” or net “feeling thermometer” preference for whites over minorities by 5 percent.

Disclaimer: Like any other "priming" study this should be taken with a hypertension-inducing amount of salt.