In the media reports and public discourses, Hurricane Katrina was
portrayed as a racialized disaster that disproportionately affected
blacks. Indeed, one in three victims of Katrina was African
American, and in the most damaged areas of New Orleans, this
proportion was as high as three in four. In this paper, using an
original survey, we show that in the aftermath of Katrina blacks and
whites held strikingly polarized views about everything from why
victims did not evacuate to the appropriateness of the government
response. We also conduct a randomized experiment to explore the
effect of media framing on this racial gap. The findings suggest
that even subtle image manipulations can make blacks more
sympathetic towards their own racial group. Similar ingroup bias is
found for gender as well as race, with women showing more sympathy
when they see an image portraying a female victim with children. Our
statistical analysis demonstrates how to avoid usual parametric
assumptions about nonresponse when analyzing survey and randomized
experiments. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings
for the political psychology of race.
(Last Revised June, 2007)
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