Racial Prejudice Predicts Police Militarization

In the United States, police are becoming increasingly militarized. Whereas the racialized nature of police militarization has been documented, the relationship between racial prejudice and police militarization is less understood. We assessed the link between racial prejudice against Black and Native Americans and police militarization at individual and regional levels. Study 1 (N = 765) recruited a nationally representative sample of White Americans and found a positive association between racial prejudice and support for police militarization. Study 2 (N = 3,129,343) sourced regional aggregates of prejudice among White Americans from Project Implicit and policing data from the Defense Logistics Agency and found that police departments in states higher in prejudice acquired greater amounts of militarized equipment. Together, these studies demonstrate that, in terms of attitudes and policies, racial prejudice predicts police militarization.

Support for Native-Themed Mascots and Opposition to Political Correctness

Despite the well-documented harmful effects of Native-themed mascots, Native-themed mascots have many supporters who decry the politically correct efforts to remove these mascots. Although ostensibly unrelated to race/racism, we reasoned that invoking anti-PC attitudes allow prejudiced people to indirectly support Native-themed mascots while minimizing the appearance of being biased. Three studies ( N = 587) found that anti-Native bias predicted anti-PC attitudes and, in turn, Native-themed mascot support. In Studies 2 and 3, participants varying in anti-PC attitudes considered a university changing their Native-themed mascot for PC or non-PC reasons. Anti-PC attitudes predicted opposition to changing Native-themed mascots in both conditions. However, the effect of anti-PC attitudes was stronger in the PC condition where social justice norms were salient. These results suggest that, for many, anti-PC attitudes reflect more than just opposition to political correctness and are used by prejudiced people to indirectly defend controversial mascots without appearing prejudiced.