Dominant groups also suffer insecurity when their status seems threatened

Evidence

While curiosity and exploitability have lingered throughout the histories of racial extension, and remain resonant variously within racial reference and mobilization today, it is threat that has assumed overriding contemporary significance in racial matters, absorbing the other two largely into its orbit. Race increasingly and increasingly baldly turned to threat as global condition more or less coterminous with the dominant shift in racial meanings from the natural to the cultural in the post-abolition period as the nineteenth gave way to the twentieth century, and as once distant peoples became (potential) neighbors, competitors, fellow citizens with supposedly divergent political interests. The abolitionist, anti-colonial, civil rights, and anti-apartheid demands for equality in socio-legal rights, educational and economic fair play conjured threat to long-held assumptions of “natural” dominance, settled hierarchies, and cultural superiority. Perceived racial threat fuels fear of loss – of power, of resources, of competitiveness, of life itself – and their attendant antagonisms and aggressivities. This sense of threat, almost invariably tinged with anxiety or exacerbated by paranoia upon racial mediation, tends to articulate selfwith social protection, no matter the cost. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 151 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Research on political tolerance has addressed this point. Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus (1982) found that blacks and Jews (and other liberal whites) tended to feel threatened by right-wing extremist groups such as the KKK, whereas more conservative whites tended to feel threatened by left-wing groups. Interestingly, Sullivan et al. found little differences between the correlates of perceived threat among blacks and Jews as compared to other whites, even though the two former groups presumably confronted more real-world external threats. The data do not rule out a purely psychological basis for feelings of threat; indeed, some of the open-ended comments reflect simple prejudice (Sullivan et al., 1982, pp. 165–175), but it appears that, on the whole, people are capable of realistically assessing threats to what they take as their values and interests. Shamir and Sullivan (1983) provided cross-national data (for the United States and Israel) that also indicate that expressions of perceived threat are based more in real-world politics than in psychological insecurity or projection. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3370 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Perceived threat to in-group status evokes greater political conservatism. — Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, On the Precipice of a…, 12; Dominant groups that lose status develop intense resentments that fuel political conflict — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 103; Intergroup threat arises when one group’s actions challenge another group’s goal attainment or well-being. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup…, 17 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Equality gains by subordinate groups trigger perceived threat in dominant groups #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 151
• Perceived group threat tracks real-world politics more than psychological insecurity #complicates (0.74) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3370