The Gendered Political Consequences of Racialized Sexual Threats

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241246532
• Author: Rachel Smilan-Goldstein
• Date: 01 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(3) 787–804

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241246532

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The Gendered Political Consequences of

Racialized Sexual Threats

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein

1



Abstract

Narratives of racialized sexual violence—specif‌ically, where a dominant-group woman faces harm by a man outside

the dominant group—have long been a staple of American political communication. Past scholarship has examined

how these threats prime racial resentment among White Americans; less is known about their gendered effects. I

present an original survey experiment comparing racializedsexual threats with r acialized threats that are not gendered

or sexual. Both evoke racial resentment. Compared with solely racial threats, however, racialized sexual threats also

make benevolent sexism salient for a range of democratic outcomes. Moreover, I f‌ind distinct effects by respondent

race and gender, as men and women of different racial identities are situated differently vis a vis racialized sexual

threats. To demonstrate that the gendered/sexualized impact of these appeals extends to real-world campaigns, I

conclude with an analysis of candidate support in the 1988 presidential election. The 1988 race saw one of the most

notorious examples of racialized sexual threat in modern American politics in the “Willie Horton”ad, aired on behalf

of the Bush campaign. Even with the limited measures available in that year, I f‌ind that sexism played an important role

in shaping Americans’political views.

Keywords

benevolent sexism, racial resentment, political psychology, political communication

Narratives of racialized sexual violence have long been a

f‌ixture of American politics, emerging after the Civil War

as the primary (though false) justif‌ication for the rape-

lynch system (Bederman 1996;Dowd Hall 1974;Wells

1892). More recent examples of racialized sexual threat

narratives include the “Central Park Five”case, in which a

White woman was sexually assaulted while running in

Central Park and f‌ive innocent Black and Latino teenage

boys were arrested (Duru 2003). Conservative immigra-

tion rhetoric has made use of similar narratives, invoking

allegations of Latino immigrant men harming White

women (Smilan-Goldstein 2023a). Perhaps the most in-

famous example, though, of racialized sexual threat in

recent American political memory is the “Willie Horton”

ad aired on behalf of the Bush campaign in 1988—I will

return to this particular case below.

Decades of theoretical work on the intersections of

racism and sexism have convincingly made the case that

sexism and racism are mutually constitutive (Collins

1990;Crenshaw 1989). Along these lines, scholars

have described how the racialization of stories about

sexual violence simultaneously demonize Black men,

invisible Black women, control White women, and

maintain White patriarchal power (Davis 1983;Jackman

1994).

Despite their prominence in American political com-

munication, the extant political psychology literature has

not directly tested the unique effects of messages that

bring to mind this particular type of racialized crime. In

this paper, I investigate the gendered effects of racialized

sexual threats using an original survey experiment and

American National Election Studies (ANES) data from

1988.

1

The experimental results show that, compared to

solely racial threats, racialized sexual threats also evoke

benevolent sexism. Moreover, I f‌ind distinct effects by

respondent race and gender, as men and women of dif-

ferent racial identities are situated differently vis a vis

racialized sexual threats. Turning to the observational

1

Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford University,

Stanford, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences,

Stanford University, 30 Alta Road, Stanford, CA 94305-6104, USA.

Email: Rachelsg@stanford.edu

data, I f‌ind that even with the limited measures of sexism

available in 1988, sexism played a notable role in shaping

Americans’political views.

Racialized Sexual Threat

A useful concept for understanding messages about ra-

cialized sexual violence is the peril narrative: As Stoler

explains, the peril narrative is a cultural script in which a

dominant-group woman faces imminent harm—typically

rape—by a man outside the dominant group. Within this

framework, “White men …imposed—and women ac-

tively participated in—protective models of womanhood

and motherhood and prescriptions for domestic relations

that constrained both the women and men in servitude and

those who ostensibly ruled”(2001, p. 843).

Other frameworks that have been used to explain the

so-called rationale for lynching Black men after the Civil

War have been the “bestial black rapist”(Duru 2003) and

the “mythical black male rapist”(Davis 1983). The em-

phasis on the f‌ictions surrounding Black men’s sexuality

is surely important in understanding justif‌ications for

lynching and subsequent attempts to hinder Black citi-

zenship, but it is incomplete. The peril narrative invites the

consideration of interacting ideas about what it means to

be Black men and White women in the U.S. context.

Rather than considering stereotypes of hypersexuality

among Black men (and Black women) or the presumed

purity and virtue of White women, the peril narrative

considers how the two interact to mutually construct one

another. The narrative elaborates on and reproduces the

boundaries of seemingly categorical, intersecting differ-

ences between Black and White, and man and woman. In

doing so, the peril narrative solidif‌ies the dominance of

White men, operates as a “velvet glove”for White women

(see Jackman 1994), demonizes Black men, and obfus-

cates harms against Black women. In the context of at-

titude formation, then, an individual’s racial attitudes

should moderate or shape their gender attitudes, and vice

versa.

Hereinafter, I use the phrase “racialized sexual threats”

to refer to messages that draw on the peril narrative. These

are distinct from the broader category of racial threat

messages that includes both gendered and sexual threats

and threats that don’t involve gender or sex. For instance,

the (false) trope that immigrants of color take jobs away

from (White) Americans is a racialized threat narrative,

but does not invoke gender or sex. A story of a man of

color sexually assaulting a White woman, though, is a

racialized sexual threat. I unpack the political impacts of

racialized sexual threats, and how they are distinct from

narratives of threat that invoke only race.

Priming Race and Gender

A wealth of sch olarship has d emonstrated that messages

about race prime racism (Huber and Lapinski 2006,2008;

Mendelberg 2001,2008;Valentino, Hutchings, and White

2002;Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek 2018). It is

increasingly clear that messages about gender function

similarly in priming sexism (Cassese and Holman 2019;

Hayes, Fortunato, and Hibbing 2021;Holman, Schneider,

and Pondel 2015;Schaffner 2005;Winter 2008,2010,

2023). An importantdifference, though, betweenracial and

gendered priming is that there is more variation in valance

of gender prejudice than racial prejudice. While contem-

porary racism is consistently negative in tone toward ra-

cially marginalized groups, one form of modern sexism—

benevolent sexism—presents women in a positive light

while undermining their autonomy.

2

While hostile sexism

is outrightly misogynistic, benevolent sexism refers to

ideas of complementary gender differentiation, hetero-

sexuality, and moral purity in women (Glick and Fiske

1996). Benevolent sexism is particularly relevant to ra-

cialized sexual threats, as it invokes the idea of masculine

protection for innocent, helpless women.

Just as priming race has differential effects depending

on one’s own racial identity (White 2007), priming ra-

cialized sexual threats has the potential to operate dif-

ferently for individuals depending their gender identities.

Racialized sexual threats have the potential to resonate

distinctly for White women and men, as these threats are

imbued with different meaning for women compared to

men: Within this narrative, White women are at risk of

direct harm by a man of color, while White men are at risk

of symbolically losing their racial, gender, and sexual

dominance. Scholars have shown that, for women, fear of

stranger rape drives fear of crime, with women most afraid

of crimes with the potential to coincide with sexual

victimization (Ferraro 1996;Fisher and Sloan 2003;Reid

and Konrad 2004). Fear of rape, as it is measured in

criminology (Senn and Dzinas 1996), specif‌ically cap-

tures how individuals think about stranger rape.

Some existing research points to the importance of

racialized sexual threats. McMahon and Kahn (2018,

2016) show that the (racial) threat of crime increases

expressions of hostile and benevolent sexism, which

demonstrates the psychological connections between ra-

cial and sexual predispositions among White Americans.

Smilan-Goldstein (2023b) shows that fear of stranger rape

is racial and political, with White and Republican women

most afraid of stranger rape—despite being no more likely

to experience it than other women. Cultural emphasis on

stranger rape—the least common form of sexual

violence—and racialized patterns of belief in victimiza-

tion risk are consistent with a racialized rape culture, in

which myths and discourses around rape culture serve to

788 Political Research Quarterly 77(3)