Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Black Students’ Behavior in Response to Racial Prejudice From Both White and Black Sources

Abstract

Much research has been done on the field of racial prejudice and discrimination. However, very few deal with the issues of participant liking, avoidance, and behavior in response to prejudice. This present study investigates: Do Blacks behave differently in response to racial prejudice, dependent on whether the communicator of the prejudiced remark is White or Black? I operationalize behaviors as tendency to want to escape interaction from or tendency to want to stay and talk with the communicator of the remark. It was expected that there would be a main effect of threat and race. That is, racially charged comments would elicit more avoidance behaviors than racially neutral comments on the whole. White William would elicit more avoidance behaviors than Black William, regardless of level of threat of the comment. Given these expectations, it was predicted that Black William saying a neutral comment would produce the least amount of avoidance behaviors, while White William saying a racially prejudiced comment would produce the most amount of avoidance behaviors. The benefits of the study are widespread. Implications and future studies are discussed.