This study aims to examine how racial resentment and partisanship shape the relationship between patriotism, nationalism and support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We argue that both patriotism and nationalism can activate exclusionary identity boundaries that, once salient, influence attitudes toward racial justice, depending on respondents' partisanship and racial resentment.
Using a diverse national sample of white respondents recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 968), we conducted a survey experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to read a speech primed with patriotic or nationalistic language or to a control condition with no prime before evaluating BLM.
We find no average treatment effects of either frame. However, strong heterogeneous effects emerge. Among Republicans and respondents high in racial resentment, both primes significantly reduced support for BLM. Among Democrats and respondents low in resentment, the same primes increased support. Racial resentment strongly conditioned these effects and nationalism (but not patriotism) was independently associated with higher resentment.
This study is the first to experimentally test how patriotic and nationalistic frames – absent explicit mention of race – interact with racial resentment and partisanship in shaping support for BLM. The findings show that even ostensibly race-neutral national identity appeals can activate race-based evaluations, particularly among those predisposed to resentment. This work advances research on identity, framing, and political persuasion, situating these dynamics within social identity theory, which explains how in-group favoritism and perceived out-group threats shape responses to racial justice movements.
