Whose War is it Anyway? Explaining the Black-White Gap in Support for the Use of Force Abroad

Abstract

Building on long-standing work on a “gender gap” in war support, this article documents a recurring “race gap” in which Black Americans display less enthusiasm for war than their White counterparts. We compile time-series data on public opinion during the Iraq War collected from over fifty national polls and successive waves of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to assess potential explanations for the gap. We show that concerns about casualties best explain lower levels of support for war among Black Americans. Feelings of political alienation and preferences for domestic spending serve as more salient contributors to Black disapproval of war during the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, having a family member in the military does not explain lower Black support for war. Black antiwar rhetoric suggests that our casualty sensitivity and alienation findings stem from linked fate attitudes and concerns about fairness and “justness” of the war effort among Black Americans.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the scholars who took time to provide feedback on this project, especially: Joshua Kertzer, Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Katy Powers, Robert Trager, Neta Crawford, Pete Cuppernull, Richard Eichenberg, Scott Sagan, and Steve Ansolabehere. Thanks also to Jessica Weeks, Mike Tomz, Joseph Grieco, Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler, and Peter Feaver for providing data and insights from their previous work during the preparation of this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data and materials that support the findings of this study are available in the Security Studies Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PFAGEE.

Notes

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2 Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest during World War II,” Journal of American History 60, no. 3 (December 1973): 692–713.

3 Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 42.

4 Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech at Riverside Church, New York, NY, 4 April 1967, American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

5 Susan Dodge, “Thousands of College Students Protest Persian Gulf War in Rallies and Sit-Ins; Others Support Military Action,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 January 1991, https://www.chronicle.com/article/thousands-of-college-students-protest-persian-gulf-war-in-rallies-and-sit-ins-others-support-military-action/; Lynne Duke, “Emerging Black Anti-War Movement Rooted in Domestic Issues,” Washington Post, 8 February 1991; Robert C. Smith and Richard Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

6 John Hudson, “Congressional Black Caucus Instructed to Hold Tongue on Syria,” Foreign Policy, 5 September 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/05/congressional-black-caucus-instructed-to-hold-tongue-on-syria/; Perry Bacon Jr., “Why the Congressional Black Caucus Could Determine if the US Strikes Syria,” The Grio, 5 September 2013, https://thegrio.com/2013/09/05/why-the-congressional-black-caucus-could-determine-if-the-u-s-strikes-syria/.

7 Pamela Johnston Conover and Virginia Sapiro, “Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and War,” American Journal of Political Science 37, no. 4 (November 1993): 1079–99; Nancy Gallagher, “The Gender Gap in Popular Attitudes toward the Use of Force,” in Women and the Use of Military Force, ed. Ruth H. Howes and Michael R. Stevenson (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 23–38; Richard C. Eichenberg, “Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Use of Force by the United States, 1990–2003,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 110–41; Deborah Jordan Brooks and Benjamin A. Valentino, “A War of One’s Own: Understanding the Gender Gap in Support for War,” Public Opinion Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 270–86; Joslyn N. Barnhart et al., “The Suffragist Peace,” International Organization 74, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 633–70.

8 John H. Aldrich et al., “Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 477–502; Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff, “A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 3 (July 2017): 543–58; Michael Tomz, Jessica L. P. Weeks, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Public Opinion and Decisions about Military Force in Democracies,” International Organization 74, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 119–43; Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Soldiers, Pollsters, and International Crises: Public Opinion and the Military’s Advice on the Use of Force,” Foreign Policy Analysis 17, no. 3 (July 2021): 1–12.

9 Sidney Verba et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” American Political Science Review 61, no. 2 (June 1967): 317–33; Richard F. Hamilton, “A Research Note on the Mass Support for ‘Tough’ Military Initiatives,” American Sociological Review 33, no. 3 (June 1968): 439–45; John P. Robinson and Solomon G. Jacobson, “American Public Opinion about Vietnam,” in Vietnam: Some Basic Issues and Alternatives, ed. Walter Isard (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1969), 63–79; Harlan Hahn, “Correlates of Public Sentiments about War: Local Referenda on the Vietnam Issue,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (December 1970): 1186–98; Milton J. Rosenberg, Sidney Verba, and Philip E. Converse, Vietnam and the Silent Majority: The Dove’s Guide (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); James D. Wright, “The Working Class, Authoritarianism, and the War in Vietnam,” Social Problems 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1972): 133–50; John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973); Henry J. Richardson III, “The Gulf Crisis and African-American Interests under International Law,” American Journal of International Law 87, no. 1 (January 1993): 42–82; Clyde Wilcox, Joseph Ferrara, and Dee Allsop, “Group Differences in Early Support for Military Action in the Gulf: The Effects of Gender, Generation, and Ethnicity,” American Politics Quarterly 21, no. 3 (July 1993): 343–59; John E. Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Scott Sigmund Gartner and Gary M. Segura, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War,” Journal of Politics 62, no. 1 (February 2000): 115–46; Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide; Miroslav Nincic and Donna J. Nincic, “Race, Gender, and War,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (September 2002): 547–68; Roxanna Harlow and Lauren Dundes, “‘United’ We Stand: Responses to the September 11 Attacks in Black and White,” Sociological Perspectives 47, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 439–64; David E. Rohall and Morten G. Ender, “Race, Gender, and Class: Attitudes toward the War in Iraq and President Bush among Military Personnel,” Race, Gender & Class 14, nos. 3–4 (2007): 99–116; Jody C. Baumgartner, Peter L. Francia, and Jonathan S. Morris, “A Clash of Civilizations? The Influence of Religion on Public Opinion of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2008): 171–79; Val Burris, “From Vietnam to Iraq: Continuity and Change in Between-Group Differences in Support for Military Action,” Social Problems 55, no. 4 (November 2008): 443–79; Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, revised ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Katherine Tate, What’s Going On? Political Incorporation and the Transformation of Black Public Opinion (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010); Rachel Allison, “Race, Gender, and Attitudes toward War in Chicago: An Intersectional Analysis,” Sociological Forum 26, no. 3 (September 2011): 668–91.

10 This dearth of research is particularly noticeable within the mainstream American IR literature.

11 Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Donald R. Kinder and Nicholas Winter, “Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (April 2001): 439–56; Claudine Gay, “Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (November 2004): 547–62; Vincent L. Hutchings and Nicholas A. Valentino, “The Centrality of Race in American Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 383–408; Ismail K. White, “When Race Matters and When It Doesn’t: Racial Group Differences in Response to Racial Cues,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 2 (May 2007): 339–54; Jane Junn, Tali Mendelberg, and Erica Czaja, “Race and the Group Bases of Public Opinion,” in New Directions in Public Opinion, ed. Adam J. Berinsky (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 119–38.

12 Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, “Political Science and the Study of African American Public Opinion,” in African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Wilbur C. Rich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 107–29.

13 Alfred O. Hero Jr., “American Negroes and U.S. Foreign Policy: 1937–1967,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 13, no. 2 (June 1969): 220–51; Jake C. Miller, The Black Presence in American Foreign Affairs (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978); Milfred C. Fierce, “Black and White American Opinions towards South Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 20, no. 4 (December 1982): 669–87; Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide.

14 Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Zoltán I. Búzás, “The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–1923),” Security Studies 22, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 573–606; Zoltán I. Búzás, “Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 440–63; Errol A. Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory,” in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (London: Routledge, 2014), 19–43; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy 237 (2020): 11–13; Bianca Freeman, D. G. Kim, and David A. Lake, “Race in International Relations: Beyond the ‘Norm against Noticing,’” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (2022): 175–96.

15 Barbara Bardes and Robert Oldendick, “Beyond Internationalism: A Case for Multiple Dimensions in the Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly 59, no. 3 (December 1978): 496–508, esp. 505; Ole R. Holsti and James N. Rosenau, “Does Where You Stand Depend on When You Were Born? The Impact of Generation on Post-Vietnam Foreign Policy Beliefs,” Public Opinion Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 1–22, esp. 7; Eichenberg, “Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Use of Force by the United States.”

16 Brooks and Valentino, “War of One’s Own”; Richard C. Eichenberg, “Gender Difference in American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force, 1982–2013,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 1 (March 2016): 138–48; Barnhart et al., “Suffragist Peace.”

17 Peter Hays Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 277.

18 John Zaller, “Information, Values, and Opinion,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 4 (December 1991): 1228–29.

19 Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/06): 33, 37.

20 Wilcox, Ferrara, and Allsop, “Group Differences in Early Support for Military Action in the Gulf.”

21 Richardson, “Gulf Crisis and African-American Interests under International Law”; Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide.

22 Non-White vs. White racial categories (appears most of the non-White sample is Black).

23 Chapter is a review of other surveys about support for Vietnam; it includes results from Verba et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” and a 1967 Newsweek poll; Robinson and Jacobson, “American Public Opinion about Vietnam,” 65–66.

24 Measured at the census-tract level; study measures the percentage of non-White individuals in each area; gap appears in many cities, but it is statistically significant in San Francisco only.

25 Chapter is a summary of other survey work on war support; Rosenberg et al., Vietnam and the Silent Majority, 74–75.

26 Gap exists for both Black/White men and Black/White women across most poll dates; Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, 142–43, 147–48.

27 Controls for party, education, income, information, sex, ethnicity, and age.

28 Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War, 43.

29 California sample; controls for party, income, region, religion, sex, ethnicity.

30 Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide, 39–60.

31 Controls for sex, “alienation,” party, age, income; Tau-b coefficients show bivariate race differences in approval, while probit coefficients show multivariate race differences.

32 The race gap in the regression with controls in Nincic and Nincic, “Race, Gender, and War,” for Korean War support (1952) has a reported p value of 0.06. Though authors report that it is not significant, it is significant at the alpha < 0.1 level.

33 Undergraduate sample, private liberal arts college.

34 US armed forces service member sample; logit controls for sex, rank, military affiliation, partisan ideology, job satisfaction.

35 Gap is not significant at the alpha < 0.1 level; coefficient is for “black Protestants,” so it should be noted that this study isolates just a subset of the Black population; controls for several religious denominations, party, sex, education, income.

36 Non-White vs. White respondents; multiple analyses with statistically significant bivariate gamma coefficients; gap reverses for interventions in El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Haiti.

37 Multiple Gallup polls; Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 227–31.

38 Various Gallup poll questions, Tate, What’s Going On?, chap. 8.

39 Race variable is significant in the bivariate regression, but not with the full set of controls.

40 Nincic and Nincic, “Race, Gender, and War.”

41 Rohall and Ender, “Race, Gender, and Class.”

42 Tate, What’s Going On?, chap. 8.

43 Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

44 Zaller, “Information, Values, and Opinion,” 1229.

45 Gartner and Segura, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War.”

46 Burris, “From Vietnam to Iraq,” 462–66.

47 Though Burris uses a White/non-White racial categorization scheme, much of his discussion focuses on Black Americans. Black Americans were, until recently, the largest non-White population in the United States.

48 Allison, “Race, Gender, and Attitudes toward War in Chicago.”

49 Allison compares levels of Black and White support within genders. Her small, geographically limited sample may explain the null results in her male-only analysis. Nevertheless, the intersection of race and gender has often shown dual effects during past crises, with White men being the largest proponents of war and Black women being the biggest opponents. See Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, 142–43. Also see Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide, 47, 50.

50 Less wealthy individuals are less likely to support the use of military force. See: Hamilton, “Research Note on the Mass Support for ‘Tough’ Military Initiatives”; Hahn, “Correlates of Public Sentiments about War”; Wright, “Working Class, Authoritarianism, and the War in Vietnam”; Burris, “From Vietnam to Iraq”; Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, “Conscription, Inequality, and Partisan Support for War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60, no. 8 (December 2016): 1419–45. Moreover, Rohall and Ender suggest that Black Americans’ preference for the Democratic Party may make them more likely to hold antiwar positions, though they do not investigate this question empirically. See Rohall and Ender, “Race, Gender, and Class,” 102. Additionally, Tate shows trends over time of convergence between the views of Black Americans and Democrats on foreign policy issues. See Tate, What’s Going On?

51 Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion.

52 Bruce W. Jentleson, “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 1992): 49–74; Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, “Still Pretty Prudent: Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 4 (August 1998): 395–417.

53 Wilcox, Ferrara, and Allsop, “Group Differences in Early Support for Military Action in the Gulf”; Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide; Rohall and Ender, “Race, Gender, and Class.”

54 Verba et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam.”

55 Gartner and Segura, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War.”

56 The survey had a total of 741 White respondents and 206 Black respondents.

57 Verba et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” 331.

58 David Coffey, “African Americans in the U.S. Military,” in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9.

59 Gerald F. Goodwin, “Black and White in Vietnam,” New York Times, 18 July 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/racism-vietnam-war.html.

60 Kim Parker, Anthony Cilluffo, and Renee Stepler, “6 Facts about the U.S. Military and Its Changing Demographics,” Pew Research Center, 13 April 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/13/6-facts-about-the-u-s-military-and-its-changing-demographics/; Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor, “Floyd Death Pushes Military to Face ‘Own Demons’ on Race,” AP News, 5 June 2020, https://apnews.com/article/american-protests-race-and-ethnicity-politics-b3540ebbf461cbf59e75c7a4aa7c6c21/; Richard V. Reeves and Sarah Nzau, “Black Americans Are Much More Likely to Serve the Nation, in Military and Civilian Roles,” Brookings Institution, 27 August 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/08/27/black-americans-are-much-more-likely-to-serve-the-nation-in-military-and-civilian-roles/.

61 Military statistics come from Parker, Cilluffo, and Stepler, “6 Facts about the U.S. Military and Its Changing Demographics”; population statistics come from the Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey data.

62 The “burden” of war includes not only loss of life but also other types of harm, such as injuries/wounds, which are often overlooked in quantitative examinations of war damage. See: Tanisha M. Fazal, “Dead Wrong? Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated Reports of War’s Demise,” International Security 39, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 95–125; Tanisha M. Fazal, “Life and Limb: New Estimates of Casualty Aversion in the United States,” International Studies Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2021): 160–72.

63 Rohall and Ender, “Race, Gender, and Class.”

64 Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Weaver, “Is the Significance of Race Declining in the Political Arena? Yes, and No,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 8 (June 2015): 1250–57.

65 Richardson, “Gulf Crisis and African-American Interests under International Law,” 53; Wilcox, Ferrara, and Allsop, “Group Differences in Early Support for Military Action in the Gulf,” 346.

66 King, “Beyond Vietnam.”

67 Verba et al., “Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” 331.

68 Robinson and Jacobson, “American Public Opinion about Vietnam,” 65; Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 231.

69 Nincic and Nincic, “Race, Gender, and War,” 562.

70 Harlow and Dundes, “‘United’ We Stand,” 450.

71 Burris, “From Vietnam to Iraq,” 464–65.

72 William M. Mason, James S. House, and Steven S. Martin, “On the Dimensions of Political Alienation in America,” Sociological Methodology 15 (1985): 111–51; Shayla C. Nunnally, Trust in Black America: Race, Discrimination, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

73 Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Michael Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race,” American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 3 (July 2012): 690–704.

74 Shayla C. Nunnally, “Race, Trust, and the American Presidency: Black-White Confidence in the Executive Branch in the Obama Era and Beyond,” in After Obama: African American Politics in a Post-Obama Era, ed. Todd C. Shaw, Robert A. Brown, and Joseph P. McCormick II (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 45–71.

75 One dataset lacks measures for income, though we find that our results are robust to the inclusion or exclusion of an income variable.

76 The wording of the question was: “All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting, or not?”

77 This poll included 873 respondents, of whom 73 (8.4%) identified as Black. We measure support for the war in Afghanistan using a question that asks respondents whether they “support or oppose” US military action in the conflict. We measure casualty sensitivity based on whether respondents believed the US government was not “doing all it reasonably [could] do to try to avoid U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan.”

78 Four of these surveys did not include an income variable, so we replicate our analyses without a control for income in the online appendix.

79 See the online appendix for all questions we included in the analysis to measure alienation and support for war.

80 Jack Citrin, “Comment: The Political Relevance of Trust in Government,” American Political Science Review 68, no. 3 (September 1974): 973–88.

81 We measure support for the Iraq War based on questions where respondents indicated the invasion was “the right thing” or was not “a mistake.” The 2010 and 2012 waves of the CCES also ask about support for the Afghanistan War, which we analyze in the online appendix.

82 We use HC₁ heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors across all regressions.

83 Since several of our proposed explanatory variables may explain the race gap, there is undoubtedly some omitted variable bias in each of our sets of regression results. Granted, this means that all previous studies that only explored one of the explanations presented here suffered from omitted variable bias as well.

84 Dustin Tingley et al., “Mediation: R Package for Causal Mediation Analysis,” Journal of Statistical Software 59, no. 5 (August 2014): 1.

85 Maya Sen and Omar Wasow, “Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs That Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics,” Annual Review of Political Science 19 (2016): 499–522.

86 Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals throughout. The vertical line divides the Bush and Obama presidencies.

87 Subsetting to only self-identified Democrats, we continue to observe a negative Black-White gap in polling only during the Bush administration, and the gap actually reverses in the CCES-Obama sample (Table C1, Models 9–10 in the online appendix).

88 Predicted likelihoods are calculated by subtracting and adding 1.96 standard error measures from the coefficients in the regressions.

89 The effect size for “casualty sensitivity” is larger for White respondents; however, Black respondents were significantly more likely to express concern about casualties in the first place, as indicated in Figure 4. For the smaller proportion of White respondents who expressed concern over casualties, this factor appeared to hold greater weight in determining their war attitudes.

90 Table A5 in the online appendix shows full regression results, which include demographic controls (Models 1–3).

91 For this and all subsequent mediation analyses, we have used list-wise deletion to address missingness in the outcome variable.

92 For our alternative measure of casualty sensitivity, across fewer surveys, the mediated effect constitutes a smaller but still substantial portion of the total effect: between 0.18 and 0.31 (95% confidence intervals). Responses are reported in the online appendix.

93 Table A5 in the online appendix shows full regression results, which include demographic controls (Models 4–9).

94 The effect size for Black respondents is smaller and not significantly distinguishable from a null relationship at the α < 0.1 level.

95 Regression table A6 in the online appendix shows full regression results, which include demographic controls (Models 1–6).

96 Across the four polls, an average of 18.1% of White Democrats felt that President Obama did not care about or understand people like them.

97 Regression Table A7 in the online appendix shows full regression results, which include demographic controls (Models 1–6).

98 The results analyzing the relationship between race, political alienation, and support for the Afghanistan War across these two administrations (in the online appendix) displayed nearly identical trends with one exception: the coefficient on alienation for the subsample of Black respondents during the Obama administration (Table D5, Model 5) was negative and not statistically significant. In other words, although Black Americans who were alienated from President Obama were more likely to support the Iraq War, they were not any more or less likely to support the Afghanistan War.

99 In observational studies such as this one, it can be difficult to tell whether the sequential ignorability assumption required for mediation holds. Sensitivity analyses developed by Kosuke Imai et al. can determine how robust results are to potential violations of this assumption. Sensitivity tests show that in our mediations for each of the explanatory variables correlated with lower Black support for war, confounders would have to have relatively large effect sizes to overturn the conclusions that we reach here; for the casualty sensitivity, domestic spending, and Bush alienation findings, the mediation effects reach zero when ρ = −0.4. In mediations without control variables, ρ would have to be at least −0.5 to alter the results. For analytical details, see Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, and Dustin Tingley, “A General Approach to Causal Mediation Analysis,” Psychological Methods 15, no. 4 (December 2010): 309–34.

100 Sociotropic policy concerns are more commonly discussed in terms of economic voting issues. See: Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, “Sociotropic Politics: The American Case,” British Journal of Political Science 11, no. 2 (April 1981): 129–61; Edward D. Mansfield and Diana C. Mutz, “Support for Free Trade: Self-Interest, Sociotropic Politics, and Out-Group Anxiety,” International Organization 63, no. 3 (July 2009): 425–57.

101 Dawson, Behind the Mule.

102 Michael J. Donnelly, “Material Interests, Identity and Linked Fate in Three Countries,” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 3 (July 2021): 1119–37.

103 Todd C. Shaw, Kirk A. Foster, and Barbara Harris Combs, “Race and Poverty Matters: Black and Latino Linked Fate, Neighborhood Effects, and Political Participation,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7, no. 3 (2019): 663–72; Menna-Weiwot A. Demessie and Errol A. Henderson, “Race and Ethnicity in Black Congressional Representation: The Case of US Foreign Policy towards Africa,” Congress & the Presidency 48, no. 2 (2021): 147–74; Claudine Gay, Jennifer Hochschild, and Ariel White, “Americans’ Belief in Linked Fate: Does the Measure Capture the Concept?” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 1, no. 1 (March 2016): 117–44.

104 White, “When Race Matters and When It Doesn’t,” 344.

105 Lynne Duke, “U.S. War Toll Defies Racial Predictions,” Washington Post, 21 March 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/03/21/us-war-toll-defies-racial-predictions/5ae579c3-fb2f-4d60-b2ee-e8198798ff72/.

106 Jesse Jackson Sr., “Rev. Jesse Jackson at MIT Peace Rally against Gulf War,” 14 January 1991, MIT Black History, https://www.blackhistory.mit.edu/archive/rev-jesse-jackson-mit-peace-rally-against-gulf-war-1991.

107 Dodge, “Thousands of College Students Protest Persian Gulf War in Rallies and Sit-Ins; Others Support Military Action.”

108 US Government Accountability Office, Military Personnel: Reporting Additional Servicemember Demographics Could Enhance Congressional Oversight, Report to Congressional Requesters GAO-05-952 (Washington, DC: US Government Accountability Office, 2005), 2.

109 Connor Huff and Robert Schub, “Segregation, Integration, and Death: Evidence from the Korean War,” International Organization 75, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 858–79.

110 Paul Robeson, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom 1, no. 2 (February 1951): 1, https://mc.dlib.nyu.edu/files/books/tamwag_fdm000003/tamwag_fdm000003_hi.pdf.

111 “‘I Love All Humanity’ Howard Says; Midwest Leader Defends Position,” Freedom 1, no. 2 (February 1951): 5, https://mc.dlib.nyu.edu/files/books/tamwag_fdm000003/tamwag_fdm000003_hi.pdf.

112 The Martinsville Seven were a group of seven Black men from Virginia who were executed by the state after being accused of raping a White woman. In August 2021, their convictions were posthumously pardoned by the governor of Virginia.

113 “The Men of Martinsville,” unsigned editorial, Freedom 1, no. 2 (February 1951): 1, https://mc.dlib.nyu.edu/files/books/tamwag_fdm000003/tamwag_fdm000003_hi.pdf.

114 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 165.

115 Patrick Deer, “Black Lives Matter in Wartime,” RSAJournal 29 (2018): 65–91; Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, “From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives,” Perspectives on Politics 20, no. 4 (December 2022): 1246–59.

116 Dean Knox, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo, “Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 3 (August 2020): 619–37.

117 John Gramlich, “Black Imprisonment Rate in the U.S. Has Fallen by a Third since 2006,” Pew Research Center, 6 May 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.

118 David C. Baldus, Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth, “Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 661–753; Frank R. Baumgartner et al., Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

119 Kathleen E. Powers et al., “What’s Fair in International Politics? Equity, Equality, and Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 2 (2022): 217–45.

120 Similarly, Jason Lyall’s argument about ethnic marginalization indicates there is a depressive effect of mistreatment of ethnic groups on the sense of common purpose in wartime and armies’ battlefield performance. See Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

121 Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, “Success Matters.”

122 Quoted in Phillips, War! What Is It Good For?, 154–55.

123 “McComb Project Comes Out against the Vietnam War,” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, 2017, https://snccdigital.org/events/mccomb-project-comes-vietnam-war/.

124 Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire; Anthony Monteiro, “Race and Empire: W.E.B. Du Bois and the US State,” Black Scholar 37, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 35–52; Nada Elia, “Violent Women: Surging into Forbidden Quarters,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 163–69.

125 Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics.

126 Merze Tate, The United States and Armaments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 204.

127 Tesler and Sears, Obama’s Race; Thomas Craemer et al., “‘Race Still Matters, However . . . ’: Implicit Identification with Blacks, Pro-Black Policy Support and the Obama Candidacy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 6 (2013): 1047–69.

128 Emily A. West, “Descriptive Representation and Political Efficacy: Evidence from Obama and Clinton,” Journal of Politics 79, no. 1 (January 2017): 351–55.

129 See, for example, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, “Constituency Influence in Congress,” American Political Science Review 57, no. 1 (March 1963): 45–56.

130 Nunnally, “Race, Trust, and the American Presidency,” 53.

131 Obama did not politicize the war in Afghanistan to the same extent, which may help to explain the slight differences in results for the effects of alienation on support for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Quote from: “Transcript: Obama’s Speech against the Iraq War,” National Public Radio, 20 January 2009, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99591469.

132 James M. Avery, “The Sources and Consequences of Political Mistrust among African Americans,” American Politics Research 34, no. 5 (September 2006): 653–82; James M. Avery, “Political Mistrust among African Americans and Support for the Political System,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 1 (March 2009): 132–45.

133 James Burk and Evelyn Espinoza, “Race Relations within the US Military,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012): 401–22.

134 Manning Marable, “The Military, Black People, and the Racist State: A History of Coercion,” Black Scholar 12, no. 1 (January–February 1981): 6–17.

135 John J. Hisnanick, “Military Service as a Factor in the Economic Progress of African American Men: A Post-Draft Era Analysis,” Journal of African American Men 5, no. 4 (March 2001): 65–79; W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy R. Wang, and Ronald B. Mincy, Black Men Making It In America: The Engines of Economic Success for Black Men in America (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2018), https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BlackMenMakingItInAmerica-Final_062218.pdf?x91208.

136 Stephen M. Utych, “Human or Not? Political Rhetoric and Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Political Science Research and Methods 10, no. 3 (July 2022): 642–50; Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Weighing Lives in War: How National Identity Influences American Public Opinion about Foreign Civilian and Compatriot Fatalities,” Journal of Global Security Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2020): 25–43; Jonathan Chu and Carrie Lee, “Race, Religion, and American Support for Humanitarian Intervention” (preprint, last revised 18 April 2022), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4060474.

137 Elliott P. Skinner, African Americans and U.S. Policy toward Africa, 1850–1924: In Defense of Black Nationality (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992); Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Alvin B. Tillery Jr., Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

138 Richardson, “Gulf Crisis and African-American Interests under International Law”; Smith and Seltzer, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide.

139 Burris, “From Vietnam to Iraq.”

140 Elizabeth N. Saunders, “War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of Using Force,” Security Studies 24, no. 3 (July–September 2015): 466–501.

141 Joseph M. Grieco et al., “Let’s Get a Second Opinion: International Institutions and American Public Support for War,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (June 2011): 563–83.

142 See, for example: Janelle S. Wong et al., Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez, eds., Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Jeré Franco, “Empowering the World War II Native American Veteran: Postwar Civil Rights,” Wicazo Sa Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 32–37.

143 For some groups of Native Americans, it may even be the case that pre-US security dynamics in North America have affected contemporary views of the use of force. See Neta C. Crawford, “A Security Regime among Democracies: Cooperation among Iroquois Nations,” International Organization 48, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 345–85.

144 For example: Ali Adam Valenzuela, “Tending the Flock: Latino Religious Commitments and Political Preferences,” Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 2014): 930–42; Jeron Fenton and LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, “Are Black State Legislators More Responsive to Emails Associated with the NAACP versus BLM? A Field Experiment on Black Intragroup Politics,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 7, no. 2 (July 2022): 203–18.

145 See, for example, Jon Green, “Does Race Stop at the Water’s Edge? Elites, the Public, and Support for Foreign Intervention among White U.S. Citizens over Time,” Political Science Quarterly 136, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 339–61.

146 “How Groups Voted,” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, accessed 29 November 2022, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how_groups_voted.

147 Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies,” World Politics 43, no. 4 (July 1991): 479–512; Eric Shiraev, “Toward a Comparative Analysis of the Public Opinion–Foreign Policy Connection,” in Decisionmaking in a Glass House: Mass Media, Public Opinion, and American and European Foreign Policy in the 21st Century, ed. Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Pierangelo Isernia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 297–304; Timothy B. Gravelle, Jason Reifler, and Thomas J. Scotto, “The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes in Transatlantic Perspective: Comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany,” European Journal of Political Research 56, no. 4 (November 2017): 757–76; Timothy B. Gravelle, Jason Reifler, and Thomas J. Scotto, “Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes: A Cross-National Exploratory Study,” Personality and Individual Differences 153 (20 January 2020): 109607; Clara H. Suong, Scott Desposato, and Erik Gartzke, “How ‘Democratic’ Is the Democratic Peace? A Survey Experiment of Foreign Policy Preferences in Brazil and China,” Brazilian Political Science Review 14, no. 1 (2020): 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-3821202000010002.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; and Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University.

Notes on contributors

Naima Green-Riley

Naima Green-Riley is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Andrew Leber

Andrew Leber is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the Middle East & North African Studies program at Tulane University.