How do you react to seeing the confederate flag? Examining public reactions by race-ethnicity and region

Abstract

This study uses insights from the white racial frame perspective to examine associations among race-ethnicity, region, and reactions to viewing the Confederate flag using public opinion data from 2011 and 2015. Data come from pooled nationally representative cross-sectional surveys collected by the Pew Research Center (n = 3,092). Results from adjusted multinomial logit models showed that U.S. adults were on average more likely to react positively to seeing the Confederate flag in 2015 than in 2011. Increased positive responses were driven largely by whites whose odds of reacting positively in 2015 increased 2-fold relative to 2011. Compared with black Americans, whites were more likely to react positively to viewing the Confederate flag, and Latinx respondents were less likely to react negatively to the flag. Further inquiry into intragroup differences showed that the adjusted probability of reacting positively in 2015 increased by 14% for whites in former Confederate states and by 8% for whites outside the former Confederacy. Reliance on the dominant white racial frame typically invokes positive reactions to the Confederate flag because of its symbolism of white supremacy, antiblackness, and an ahistorical and romanticized Lost Cause of the civil war.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no potential conflict of interest, and no financial support was provided to the author for the research, authorship, or publication of this article. The Pew Research Center bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here.

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Ryan D. Talbert

Ryan D. Talbert is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Affiliate of the Africana Studies Institute and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in health disparities, race and racism, and punishment and inequality. A primary goal of his work is to examine critically the creation and maintenance of racial health disparities with an emphasis on assessing the deleterious effects of systemic racism and white supremacy. His scholarship has been published in journals, such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Race and Social Problems, and Sociology Compass.