Most work on racial attitudes considers explicitly hostile outgroup evaluations. What about racial attitudes that appear subjectively positive but reinforce racial inequality more broadly? Research in social psychology shows that sexist attitudes are ambivalent; sexism can be hostile or benevolent. Building on the nascent idea that racial prejudice also ranges from hostile to benevolent, we theorise the concept of “racial benevolence” and develop comparable measures of Whites’ benevolent attitudes toward Black Americans (in the United States) and Indigenous peoples (in Canada and Australia). Unlike hostile prejudicial attitudes, benevolent racial attitudes are motivated by an egalitarian impetus to help—but drive political behaviour that threatens to undermine racial equality more generally by reinforcing target group members’ subordination through assimilation and surveillance. We discuss how hostile and benevolent racial attitudes work in tandem to reinforce racial inequalities.

Edana Beauvais is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. Before joining SFU, she held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University, a Visiting Democracy Fellowship at the Ash Center, Harvard University, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University. Beauvais is interested in the way inequalities shape communication and action, producing unequal political influence between different social group members. Substantively, Beauvais's research falls into three categories: the study of political communication, deliberation and democratic innovation; gender and politics; and racial, ethnic and settler-colonial politics. Beauvais has published in a number of outlets, including Political Science Research & Methods, Political Research Quarterly, and the European Journal of Political Research. At SFU, Beauvais's teaching contributes to both the Department of Political Science and the new minor in Social Data Analytics.