ABSTRACT

The alleged prevalence of anti-gay bias among Black communities in the United States has received ample popular and academic attention in recent decades. But just how consistent is the purported relationship between race and homophobia? In this paper, we use the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey to show that public claims about “Black homophobia” have been dangerously overstated. Moreover, where racial differences in attitudes toward same-gender sexuality do occur, we find that the two most prevalent scholarly explanations for such gaps—religious institutions and gender ideologies—do not predict anti-gay bias for Black survey respondents. We thus derive an alternative explanation from scholarship on group threat: that perceived competition for political resources is what motivates racial differences in antagonism toward same-gender sexuality. Our results support that alternative and, in so doing, evince the importance of a relational approach to homophobia in academic and activist spheres alike.

摘要

近几十年来，美国黑人社区中普遍存在的反同性恋偏见受到了广泛的大众和学术关注。但是，种族和恐同症之间的所谓关系到底有多一致？在本文中，我们使用美国全国选举研究和综合社会调查表明，公众对“黑人同性恋恐惧症”的说法被夸大了。此外，在对同性性行为的态度确实存在种族差异的地方，我们发现对这种差距的两种最普遍的学术解释——宗教机构和性别意识形态——并不能预测黑人调查受访者的反同性恋偏见。因此，我们从关于群体威胁的学术研究中得出了另一种解释：对政治资源的感知竞争是激发种族差异对同性性行为的对抗。我们的结果支持这种替代方案，并在此过程中证明了在学术和活动领域等领域对同性恋恐惧症采取关系方法的重要性。