Whose Rights are Civil Rights? Evaluating Group Threat as an Explanation for Racial Differences in Attitudes Toward...

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.