Report Publish Date: January 3, 2025

The authors of this journal article question the assumption that mentioning racial disparities keeps people from supporting social policies that address health inequity.

Primary Takeaways

The researchers found that emphasizing policy benefits—either the benefits to all people or to all people and especially to some people—gets more people on board than simply describing a policy.

The researchers also conclude that:

• It’s possible to design and pretest message strategies that boost support for evidence-based policies that address racial and ethnic inequity.
• Centering racial and ethnic disparities does not affect support for equitable policies among White people.
• The effective messages tested by researchers boosted Black and Hispanic respondents’ intentions to advocate for equitable policies. But the messages did not affect the intentions of White respondents. This finding suggests a need for further research into what drives people of different races and ethnicities to action.

Overview and Objectives

As they study what type of messaging gets the public to support policies that promote racial equity, some researchers have suggested that talking about racial disparities might make some people less likely to support these policies. Or that the messages that mention disparities might polarize opinions, for example between members of different political parties or between White people and people of color. But much of the message testing research to date has worked mostly with White respondents, which means we know little about how such messaging affects the attitudes of people of color.

The researchers conducting this study push back against the assumption that talking about disparities is not helpful. They also wanted to uncover what works to get people to support equitable social policies.

Hypothesis or Approach 

The researchers conducted two studies, using two different trial approaches. They tested messages about child tax credit expansion, a federal financial policy that helps families who are raising children. The first study compared six candidate messages to a control message. The second compared two messages in support of expanding the child tax credit to more families. One message emphasized the ways all children benefit, and the other did the same while also mentioning that Black and Hispanic children benefit the most.

How This Influences Change

“Well-designed messages emphasizing policy efficacy can promote support for a redistributive tax policy across racial, ethnic, and political identities,” the researchers write. In addition, they show the importance of gathering the perspectives of people who are not White and making sure survey and message testing samples are diverse.