There has been a little hullabaloo in the media about lack of support for Pete Buttigieg in the black community due to the skepticism of his identity as a married gay man. My own prior is to assume that there will be some differences in attitudes, but it will be modest. I come to this position because when I’ve looked at survey data black Americans and white Americans aren’t as different as the stark caricatures make them out to be. Contrary to Republican assertions black Americans are not really socially conservative, though they are more moderate than white liberals (what’s really going on usually is that white liberals are very socially liberal).
So I decided to look in the GSS for the years 2016 and 2018 at a variable with large sample sizes, HOMOSEX. It asks about whether people think “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” are:
– always wrong
– almost always wrong
– sometimes wrong
– not wrong at all
You can see the result above. The difference in attitudes is huge. I added white Republicans and Hispanic Democrats, and you can see black Democrats are even further in their views than these groups.
Though the sample sizes are smaller when you go into the cross-tabs, here are some demographic slices. Notice that white Democrats born after 1984 almost all think that homosexual sex between adults is “not wrong at all.” In contrast, younger black Democrats are divided. It is less black Americans are homophobic, and more that white Democrats have moved very fast and very far on this once polarizing social issue.
Finally, I ran a logit regression with a dummy variable. It looks like religion and education doesn’t explain all the difference. Probably due to how social consensus on political issues emerges, the separation of black and white social networks has caused this split, as the consensus in the latter has not spread to the former (among Democrats).
Variables for replication: race, partyid(r:1-3;4;5-7)*, hispanic, degree, cohort.
Tables below