Racial Retaliation and Updating: Black Athletes and Racial Hate (together with Jiangnan Zeng)

We examine how racial animus responds to the presence and performance of minority star athletes, focusing on Black quarterbacks in the National Football League (NFL) – a highly salient media environment central to national and regional identity in the United States. We show that exposure to Black quarterbacks shapes racial hostility in both the short and long-run. Using a game-day event-study design, we identify evidence of emotion-driven racial retaliation. Relative to games where both quarterbacks were white, losses involving a Black quarterback are followed by a 16% increase in hate crime rates. These effects are concentrated after emotionally engaging games which generate a 40% rise in hate crimes, a 36% increase in hate speech indicators, and a 0.035 sd increase in implicit bias. In the long-run, we document a performance-contingent updating process. Areas with low-performing Black quarterback-led teams exhibit little change in racial animus. In contrast, when Black quarterback-led teams advance to championship games, hate crime rates fall by 32%, racial slur searches decline by -0.082 sds, hate speech indicators decrease by 17%, and implicit bias measures fall by -0.040 sds. Exposure to opposition Black quarterbacks does not produce long-run effects.