Aided by illustrative anecdotes from the worlds of politics, journalism and culture, Chapter One dives into the scholarship on the role of emotions in shaping political behavior to establish the questions at the heart of the manuscript. How does race moderate the emergence of anger, and its impact on political behavior? What is the racial anger gap, and what are its implications for black Americans’ capacity to achieve their policy goals? What are its implications for partisan politics? What factors—both psychological and structural—work to constrain the emergence and translation of political anger to political action among African Americans? Finally, do positive emotions such as hope and pride shape African American decisions to participate in politics in a manner different from their white counterparts? This chapter introduces a theoretical framework that connects the distinct racial lenses through which black and white Americans view the political environment to the divergent set of emotional sentiments they generally carry within that environment. The emotional sentiment of resignation exhibited by African Americans is the root cause of the anger gap, laying the foundation for the exploration of the causes and consequences of this gap in U.S. politics.

Chapter Three provides robust evidence of the racial anger gap and its consequences for participation. With the aid of findings from survey data providing nearly 40 years’ worth of information on black and white Americans’ political attitudes, emotions and participation, I demonstrate the effect of the anger gap on black turnout in political eras particularly threatening to the collective interests of African Americans. Insights on how the anger gap shaped black decisions to participate in electoral politics span the Reagan era to the dawn of the Trump era. The first object of respondents’ anger measured in this chapter is the set of presidential incumbents and major party candidates across election years. The second measure employed is an indicator of how often survey respondents felt angry over the course of the 2016 election. Whereas this is a more open-ended measure, analyses demonstrate that individuals’ reports of anger were closely ties to their perceptions of the figure who dominated the election season—Donald J. Trump. This chapter also explores whether the racial anger gap is moderated by the cross-cutting social identities of gender, age and education attained.