How Wide is the Arc of Racial Solidarity? People of Color and Middle Easterners and North Africans

Emerging work suggests that Blacks, Asians, and Latinos sometimes share a strong sense of solidarity as people of color (PoC), which unifies their political opinions on issues that strongly implicate some of these racial groups (e.g., Black Lives Matter). Yet much uncertainty remains about whether other non-White groups, beyond these traditional three, are compelled to engage in politics as PoC via this same mechanism. We investigate this with two studies focused on Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) individuals: a minoritized group with deep U.S. roots, but sparse theoretical and empirical attention in political science. Study 1 draws on in-depth interviews with MENA adults (N=20), who suggest that, insofar as they sense solidarity with other people of color, it is because they feel racially marginalized as foreigners. Study 2 builds on this insight with a pre-registered experiment on MENA adults (N=514), which randomly assigned them to read an article about Latinos, who are also marginalized as foreign (vs. control article). We find that exposure to treatment reliably heightens MENAs' expression of solidarity with other PoC, which then significantly boosts support for flexible policies toward undocumented immigrants (which implicate Latinos, but not MENAs) and reduces belief in negative stereotypes of Latinos.