The colour of rage and political opinion: An exploratory study of factors of moral outrage for the South African context.

Abstract

Background: Societies had expected that the transition from crude forms of racial prejudice and oppressive governments would lead to democratic governments that catered for everyone. While policies for racial redress have been implemented, no significant change in social positioning between various race groups has occurred. Various race groups have, as a result, engaged in political movements to express their stance regarding the continued political injustice towards themselves and their race group. Symbolic racism and moral outrage have been used to explain the phenomena of protest actions against politics and policies of racial redress. Objective: The study aimed to develop a reliable and valid moral outrage (MO) scale. It then aimed to use the scale to explore the relationship between this moral outrage and racial prejudice and self-interest. Method: A questionnaire was distributed to black (N=103), Indian (N=45) and white (N=18) participants at UKZN (PMB). Only the black and Indian sample outcomes were used in the study due to the small size of the white sample. SPSS was used to analyse the data. Findings: The results indicated that the developed moral outrage scale is reliable to use (ɑ= 0.72). The study found that participants were morally outraged by racial privilege, government corruption, land ownership, social dominance and out-group threat. Racial privilege was a reliable measure for moral outrage for both black participants (ɑ= 0.78) and Indian participants (ɑ= 0.74) and government corruption was reliable for Indian participants (ɑ= 0.74). Racial discrimination and self-interest did not significantly correlate to MO for black participants, racial discrimination did however have a relationship with racial privilege for Indian participants. Conclusion: A salient group identity is a crucial driving force that mobilizes public reactions to policies as there is shared suffering and perceived infringement of rights. The emotions that black participants have towards white people and that Indian participants hold about their own race that were good predictors for moral outrage.