Newsom’s ‘play dumb’ routine is not new — in fact, it has a clinical name

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) took the stage before a predominantly Black audience in Georgia recently, something revealing happened. He leaned into the microphone and offered his credentials for relatability: a 960 SAT score, a confession that he can’t read well, and a childhood sustained by frozen lasagna and mac and cheese.

Newsom’s intention was for the crowd to feel seen. But that he actually exposed was a pattern that has been hiding in plain sight for thirty years — a pattern so well-documented that researchers at Yale and Princeton have given it a clinical name.

In 2019, social psychologists Cydney Dupree of Yale and Susan Fiske of Princeton published a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with a striking conclusion: White liberals systematically present themselves as less competent when speaking to Black audiences than when speaking to white ones.

They called it “competence downshift.”

Analyzing 25 years of presidential campaign speeches — 74 speeches delivered to mostly white or mostly minority audiences — they found that Democratic candidates consistently used fewer words associated with intelligence, ability, and status when addressing Black crowds. Republican candidates showed no such pattern. The difference was not random. It was consistent, measurable, and unique to white liberals.

So what Newsom just did by playing dumb to a Black audience in Georgia was not a gaffe. Science says it is a feature.

The researchers found that white liberals draw on minority-incompetence stereotypes when trying to connect with Black audiences. They reach for what they assume the room will relate to. And what they assume, the data reveals, is struggle, deficit, and disadvantage — not excellence, not ambition and not achievement. The lead researcher herself called the findings “kind of an unpleasant surprise” and........

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