Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Martin Luther King Jr. on Democratic Propaganda, Shame, and Moral Transformation

This essay develops an account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s justification for and use of what I will call “democratic propaganda”—truthful propaganda that is aimed at promoting and fostering democratic political action by stirring readers’ emotions. I interpret King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the broader context of his work and argue that it is a piece of democratic propaganda. I give an account of what led King to support the use of democratic propaganda and why he hoped it would help to overcome a central problem in the civil rights movement: the political inaction of the white moderates. King emphasizes shame in the Letter, and I argue that this concept offers us a new way of thinking about the efficacy of democratic propaganda. I close by considering the relevance of King’s approach for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the innovativeness of King’s use of shame, I suggest it may be time for a new approach to Black politics and activism.

Linked Fate, Black Voters, and Black Women Candidates

This chapter examines how linked fate—a feeling of closeness to group members—may shape how Black voters respond to Black women candidates. It provides a brief review of the relevant literature on linked fate and colorism, a novel inclusion to this foundational concept in Black politics. The chapter includes colorism in an analysis of linked fate and its significance to vote choice, and it more fully fleshes out these implications for the appeal of Black women candidates to men and women voters who report a sense of linked fate. Using experimental data, the authors do not find strong evidence of heterogeneity by linked fate. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Black women candidates’ bodies influence vote choice.

After Obama

This book engages the reader in a wide-ranging assessment of the legacy of Barack Obama—the “first Black president”—relative to Black politics. It uses its vantage point of being written during Donald Trump’s presidency to understand what Black politics has and has not inherited from the Obama administration. It is comprehensive in the number of constituencies and policy topics it covers. Its co-editors frame its chapters by explaining how both “inverted linked fate” and an “inclusionary dilemma” shaped the Obama presidency and legacy for Black politics. Nearly twenty prominent or emerging political scientists provide this book’s interior chapters, using quantitative and qualitative methods to draw conclusions. The first group of scholars examines the Obama administration’s impact upon the attitudes and perceived group interests of various Black constituencies, including voters, partisans, civil rights leaders, lobbyists, women, church leaders and members, and LGBTQ persons. The second group examines Obama’s impact upon Black policy interests, including civil rights, criminal justice reform, antipoverty, women’s welfare, healthcare reform, housing, immigration, and foreign affairs. In the conclusion, the co-editors consider what may confront the “next Black president” and the “next Black America.”

The Obama Era and Black Attitudes toward Undocumented Immigration Policies

In this chapter, we examine African American attitudes toward immigration given the policy context of the Obama administration. What the editors of this volume call an “inverted Black linked fate” with Obama and his administration may or may not have indirectly affected Black attitudes on immigration. In President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, he made promises to the immigrant community, but especially the Latino immigrant community, to deliver comprehensive immigration reform. Reform advocates and activists were sorely disappointed when, for various reasons, these promises were not fulfilled and more punitive immigration enforcement led to activists dubbing Obama the “deporter in chief.” How might immigration affect Black politics? We examine what factors shape Black views toward often racialized and politicized policy issues such as immigration in order to provide insight on the prospects for coalition formation and sustainability beyond the Obama administration. We examine the extent to which factors such as economic attitudes, linked fate, neighborhood context, and sociodemographic factors influence Blacks’ views toward undocumented immigrants already living and working in the US. In this sense, we examine the standard conception of group linked fate but consider, to a limited degree, what it says about this volume’s notion of “inverted linked fate.”

What about Black Women?

Using the Urban and Economic Mobility initiative undertaken by President Obama, I explore how and if race-gender is recognized in the framing of urban policy during the Obama administration. There is a distinctive race-gender dimension to urban policy. In urban areas, data suggests that poverty is both raced and gendered. The purpose of this chapter is to engage in an analysis of the relationship between race-gender and space in relation to urban policy-making. This analysis specifically looks at how Black women are treated in the urban policy-making process of the Obama administration. However, it also serves as an analysis into how Black women are understood in Black politics more specifically as it grapples with the larger question of how ideologies of gender, which often engage a rather masculinist approach, influence the quest for freedom and equality. An analysis of the Obama administration is somewhat of a proxy for an analysis of how gender, particularly Black womanhood, is treated in Black politics. As I argue, the ideologies of gender that influence urban policy, resulting in the invisibility of Black womanhood, are also prevalent in Black politics. What should Black politics look like beyond Obama?