John Lewis and the Durability of Transcendent Race Politics

John Lewis's civil rights activism in the 1960s often obscures the fact that he won elective office as a racially moderate politician. Scholars have long noted the efficacy of using deracialized, or racially transcendent, campaign strategies to get elected, despite normative concerns. These strategies were critical to electing Black governors, senators, and even President Obama. However, in the age of Black Lives Matter, some have questioned the continued usefulness of the strategy. Using Rep. Lewis's life as a guide, I examine the ways that some Black politicians continue to use deracialization, even in this racially charged social and political moment, and I explain how younger cohorts of Black politicians challenge this approach. Ultimately, I argue that while deracialization is a contested strategy, its efficacy has not diminished. Rather, Black politicians have expanded the boundaries of what constitutes racially transcendent politics to include consensus issues like voting rights, which while highly racialized, are not likely to induce an erosion of support among non-Black Democratic voters.

Politicians’ Ideology Matters More Than Their Race in Determining the Association Between White Identity and Evaluation of the Politicians

White Americans’ racial identity can predict their sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors, demonstrating an emergent trend of White identity politics. However, when it comes to predicting support for political candidates, it remains an unclarified question whether the effects of White identity politics are determined more by candidates’ ideology or race. This article disentangles and compares the role of candidates’ ideology and race. Four studies using White American samples consistently support the ideology hypothesis, which suggests that White identity predicts support for conservative politicians and opposition to liberal politicians because of their ideology. The evidence is limited for the racial hypothesis, which suggests that White identity predicts support for White politicians but opposition to Black politicians because of their race. Thus, this article complements theories of White identity politics and clarifies implications for who might benefit from its growing influence.

“It’s a Racist plot”: An Experimental test of the Racial Defense

Black municipal leaders are routinely accused of using race and racism to sidestep allegations that they have run afoul the ethics of public office. That is, they use racial defenses to respond to what they view as racist attacks against them. This type of race-based account has been treated as commonplace in American politics, but its effectiveness as a political account has received little scholarly attention. For example, how effective is the racial defense at minimizing negative political fallout for scandalized Black politicians? Using data from a survey experiment, I test how Black Americans respond to the political accounts profferred by Black elected officials accused of official misconduct. I show that a strategy involving a racial defense can yield positive evaluations in terms of trait judgment and voter intention, while offering no comment reduces participant suspicion about investigative malfeasance.

Homenagem: Remembering the Life and Work of Abdias Nascimento

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento’s views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition.

Race, Real Estate, and Responsiveness

In this chapter, I empirically trace the state of Black homeownership over the course of the Obama presidency in comparison to other groups. I look at homeownership, foreclosure, and mortgage refinancing rates by race, in addition to residential segregation patterns. I also discuss policies that the Obama administration initiated to help struggling homeowners and reduce residential segregation. Studying homeownership and residential segregation policies in the Obama administration is important because it contributes to the larger debate about what President Obama did for Blacks while in office. We can see if President Obama was quietly advocating for Black interests out of the public eye with programs. This may have been his effort at avoiding what the editors of this volume call the “inclusionary dilemma” of Black politicians attempting to include Black interests within often racially hostile American policy regimes. Now that President Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, has had enough time to put his own stamp on housing policy, we have the advantage of being able to compare the different approaches to and motivations behind particular housing policies. This chapter ends with a brief discussion of how President Obama’s housing policies—the Obama housing legacy—have fared under the Trump administration.

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.

“Here We Go Again”: Race and Redevelopment in Downtown Richmond, Virginia, 1977-Present

This article examines newspapers, archival collections, interviews, and personal papers to place Richmond, Virginia, at the center of the national debate about public–private revitalization projects. Since World War II, America’s urban leaders, led by interracial coalitions of black politicians and white business elites, have used racial capitalism to promise that tax-funded redevelopment projects would enrich their cities, provide better public services, and reconcile the legacy of racist urban planning. Richmond’s issues with Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace in the 1980s, as well as recent issues with the Navy Hill Project, reveals the continuum of political and economic peril that comes with using such plans. Because urban revitalization is supremely profit-driven and shaped by the economic thinking that created disparate levels of white corporate wealth and black urban poverty, it is bound to exacerbate systemic racism.

White Identity Politics Benefit Conservative and Undermine Liberal Political Politicians Regardless Politician Race

Despite historically being omitted as a socially invisible identity, recent studies suggest that racial identity can play an important role in predicting White Americans’ sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors, demonstrating an emergent trend of White identity politics in the United States. However, whether the effects of White identity politics are more “ideological” or “racial” remains an unclarified question. Four studies using White American samples show that the evidence consistently supports the “ideological” explanation of White identity, the idea that White identity predicts support for conservative politicians and opposition for liberal politicians for their ideology. The evidence is limited for the “racial” explanation, the idea that White identity predicts support for White politicians but opposition for Black politicians for their race. Thus, this paper clarifies the theories about White identity politics as well as implications for whom might benefit from the rise of White identity politics.

PURE POLITICKING! RACIALISED BLAME GAMES AND MORAL PANIC IN THE CASE OF A SOUTH AFRICAN HIGH SCHOOL

This study combines two discourse analytic frameworks, and explores the utility of this combination for unpacking journalistic opinions written in response to a polarising and racialised event in South African education: the Overvaal High School incident. It uncovers strategic constructions of racism within politicised blame games, in the context of Overvaal, and discloses how blame-assertion and blame-denial became implicated in framings of moral panic. Methodologically, this study relies on the concept race trouble, as well as a practical model of argumentation. In conjunction, these two approaches supply insight into both the calculated construction of racism, as well as the incorporation of these constructions into arguments aimed at rationalising blame-assertion and blame-denial. The results are interpreted within theorisations of moral panic. The findings showcase how arguments are produced to blame an individual politician for escalating racial antagonism around Overvaal, instead of offering a deeply historicised and contextualised account of the incident. Consequently, the arguments that shaped the opinion pieces, and the framing of racism involved in these arguments, ultimately obfuscate inquiry into structural determinants of racial inequity. Implicitly, this framing of racism and its incorporation into argumentation and blame games, produce a form of moral panic, in which South Africans racialised as white are construed as embattled by self-serving (black) politicians. Such politicians are vilified, or rendered as folk devils, and the results indicate how this process evades penetrating analyses of racialisation and its intersection with unequal education.

Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction

This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. While the effect of black politicians is positive and significant, black officials may be endogenous to electoral preferences for redistribution. I therefore use the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an instrument for black political leaders during Reconstruction. Instrumental variables (IV) estimates show that an additional black official increased per capita county tax revenue by $0.20, more than an hour’s wage at the time. The effect was not persistent, however, disappearing entirely once black politicians were removed from office at Reconstruction’s end. Consistent with the stated policy objectives of black officials, I find positive effects of black politicians on land tenancy and black literacy. These results suggest that black political leaders had large effects on public finance and individual outcomes over and above electoral preferences.