In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) African Americans. Further, we see protests not just in the United States but throughout the world. The 2020 George Floyd murder arguably spurred more protests against police violence within the United States and around the world than any other moment. We understand these protests as part of a broader decolonial project that seeks to eradicate racialised violence. How does this project develop? In examining Black Lives Matter as a movement, most have either focused on domestic activity within the United States or on instances of international activity, but few have attempted to theorise its spread. I suggest that any approach that focuses solely or primarily on technological advances or on the work of activists misses an essential and under-examined element – US Black popular culture.

Macropartisanship is a measure of aggregate trends in party identification in the mass public that allows researchers to track partisanship dynamically. In previous research, macropartisanship was found to vary in concert with major political events and forces like presidential approval and the economy. However, studying macropartisanship as an aggregate trend assumes that group dynamics within the measure are equivalent. We present a series of new measures of macropartisanship using Stimson’s (2018) dyad ratio approach disaggregated by race and ethnicity. We detail the creation of measures for White, Latino, and Black macropartisanship from 1983 to 2016 using more than 500 surveys from CBS News and CBS/New York Times. The resulting data collection is publicly available and can be downloaded in monthly, quarterly, or yearly format. Our initial analysis of these data show that thinking about macropartisanship as a single aggregate measure masks important and significant variation in our understanding of party identification. Change in the measures are uncorrelated. Latino macropartisanship is more volatile and responds more to economic conditions, Black macropartisanship is very stable and has become more Democratic in response to increased polarization, while White macropartisanship has become less responsive to economic conditions as has become more Republican as Republicans have moved to the right.

This essay examines the debate within the community of Black intellectuals and politicians about whether or not to abandon the Republican Party in 1916, and discusses both major parties’ attempts to cultivate Black voters. The objective of this article is to analyze 1916 through the lens of the rise of Black political independence and to elucidate the strains of thought that pushed an increasing number of Black thinkers—and, later, everyday Black voters—to operate outside of the political framework of the Republican Party. Though the momentous shift in the Black vote had not yet fully materialized, 1916 saw a pivotal and significant crystallization of discontent with the GOP that pushed Black voters to search for alternatives, including the radical option of a “Negro Party.” Ultimately, this new sense of political opportunity helped create the atmosphere that allowed Black voters to shift to the Democratic Party from 1928 to 1936.

We fielded an experiment on a sample of approximately 400 Black state legislators to test whether they would be more responsive to an email that mentioned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) relative to an email that mentioned Black Lives Matter (BLM). The experiment tested Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization (1999), whereby relatively advantaged members of a marginalized group regulate the behavior, attitudes, and access to resources of less advantaged members of the group. We expected that Black legislators would be less responsive to an email that referenced BLM, an organization that is associated with more marginalized members of the Black community. Contrary to our hypothesis, Black legislators were as responsive to emails referencing inspiration from BLM as they were to emails referencing inspiration from the NAACP. Thus, we do not find any evidence of intragroup discrimination by Black state legislators. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment to test Cohen's theory of secondary marginalization.1

A Black middle class has emerged in many Latin American countries. Yet given the fluidity of Black identity, it is unclear if socioeconomic gains will result in the consolidation of a Black middle-class group identity with a sense of political responsibility or purpose. In this article, we use qualitative interviews with twenty-two Black professionals in Cali, Colombia, plus a small convenience survey, to explore the following research questions: Does the intersection of being Black and middle class cohere into a group identity? If so, does it translate into a Black political consciousness? And if not, what are the obstacles? We find that while respondents individually identify with a Black middle-class label, they do not experience it as a group that feels symbolic bonds of attachment or acts in a coordinated or mutually cognizant manner. It is a category without shape or coherence. It is amorphous. There are four primary explanations for Black middle class amorphism: the absence of shared or positive markers of collective Black identity; a lack of organizational infrastructure; taboos against organizing along racial lines in the workplace; and a strong individualist ethos towards protecting opportunities and enhancing personal status. We situate our findings within the field of Black politics to discuss what might be lost or gained by this amorphism.

Traditionally, scholars argue that the committee structure is central to the policymaking process in congress, and that those that wield the gavel in committees enjoy a great deal of influence over the legislative agenda. The most recent iterations of Congress are more diverse than ever before. With 55 members—of whom, five chair full committees and 28 sit atop subcommittees—the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is in a place to wield a significant leverage over the legislative agenda in the 116th Congress. However, noticeable proportional gains in minority membership in Congress have yet to produce sizable policy gains for the communities they represent. An examination of bill sponsorship from the 103rd–112th congresses reveals underlying institutional forces—i.e., marginalization and negative agenda setting—leave Black lawmakers at a distinct disadvantage compared to their non-black counterparts. Bills in policy areas targeted by the CBC are subject to disproportionate winnowing in congressional committees. Unfortunately, a number of institutional resources often found to increase a bill's prospects—including placements and leadership on committees with jurisdiction over policy areas of interest—are relatively ineffective for CBC members looking to forward those key issues onto the legislative agenda.

A growing body of literature examines how direct or vicarious contact with forms of state surveillance affects political behavior and perceptions of government legitimacy. We develop a new method, Portals, to collect conversations between black residents from highly policed areas in five different U.S. cities between 2016 and 2018. While existing research emphasizes how interactions with the carceral state are alienating and demobilizing, our analysis of these conversations identifies productive ways in which citizens respond to oppressive encounters with police. The political discourses used by Portals participants, we argue, are centered on a logic of “collective autonomy”—given police ignorance, abuses of police authority, and the little political power that residents of highly policed communities have to demand change, many conclude that power is best achieved by strategically distancing from state institutions in the short term while building community power in the long term. Crucially, articulations of collective autonomy transcend the ideological positions of participants and track closely with an ideological tradition in black politics that persists across generations and contexts of state oppression.

The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped Northern electorates. Millions of Black voters, who had been unable to vote in the South, became eligible to vote through their resettlement in the North. In many instances, parties and politicians believed that Black voters were the balance of power in elections. This belief led them to change their approaches and make specific appeals to Black voters in an effort to win their support. Although scholars of American politics have revised the dominant narrative about the development of the Democratic Party on issues related to race, they fail to account for the role of Black voters in contributing to the Party’s change. The goal of this work is to describe how the Great Migration influenced Democratic Party interactions with Black voters in presidential elections from 1948–1960. I argue that increasing competition between the Democratic and Republican Parties, coupled with Black migrants’ location in electorally important states, made Black voters an important target of presidential campaign strategy in the post-war era.

How does gerrymandering affect intraparty and interparty electoral competition in state legislatures? Research has shown that electoral competition produces better representation and that descriptive representation positively affects substantive representation or policy outcomes. However, other studies have found an ever increasing incumbency advantage. I argue that the incumbency advantage within Majority Minority Districts is significant and distinct from that of majority White Democrat and Republican districts. I estimate levels of intraparty and interparty competition among Majority Minority Districts, majority White Democrat districts, and majority White Republican districts in the state legislature of Alabama. I use majority White Democrat districts as an intraparty comparison group because of African American’s statistically high support for the Democrat Party. Using three separate measures of competitiveness, I find racial gerrymandering in Alabama has a significant and sui generis negative effect on competition within Majority Minority Districts, compared to majority White districts.

This paper offers a broad overview of Black citizenship within the United States, concentrating on the major shifts in Black life that have transpired since the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We examine several critical aspects of Black citizenship including economic status, education, criminal justice and mass incarceration, and political participation. Our report reveals that Black progress toward equal citizenship is inconsistent at best; at worst, it is stagnant and at times, regressive. As such, we conclude that dramatic solutions beyond traditional reformist approaches are needed in order to realize genuine citizenship and equal rights for Black people within the United States. In closing, we briefly highlight a specific example of a strategic approach to advancing substantive social and political change.

Extant scholarship on black politics has demonstrated the mobilizing effect that racial group consciousness can have on African American political participation. Few studies, however, test for or compare the political impact of group consciousness across national contexts. This paper presents an empirical comparison of group consciousness and its relationship with political behavior among black Americans and black Britons. Mobilizing two nationally representative surveys from the United States and Britain and a multi-dimensional measure of group consciousness, the findings presented here suggest that while elements of racial group consciousness are present among blacks in both societies, racial group consciousness is generally more prevalent and politically significant among blacks in the United States. For example, blacks in Britain are less likely to view blacks as occupying a fundamentally marginalized structural position and less likely to endorse race specific interventions that might address that marginalization. Results from regression analysis further suggest that while strong racial (rather than national) group attachment negatively affects the likelihood that blacks will vote in both countries, other elements of group consciousness are more strongly associated with participation among blacks in the United States than in Britain.

Shared social disadvantage relative to Whites is assumed to motivate inter-minority political behavior but we lack causal evidence. Using a survey experiment of 1,200 African Americans, we prompt respondents to consider group social position when evaluating political commonality with Latinos. The experiment describes racial disparities in a randomized domain (education or housing), varies the description of inequality (either Black versus White, Latino versus White, or Black and Latino versus White), and offers half of the respondents a political cue to test whether shared social disadvantage causes Blacks’ perceptions of political commonality with Latinos. We find little evidence of a causal relationship. We conclude that cross-racial minority political coalitions may be more difficult to activate than previously thought.

Do voters in white districts systematically obstruct minority representation? Despite a great deal of public and scholarly attention, this question remains largely unresolved. We demonstrate that the narrow focus on the relationship between white voters and minority representation is inadequate to understand why we do not see more minority-elected officials in the United States. We use a matching technique to investigate three theoretical perspectives of descriptive representation using a unique dataset from the 2012 general elections for state legislative seats in 14 states, the first elections after the 2010 redistricting process. Our findings challenge the venerable notion that minority candidates consistently underperform in white districts, and complicate our understanding of the political expression of bigotry in the voting booth.

School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their children in schools? Also, what kind of political positions emerge from parents’ everyday experiences given the ubiquitous language of school choice? I find that in their own recounting parents focused on finding a quality school while experiencing numerous barriers to accessing such schools; parents expressed experiential knowledge of being chosen, rather than choosing; and parents highlighted the opacity, uncertainty, and burden of choice, even when they participated in it quite heartily. I argue that their stories convey limited and weak empowerment, limited individual agency, and no control. Their perspectives conjure policy frameworks and political ideologies that require a discussion of entitlements and provision, rather than choice.

Contemporary discourse about Black Americans questions the loyalties of younger Blacks to the advancement of the Black racial group. This discourse often compares the commitment of Black Americans who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement era to those who came of age during the post-Civil Rights Movement era. Fueling this discourse is a working assumption that somehow younger Black Americans have a different understanding about race and its role in Blacks' political interests. This begs the question whether there are generational differences in the ways that Black Americans learn about race, or racial socialization, perhaps with implications for distinct value orientations about Black politics. Using public opinion data from an original survey, the 2007 National Politics and Socialization Survey (NPSS), this paper compares the racial socialization experiences of four generations of Black Americans—(1) World War II generation (age 67 and older, born in and before 1940); (2) civil rights generation (ages 54–66, born 1953–1941); (3) mid-civil rights generation (ages 43–53, born 1964–1954); and (4) post-civil rights generation Black Americans (age 42 and under, born 1965 and after). Results of ordered probit regression analyses indicate minimal generational differences. Differences emerge in emphases on racial socialization messages about Black public behavior, Black intraracial relations, Black interracial relations, and composite factor loadings of Black consciousness and Black protectiveness messages.

As a result of urban immigration and White flight over the past three decades, the demography of U.S. cities has changed rather dramatically; approximately one-half of the largest hundred cities are now composed of minority majorities. Many urban scholars expected these demographic shifts to enhance the prospects for minority electoral alliances. In reality, however, few such alliances have emerged. This paper looks to explore the barriers to effective coalition building between native-born African Americans and their immigrant counterparts. In the first half of the paper, I explore the psychological barriers to mass coalitions, focusing on the negative stereotypes and perceived zero-sum conflict that exist between native-born African Americans and Latino immigrants. The second half of the paper argues that material and symbolic incentives fuel ongoing competition between Blacks and Latinos in the political sphere. The paper concludes with a discussion of how immigrant-induced diversity coupled with existing racial hierarchies work against future Black empowerment. Even when changing urban demography makes Whites a numerical minority, White voters often retain their status as urban power players through their ability to divide minority voters at the polls. Divisive electoral strategies that offer political rewards to one group at the expense of others threaten Black incorporation in the urban arena. Unless minority leadership changes the incentive structure embedded in the traditional modes of municipal governance, Whites will persist in their economic dominance, while disadvantaged immigrants and Blacks will continue to make political choices that yield small, short-term rewards at the expense of greater social and economic justice.

There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support for Black nationalism a function of time? Some scholars note that Black nationalism takes on the character of its material context and that it cannot be easily subsumed into a trans-historical ideology (Reed 2002; Robinson 2001). We indirectly test these hypotheses by examining the relationship between two components of Black nationalism—Black separatism and Pan-Africanism. To test these hypotheses, we analyze data from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA). Overall, we establish the determinants of support for Black separatism and Pan-Africanism while distinguishing these ideologies' similarities and differences.