Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Racial Disenfranchisement

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Racial Disenfranchisement

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Racial Disenfranchisement
VINCENT L. HUTCHINGS and DAVIN L. PHOENIX

Abstract
Inquiries into racial disenfranchisement offer a crucial lens through which to critically assess the capacity of the US political system to sufficiently respond to the
demands of an increasingly diverse society. Various social science disciplines have
employed a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies to explore the institutional, cultural, and psychological antecedents of disenfranchisement, as well as
strategies to achieve racial equity. This essay reviews a small slice of the scholarly
perspectives offered on racial inequity. It provides particular emphasis on theories
of racial subjugation, racial attitudes, and the political behavior of racial minorities.
The discussion of current and future trends in research on racial disenfranchisement
explores the questions raised and insight offered by examinations of the distinct
experiences of diverse racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as the potential
impact of the “Obama era” on the state of race relations in the United States.

INTRODUCTION
Disenfranchisement is conventionally understood as the revocation of an
individual or group’s basic citizenship rights, particularly with respect to
voting. But across multiple disciplines of social science, inquiries into the
disenfranchisement of marginalized groups—typically racial and ethnic
minorities—entail examinations of the societal forces that diminish the
broader political influence of minorities. Classic and emergent work has
both (i) examined the impact of this diminished political influence on the
distinct experiences of minority groups and (ii) explored the means through
which these minority groups can achieve greater access and equity within
the system.
Much of the scholarly work on racial disenfranchisement has been framed
around assessing the opportunities and constraints offered by the political,
legal, and cultural landscape for racial minorities in the post-Civil Rights era.
Studies arising from this framing include explorations of the evolution of citizen attitudes on race and examinations of how legal and political institutions
have evolved in order to adapt to (or counteract) the political influence of
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and other racial minorities.
Still other work focuses on the attitudes, ideologies, and strategies cultivated
and adopted by minority group members as they have sought to capitalize
on the removal of formal legal barriers to their economic and political participation. Together, these lines of work paint a picture of a constant tug of war
between racial and ethnic minority groups seeking various forms of equity
and restitution, and legal and political elites responding with either retrenchment or rapprochement, contingent on various factors.
This essay summarizes relevant research, identifies intriguing lines of emergent work, and discusses inquiries and methods that may guide future work
and shed further insight on the distinct role of race in US politics.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
THEORIES OF RACIAL SUBJUGATION
Myrdal (1944) labeled the treatment of racial minorities in the United
States—particularly African-Americans—as an “American Dilemma.”
According to him, (White) Americans were torn between a genuine commitment to the ideal of liberty and justice for all, and a steadfast belief in the
tenets of White Supremacy. Although Myrdal describes in painstaking detail
the routine injustice of the Jim Crow south, he ultimately concluded that as
more Americans learned of the plight of their fellow citizens, the American
creed would overwhelm the prejudicial instincts of White America. This
work was well received and its perspective on race relations became the
dominant paradigm among political observers and within much of the social
sciences (Steinberg, 2007). Over time, however, several scholars would offer
a somewhat different point of view.
The theory of group position, introduced by Blumer (1958), represents an alternative assessment of race relations. In this account, racial discrimination is
not simply borne out of ignorance but instead serves an instrumental function by helping to preserve the privileged status of the dominant groups
in society. Moreover, intergroup strife and competition derive from historically and elite-driven judgments about where in-group members ought to
be arrayed in the socio-political hierarchy relative to out-group members.
Omi and Winant (1994) develop a similar framework with their racial formation theory. They argue that race is a socially constructed category, and the
cultural and political significance that society attaches to this identity permeates virtually all domains of life. They maintain that socially constructed
race categories evolve and adapt with society, and are constantly leveraged
by contemporary elites to establish and reinforce unequal power relations
between groups.

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Following this theoretical foundation, numerous influential works examine the proliferation of either cultural norms or institutional policies that
work to reinforce the political, economic, and legal subjugation minorities.
For example, in Why Americans Hate Welfare, Gilens (2000) traces Americans’
fierce opposition to welfare policy to the media practice of systematically juxtaposing African-American images with negative coverage of poverty and
welfare. This association has subsequently encouraged, according to Gilens,
White Americans to attribute their negative stereotypes about Blacks to welfare recipients and welfare policy more generally. In addition, early critical
race theory proponent Bell (1972) offers in Race, Racism and American Law an
exhaustive historical analysis of the manner in which racial subjugation has
been preserved and reinforced by the American rule of law, citing examples
ranging from Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
RACIAL ATTITUDES
The central question in the racial attitudes literature is whether racial considerations influence political judgments in contemporary American politics.
Virtually all scholars agree that the biological racism that was so prevalent
throughout the country as late as the 1950s has almost completely disappeared in the twenty-first century. However, one group of scholars maintains
that a new form of racial prejudice has emerged in the post-Civil Rights era
and this modern form of bias remains a prominent feature in society. Some
critics argue that this ostensibly “new” form of racism actually represents
nonracial ideological conflicts in the electorate. Other critics accept the basic
premise that racial considerations remain salient but dispute that this represents a “new” form of prejudice.
Kinder and Sears (1981; also see Kinder and Sanders 1996) contend that a
new form of racial prejudice, alternatively called symbolic racism or racial
resentment, arose in the aftermath of the civil unrest that plagued American
cities in the late 1960s. According to these authors, these events caused
Whites to feel angry rather than sympathetic toward African-Americans.
Many Whites felt that minorities should be grateful for the progress achieved
through the Civil Rights Movement and that any lingering racial inequities
were primarily due to Blacks’ reluctance to fully embrace the Protestant
work ethic. For this reason, many Whites were inclined to oppose policies
designed to assist African-Americans. Inherent racial inferiority, however,
did not play a significant role in these attitudes.
Sniderman and Carmines (1997) advance an opposing view on White
racial attitudes. They argue that White opposition to policies that would
disproportionately advance minority interests are driven not by Whites’

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

antipathy toward racial minorities, but rather by their principled commitment to race-neutral political values, such as limited government and
equality of opportunity. Moreover, they purport to show that policies framed
in universal terms are far more likely to engender support than race-specific
policies such as affirmative action.
Bobo and Tuan (2006) are less interested in whether racial considerations
influence political judgments, but rather how this influence is manifest.
In order to address this question, Bobo and Tuan focus on the issue of
Native American (Chippewa) treaty rights dispute in Wisconsin. In brief,
this issue involved a court decision in Wisconsin in the 1980s that enforced
long-standing treaty rights for Native Americans in the state involving
access to fishing. The authors examine four possible theoretical explanations
for White opposition to the enforcement of Native American treaty rights:
self-interest concerns; the ostensibly race-neutral injustice frame; traditional
prejudice and symbolic racism; and finally the group position theory. Bobo and
Tuan argue that the group position theory represents an effective synthesis of
all the theories they examine. Consistent with their expectations, they report
that there is considerable overlap across the four theories—consistent with
the group position framework—but not consistent with the injustice frame
or symbolic racism. Thus, Bobo and Tuan conclude that the most effective
and efficient way to characterize intergroup relations in the Wisconsin treaty
dispute, and more broadly, is with the group position theory.
STRATEGIES: RACIAL MINORITY INCORPORATION AND REPRESENTATION
Black Power, by Ture and Hamilton (1967), argues that the advancement of
African-Americans must be preceded by the creation of an autonomous Black
economic and political power base. As a result, interracial political coalitions
are deemed to be of only secondary importance. This groundbreaking book
has largely set the tone for subsequent works, which attempt to pinpoint the
best means through which that power base can be established and sustained.
In their influential treatise on the evolution of racial politics Protest is
not Enough, Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984) offer a model through
which minorities attain greater political access by becoming incorporated
into the local governing regime. They argue that the strategic paradigm
pursued by minorities must undergo a necessary shift from demand-protest
to electoral-mobilization activities. In short, the election of minorities to office
should be viewed as the most effective means through which minorities can
achieve their political goals. Accordingly, much of the subsequent research
has explored the impact of minority office holding on the socio-economic
status of minority communities.

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Bobo and Gilliam (1990) examine the political consequences of descriptive
representation, a condition met when a group shares a relevant demographic
characteristic such as race or gender with their elected official. They argue
that the presence of a Black mayor signals to African-American constituents
that there is a greater likelihood of responsiveness from the local governing regime. As a result, Blacks are more trusting, more efficacious, more
informed about local government, and more likely to participate at greater
rates than Blacks who lack descriptive representation. In a similar vein, Tate
(2003) finds that African-American constituents who are represented by
Black members of Congress (MCs) are significantly more supportive of their
legislators than comparable citizens with White representatives. She also
finds, however, that Blacks are not more likely to participate in congressional
elections when Black MCs represent them.
Finally, challenging the work of Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984),
Smith (1996) makes the provocative claim that the methods of incorporation
sought by Blacks have led to unfavorable results, as litigation has been met
with symbolism, the ascension of Blacks to elite positions has resulted in
their cooptation, and forceful demands for responsiveness from Blacks have
been ignored. Indeed, as the debate over the best strategies for attainment
of political equity rage on, they largely remain guided by the framework
established by Ture and Hamilton (1967).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
RACIAL DIVERSITY
Much of the foundational work shaping the scholarly understanding of racial
disenfranchisement has been limited in focus to the Black–White paradigm.
One of the most promising recent directions of race work has been the proliferation of work on the attitudes, ideologies, and behavior of non-Black racial
and ethnic groups. For instance, scholars have explored the political consequences of Hispanics’ adherence to their respective national-origin identities
as opposed to a pan-ethnic “Hispanic” or “Latino” racial identity, as well
as the conditions under which a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity becomes more
salient (Barrera, 2008; Barreto, Manzano, Ramirez, & Rim, 2009; Beltran, 2010;
Hajnal and Lee, 2011; Lee, 2008). Further, a number of scholars conducted a
unique survey of Arab Americans in the Detroit area to examine the tenuous
relationship between ethnicity and citizenship in the post-9/11 era (see Baker
et al., 2009).

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APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY TO RACIAL ATTITUDE STUDIES
Social psychologists and political scientists have recently ventured into new
and controversial territory as they have sought to understand contemporary racial attitudes. For example, a provocative piece by Goff, Eberhardt,
Williams, and Jackson (2008) addresses two basic research questions. First,
they examine whether people continue to associate African-Americans with
apes. And, second, assuming this association still exists they wonder if this
influences individual judgments about criminal suspects, particularly when
the alleged perpetrator is Black. In order to answer these questions, Goff
and his colleagues rely on five different experimental studies. In spite of
the fact that overt associations between African-Americans and apes have
long since become unacceptable in mainstream culture, the authors find that
their experimental subjects are more likely to implicitly associate Blacks with
apes. They also report that by subliminally priming subjects to think about
apes, but not big cats, their subjects were more likely to condone police brutality directed against a Black suspect, but not a White suspect. Schreiber
and Iaconi (2011) wade deep into the waters of neuroscience, by exploring
how brain-imaging technology can illuminate long-standing political questions. By identifying which areas of the brain are activated by exposure to
stereotypic and counter-stereotypic images, the authors seek to determine
whether individuals’ aversion to negative depictions of racial minorities is
driven by the minorities’ race or simply by the norm violation being depicted.
Finally, Perez (2010) finds evidence from survey experiments that individuals’ subconscious attitudes about immigrants—measured through implicit
association tests (IAT)—are nontrivial predictors of their conscious political
judgments.
ASSESSING POLICY IMPACTS OF STRATEGIES FOR MINORITY ADVANCEMENT
Finally, emergent work has made use of sophisticated methodological
techniques to examine the policy outputs associated with differing strategies
employed by minorities to achieve racial equality. For instance, Hopkins
and McCabe (working paper 2011) employ a regression discontinuity design
to examine how and where the expenditures of Black mayors differ from
those of White mayors. In his forthcoming book, Daniel Gillion (2013) builds
and tests a model of political protest and finds evidence that over the past
several decades, the three branches of government have demonstrated
varying forms of responsiveness to African-American protest activity.
Finally, Phoenix, Piston, and Hutchings (working paper 2013) utilize a
unique multi-racial and multi-ethnic national survey and find that under
particular contexts, Black citizens participate less under African-American
mayors than Blacks living under White mayors. Current and future research

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will continue to challenge conventional wisdom on the opportunities and
constraints facing minority groups seeking an end to continued patterns of
disenfranchisement.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
FUTURE TRENDS IN RESEARCH
As scholarly inquiries into the disenfranchisement and empowerment of
racial minorities continue to evolve and adapt to new opportunities and
constraints in relevant fields of research, a number of trends will likely be
prevalent. One of those is continued and growing reliance on innovative
experimental designs. Expect to see the influence of experiments rises sharply
as sources of novel information on race-relevant attitudes, policy preferences, and participation strategies. This change is due, in part, to the growth
of Internet survey firms that have made the acquisition of experimental
data—on minority and nonminority populations—more feasible.
The primary virtue of well-designed experiments is that they allow
the researcher to isolate the precise causal mechanism responsible for
some politically relevant outcome. There are, of course, limitations to
this strategy as well with perhaps the chief drawback being the artificial
nature of many experiments, particularly lab experiments. Some recent
work has successfully avoided this limitation but introducing randomized
experiments into the field. An excellent example of this method is found
in the work of Butler and Broockman (2011). These researchers randomly
assigned state legislators across the nation to receive different versions of
an e-mail request for information on how to register to vote. One version
of the request was attributed to “Jake Mueller,” while another version was
attributed to “DeShawn Jackson.” The expectation was that legislators
would perceive Mueller as White and Jackson as African-American and
the research question was whether “race” would influence legislative
responsiveness. Butler and Broockman uncover strong evidence that White
state legislators—both Democrats and Republicans—were significantly less
responsive to the request of an African-American constituent compared
to the identical request from a White constituent. Interestingly, minority
legislators were systematically biased in favor of the Black constituent.
Another trend expected to proliferate in future studies is continued exploration of the neurological underpinnings of racial attitudes. Many scholars
have demonstrated that the more racially tolerant political environment of
the last half-century has not necessarily been accompanied by similarly broad
shifts in support among Whites for policies designed to achieve racial equality. Given this apparent puzzle, scholars of racial attitudes have been forced

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to rely on increasing subtle and unobtrusive methods to explain public opinion on matters of race. Studies exploring the manner in which racial attitudes are related to existing predispositions and personality types constitute
a promising vein of inquiry. Further, rigorous examinations of which areas of
the brain are activated by race-relevant stimuli can lend great insight to the
individual origins of racial attitudes.
Finally, a trend expected to characterize the future of research of racial disenfranchisement is the continued departure from the binary Black–White
paradigm and an increased examination of multiple racial and ethnic minority groups. Scholars will likely continue to glean novel information about the
ideologies and behavior of distinct racial and ethnic group populations concentrated in particular geographic regions, through either ethnographic studies or fielding of small-scale surveys. The 2003 Detroit Arab American Study
serves as a prototype for such data collective endeavors. In addition, the 2004
National Politics Study is a rare example of a nationally representative survey
data set that is a rich source of information on oversamples Black, Hispanic,
Asian, and Caribbean respondents. Moving forward scholars can utilize such
data—and find creative means of collecting their own—that allow them to
not only make inferences about distinct minority groups but also compare
ideologies and behaviors between groups. Such work will provide much
needed new paradigms for understanding minority disenfranchisement.
KEY QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES MOVING FORWARD
The Obama era potentially represents a new chapter of minority mobilization
and incorporation into mainstream politics, one fraught with unique new
challenges and opportunities. This era will both test established paradigms
of understanding minority disenfranchisement and provide valuable testing
ground for new paradigms.
Emergent work has already arisen to challenge the notion that the election
of the first president of African descent signals that race is no longer a significant inhibiting factor in the lives of racial minorities. Hutchings (2009) finds
a wealth of evidence that even at the outset of the Obama era, the attitudinal
divide between Blacks and Whites remains as stark as ever. And further, the
divide remains about as large among younger age cohorts. Piston (2010) finds
evidence that adherence to racial stereotypes played a significantly larger role
in voters’ decision not to vote for Obama than it has for previous Democratic
presidential candidates, suggesting that Obama lost some White support due
simply to his race.
Future work will inevitably grapple with the impact that Obama’s
tenure has had on the political orientations, judgments, and outcomes
of racial and ethnic minorities. Does descriptive representation at this

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level breed increased activism or complacency? How does the presence of
an African-American in office affect the political strategies undertaken by
minorities to articulate and aggregate their demands? Will counter-insurgent
tactics such as protests be embraced or shunned? And going forward, does
the presence of a Black president significantly alter the broader strategic
paradigm of minority incorporation? Will minority leaders coalesce around
a strategy of mobilizing citizen action, or pursue with more vigor a strategy
of recruiting and grooming minorities for attainment of elite positions?
Finally, to what extent will minority incorporation at this level engender
retrenchment from the old guard?
Another key question concerns how the rapidly changing demographics
of the American electorate—particularly the rise of the Latino American
population as a “sleeping giant”—will influence race relations at the citizen
and elite levels. Immigrant groups have the potential to dramatically alter
the electoral landscape, leading scholars to ask how immigrants cultivate
political identities and what strategies they will pursue for incorporation.
To what extent will the processes of political identity formation and political
behavioral orientation for Latino and Asian immigrants be similar to or
deviate from the process for African-Americans? Going forward, what are
the prospects for coalition or competition between groups for economic and
political resources? What strategies will be adopted by political elites to
recruit these immigrant groups into their folds?
For scholars to gain the most leverage on these questions, they must be
willing to revise and at times even upset the extant modes of thinking about
minority ideologies and behavior. Forging new ground in our empirical
understanding of racial disenfranchisement requires continued forward
thinking, undergirded by the theoretical foundations laid by previous work,
while not bound to the paradigms established by such work.
REFERENCES
Baker, W., Howell, S., Jamal, A., Lin, A. C., Shyrock, A., Stockton, R., & Tessler, M.
(2009). Citizenship and crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Barrera, M. (2008). Are Latinos a racialized minority? Sociological Perspectives, 51(2),
305–324.
Barreto, M., Manzano, S., Ramirez, R., & Rim, K. (2009). Mobilization, participation,
and solidaridad: Latino participation in the 2006 immigration protest rallies. Urban
Affairs Review, 42, 736–764.
Bell, D. A. (1972). Race, racism, and American law. New York, NY: Aspen Publishers.
Beltran, C. (2010). The trouble with unity: Latino politics and the creation of identity. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Blumer, H. (1958). Race prejudice as a sense of group position. Pacific Sociological
Review, 1, 3–7.
Bobo, L., & Gilliam, F., Jr. (1990). Race, sociopolitical participation and Black empowerment. American Political Science Review, 84(2), 377–393.
Bobo, L. D., & Tuan, M. (2006). Prejudice in politics: Group position, public opinion, and
the Wisconsin treaty rights dispute. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Browning, R. P., Marshall, D. R., & Tabb, D. (1984). Protest is not enough: The struggle of
blacks and Hispanics for equality in urban politics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Butler, D. M., & Broockman, D. E. (2011). Do politicians racially discriminate against
constituents? A field experiment on state legislators. American Journal of Political
Science, 55(3), 463–477.
Gilens, M. (2000). Why Americans hate welfare: Race, media, and the politics of antipoverty
policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gillion, D. Q. (2013). The political power of protest: Minority activism and shifts in public
policy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human:
Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 292–306.
Hajnal, Z. L., & Lee, T. (2011). Why Americans don’t join the party: Race, immigration,
and the failure (of political parties) to engage the electorate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Hopkins, D. J. & And McCabe, K. T. (2011). After it’s too late: Estimating the
policy impacts of black mayors in U.S. cities. Working paper. Retrieved from
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1632390
Hutchings, V. L. (2009). Change or more of the same?: Evaluating racial attitudes in
the Obama era. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(5), 917–942.
Kinder, D., & Sanders, L. (1996). Divided by color. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Kinder, D., & Sears, D. O. (1981). Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial
threats to the good life. Journal of Personality and Social Context, 40(3), 414–431.
Lee, T. (2008). Race, immigration, and the identity-to-politics link. Annual Review of
Political Science, 11, 457–478.
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma (Transaction Publishers. Original edition).
New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to
the 1990s (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Perez, E. O. (2010). Explicit evidence on the import of implicit attitudes: The IAT and
immigration policy judgments. Political Behavior, 32(4), 517–545.
Phoenix, D., Piston, S., & Hutchings, V. L. (2013). The (Dis)empowerment effect?:
Revisiting the effects of localized descriptive representation on the participation
of African Americans. (Manuscript in-progress).
Piston, S. (2010). How explicit racial prejudice hurt Obama in the 2008 election. Political Behavior, 32(4), 431–451.

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Schreiber, D., & Iacoboni, M. (2011). Huxtables on the brain: An fMRI study of race
and norm violation. Political Psychology, 33(3), 313–330.
Smith, R. C. (1996). We have no leaders: African-Americans in the post-civil rights era.
New York, NY: SUNY Press.
Sniderman, P. M., & Carmines, E. G. (1997). Reaching beyond race. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Steinberg, S. (2007). Race relations: A critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Tate, K. (2003). Black faces in the mirror. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ture, K., & Hamilton, C. [1992] (1967). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York,
NY: Vintage Books.

FURTHER READING
Barker, L. J. (Ed.) (1992). Ethnic politics and civil liberties. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transacation Publishers.
Brown, R. A., & Shaw, T. C. (2002). Separate nations: Two attitudinal dimensions of
black Nationalism. The Journal of Politics, 64(1), 22–44.
Davis, D. W., & Brown, R. W. (2002). The antipathy of black nationalism: Behavioral
and attitudinal implications of an African-American ideology. American Journal of
Political Science, 46(2), 239–252.
Dawson, M. C. (1994). Behind the mule: Race and class in African-American politics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dawson, M. C. (2011). Not in our lifetimes: The future of black politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kinkner, P. A., & Smith, R. M. (2002). The unsteady march: The rise and decline of racial
equality in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press.
Mendelberg, T. (2001). The race card: Campaign strategy, implicit messages, and the norm
of equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morris, A. D. (1984). The origins of the Civil Rights movement: Black communities organizing for change. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance theory: A new synthesis. In Social
dominance (pp. 31–57). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sonenshein, R. J. (1993). Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stokes, A. K. (2003). Latino group consciousness and political participation. American
Politics Research, 31, 361–378.
Valentino, N. A., Hutchings, V. L., & White, I. K. (2002). Cues that matter: How political ads prime racial attitudes during campaigns. American Political Science Review,
96(1), 75–90.
Williams, L. F. (2003). The constraint of race: Legacies of white skin privilege. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press.

VINCENT L. HUTCHINGS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Vincent L. Hutchings is a Professor of Political Science at the University of
Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. His

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

research examines the ways in which political elites frame policy debates
in ways that activate and make politically relevant the voters’ sympathies
and/or antipathies for particular racial groups. His work has appeared in
the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review, the
Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.
He has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation,
most recently (2009) for his project entitled “Elite Communications and
Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century.” He is currently the Principal
Investigator (along with Simon Jackman, Gary Segura of Stanford University
and Ted Brader) of the American National Election Study.
DAVIN L. PHOENIX SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Davin L. Phoenix is an assistant professor of political science at UCI. His
research interests include race and representation, mobilization of marginalized groups, and political communications. He is a 2007 NSF Predoctoral
grant recipient.
RELATED ESSAYS
Economic Models of Voting (Political Science), Ian G. Anson and Timothy
Hellwig
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science),
Sarah F. Anzia
Stereotype Content (Sociology), Beatrice H. Capestany and Lasana T. Harris
Elites (Sociology), Johan S. G. Chu and Mark S. Mizruchi
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Government Formation and Cabinets (Political Science), Sona N. Golder
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Political Inequality (Sociology), Jeff Manza
Participatory Governance (Political Science), Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian
Wampler
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Moore and Ryan M. Welch
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et al.
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Assimilation and its Discontents (Sociology), Min Zhou



Racial Disenfranchisement
VINCENT L. HUTCHINGS and DAVIN L. PHOENIX

Abstract
Inquiries into racial disenfranchisement offer a crucial lens through which to critically assess the capacity of the US political system to sufficiently respond to the
demands of an increasingly diverse society. Various social science disciplines have
employed a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies to explore the institutional, cultural, and psychological antecedents of disenfranchisement, as well as
strategies to achieve racial equity. This essay reviews a small slice of the scholarly
perspectives offered on racial inequity. It provides particular emphasis on theories
of racial subjugation, racial attitudes, and the political behavior of racial minorities.
The discussion of current and future trends in research on racial disenfranchisement
explores the questions raised and insight offered by examinations of the distinct
experiences of diverse racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as the potential
impact of the “Obama era” on the state of race relations in the United States.

INTRODUCTION
Disenfranchisement is conventionally understood as the revocation of an
individual or group’s basic citizenship rights, particularly with respect to
voting. But across multiple disciplines of social science, inquiries into the
disenfranchisement of marginalized groups—typically racial and ethnic
minorities—entail examinations of the societal forces that diminish the
broader political influence of minorities. Classic and emergent work has
both (i) examined the impact of this diminished political influence on the
distinct experiences of minority groups and (ii) explored the means through
which these minority groups can achieve greater access and equity within
the system.
Much of the scholarly work on racial disenfranchisement has been framed
around assessing the opportunities and constraints offered by the political,
legal, and cultural landscape for racial minorities in the post-Civil Rights era.
Studies arising from this framing include explorations of the evolution of citizen attitudes on race and examinations of how legal and political institutions
have evolved in order to adapt to (or counteract) the political influence of
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and other racial minorities.
Still other work focuses on the attitudes, ideologies, and strategies cultivated
and adopted by minority group members as they have sought to capitalize
on the removal of formal legal barriers to their economic and political participation. Together, these lines of work paint a picture of a constant tug of war
between racial and ethnic minority groups seeking various forms of equity
and restitution, and legal and political elites responding with either retrenchment or rapprochement, contingent on various factors.
This essay summarizes relevant research, identifies intriguing lines of emergent work, and discusses inquiries and methods that may guide future work
and shed further insight on the distinct role of race in US politics.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
THEORIES OF RACIAL SUBJUGATION
Myrdal (1944) labeled the treatment of racial minorities in the United
States—particularly African-Americans—as an “American Dilemma.”
According to him, (White) Americans were torn between a genuine commitment to the ideal of liberty and justice for all, and a steadfast belief in the
tenets of White Supremacy. Although Myrdal describes in painstaking detail
the routine injustice of the Jim Crow south, he ultimately concluded that as
more Americans learned of the plight of their fellow citizens, the American
creed would overwhelm the prejudicial instincts of White America. This
work was well received and its perspective on race relations became the
dominant paradigm among political observers and within much of the social
sciences (Steinberg, 2007). Over time, however, several scholars would offer
a somewhat different point of view.
The theory of group position, introduced by Blumer (1958), represents an alternative assessment of race relations. In this account, racial discrimination is
not simply borne out of ignorance but instead serves an instrumental function by helping to preserve the privileged status of the dominant groups
in society. Moreover, intergroup strife and competition derive from historically and elite-driven judgments about where in-group members ought to
be arrayed in the socio-political hierarchy relative to out-group members.
Omi and Winant (1994) develop a similar framework with their racial formation theory. They argue that race is a socially constructed category, and the
cultural and political significance that society attaches to this identity permeates virtually all domains of life. They maintain that socially constructed
race categories evolve and adapt with society, and are constantly leveraged
by contemporary elites to establish and reinforce unequal power relations
between groups.

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3

Following this theoretical foundation, numerous influential works examine the proliferation of either cultural norms or institutional policies that
work to reinforce the political, economic, and legal subjugation minorities.
For example, in Why Americans Hate Welfare, Gilens (2000) traces Americans’
fierce opposition to welfare policy to the media practice of systematically juxtaposing African-American images with negative coverage of poverty and
welfare. This association has subsequently encouraged, according to Gilens,
White Americans to attribute their negative stereotypes about Blacks to welfare recipients and welfare policy more generally. In addition, early critical
race theory proponent Bell (1972) offers in Race, Racism and American Law an
exhaustive historical analysis of the manner in which racial subjugation has
been preserved and reinforced by the American rule of law, citing examples
ranging from Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
RACIAL ATTITUDES
The central question in the racial attitudes literature is whether racial considerations influence political judgments in contemporary American politics.
Virtually all scholars agree that the biological racism that was so prevalent
throughout the country as late as the 1950s has almost completely disappeared in the twenty-first century. However, one group of scholars maintains
that a new form of racial prejudice has emerged in the post-Civil Rights era
and this modern form of bias remains a prominent feature in society. Some
critics argue that this ostensibly “new” form of racism actually represents
nonracial ideological conflicts in the electorate. Other critics accept the basic
premise that racial considerations remain salient but dispute that this represents a “new” form of prejudice.
Kinder and Sears (1981; also see Kinder and Sanders 1996) contend that a
new form of racial prejudice, alternatively called symbolic racism or racial
resentment, arose in the aftermath of the civil unrest that plagued American
cities in the late 1960s. According to these authors, these events caused
Whites to feel angry rather than sympathetic toward African-Americans.
Many Whites felt that minorities should be grateful for the progress achieved
through the Civil Rights Movement and that any lingering racial inequities
were primarily due to Blacks’ reluctance to fully embrace the Protestant
work ethic. For this reason, many Whites were inclined to oppose policies
designed to assist African-Americans. Inherent racial inferiority, however,
did not play a significant role in these attitudes.
Sniderman and Carmines (1997) advance an opposing view on White
racial attitudes. They argue that White opposition to policies that would
disproportionately advance minority interests are driven not by Whites’

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

antipathy toward racial minorities, but rather by their principled commitment to race-neutral political values, such as limited government and
equality of opportunity. Moreover, they purport to show that policies framed
in universal terms are far more likely to engender support than race-specific
policies such as affirmative action.
Bobo and Tuan (2006) are less interested in whether racial considerations
influence political judgments, but rather how this influence is manifest.
In order to address this question, Bobo and Tuan focus on the issue of
Native American (Chippewa) treaty rights dispute in Wisconsin. In brief,
this issue involved a court decision in Wisconsin in the 1980s that enforced
long-standing treaty rights for Native Americans in the state involving
access to fishing. The authors examine four possible theoretical explanations
for White opposition to the enforcement of Native American treaty rights:
self-interest concerns; the ostensibly race-neutral injustice frame; traditional
prejudice and symbolic racism; and finally the group position theory. Bobo and
Tuan argue that the group position theory represents an effective synthesis of
all the theories they examine. Consistent with their expectations, they report
that there is considerable overlap across the four theories—consistent with
the group position framework—but not consistent with the injustice frame
or symbolic racism. Thus, Bobo and Tuan conclude that the most effective
and efficient way to characterize intergroup relations in the Wisconsin treaty
dispute, and more broadly, is with the group position theory.
STRATEGIES: RACIAL MINORITY INCORPORATION AND REPRESENTATION
Black Power, by Ture and Hamilton (1967), argues that the advancement of
African-Americans must be preceded by the creation of an autonomous Black
economic and political power base. As a result, interracial political coalitions
are deemed to be of only secondary importance. This groundbreaking book
has largely set the tone for subsequent works, which attempt to pinpoint the
best means through which that power base can be established and sustained.
In their influential treatise on the evolution of racial politics Protest is
not Enough, Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984) offer a model through
which minorities attain greater political access by becoming incorporated
into the local governing regime. They argue that the strategic paradigm
pursued by minorities must undergo a necessary shift from demand-protest
to electoral-mobilization activities. In short, the election of minorities to office
should be viewed as the most effective means through which minorities can
achieve their political goals. Accordingly, much of the subsequent research
has explored the impact of minority office holding on the socio-economic
status of minority communities.

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5

Bobo and Gilliam (1990) examine the political consequences of descriptive
representation, a condition met when a group shares a relevant demographic
characteristic such as race or gender with their elected official. They argue
that the presence of a Black mayor signals to African-American constituents
that there is a greater likelihood of responsiveness from the local governing regime. As a result, Blacks are more trusting, more efficacious, more
informed about local government, and more likely to participate at greater
rates than Blacks who lack descriptive representation. In a similar vein, Tate
(2003) finds that African-American constituents who are represented by
Black members of Congress (MCs) are significantly more supportive of their
legislators than comparable citizens with White representatives. She also
finds, however, that Blacks are not more likely to participate in congressional
elections when Black MCs represent them.
Finally, challenging the work of Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984),
Smith (1996) makes the provocative claim that the methods of incorporation
sought by Blacks have led to unfavorable results, as litigation has been met
with symbolism, the ascension of Blacks to elite positions has resulted in
their cooptation, and forceful demands for responsiveness from Blacks have
been ignored. Indeed, as the debate over the best strategies for attainment
of political equity rage on, they largely remain guided by the framework
established by Ture and Hamilton (1967).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
RACIAL DIVERSITY
Much of the foundational work shaping the scholarly understanding of racial
disenfranchisement has been limited in focus to the Black–White paradigm.
One of the most promising recent directions of race work has been the proliferation of work on the attitudes, ideologies, and behavior of non-Black racial
and ethnic groups. For instance, scholars have explored the political consequences of Hispanics’ adherence to their respective national-origin identities
as opposed to a pan-ethnic “Hispanic” or “Latino” racial identity, as well
as the conditions under which a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity becomes more
salient (Barrera, 2008; Barreto, Manzano, Ramirez, & Rim, 2009; Beltran, 2010;
Hajnal and Lee, 2011; Lee, 2008). Further, a number of scholars conducted a
unique survey of Arab Americans in the Detroit area to examine the tenuous
relationship between ethnicity and citizenship in the post-9/11 era (see Baker
et al., 2009).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY TO RACIAL ATTITUDE STUDIES
Social psychologists and political scientists have recently ventured into new
and controversial territory as they have sought to understand contemporary racial attitudes. For example, a provocative piece by Goff, Eberhardt,
Williams, and Jackson (2008) addresses two basic research questions. First,
they examine whether people continue to associate African-Americans with
apes. And, second, assuming this association still exists they wonder if this
influences individual judgments about criminal suspects, particularly when
the alleged perpetrator is Black. In order to answer these questions, Goff
and his colleagues rely on five different experimental studies. In spite of
the fact that overt associations between African-Americans and apes have
long since become unacceptable in mainstream culture, the authors find that
their experimental subjects are more likely to implicitly associate Blacks with
apes. They also report that by subliminally priming subjects to think about
apes, but not big cats, their subjects were more likely to condone police brutality directed against a Black suspect, but not a White suspect. Schreiber
and Iaconi (2011) wade deep into the waters of neuroscience, by exploring
how brain-imaging technology can illuminate long-standing political questions. By identifying which areas of the brain are activated by exposure to
stereotypic and counter-stereotypic images, the authors seek to determine
whether individuals’ aversion to negative depictions of racial minorities is
driven by the minorities’ race or simply by the norm violation being depicted.
Finally, Perez (2010) finds evidence from survey experiments that individuals’ subconscious attitudes about immigrants—measured through implicit
association tests (IAT)—are nontrivial predictors of their conscious political
judgments.
ASSESSING POLICY IMPACTS OF STRATEGIES FOR MINORITY ADVANCEMENT
Finally, emergent work has made use of sophisticated methodological
techniques to examine the policy outputs associated with differing strategies
employed by minorities to achieve racial equality. For instance, Hopkins
and McCabe (working paper 2011) employ a regression discontinuity design
to examine how and where the expenditures of Black mayors differ from
those of White mayors. In his forthcoming book, Daniel Gillion (2013) builds
and tests a model of political protest and finds evidence that over the past
several decades, the three branches of government have demonstrated
varying forms of responsiveness to African-American protest activity.
Finally, Phoenix, Piston, and Hutchings (working paper 2013) utilize a
unique multi-racial and multi-ethnic national survey and find that under
particular contexts, Black citizens participate less under African-American
mayors than Blacks living under White mayors. Current and future research

Racial Disenfranchisement

7

will continue to challenge conventional wisdom on the opportunities and
constraints facing minority groups seeking an end to continued patterns of
disenfranchisement.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
FUTURE TRENDS IN RESEARCH
As scholarly inquiries into the disenfranchisement and empowerment of
racial minorities continue to evolve and adapt to new opportunities and
constraints in relevant fields of research, a number of trends will likely be
prevalent. One of those is continued and growing reliance on innovative
experimental designs. Expect to see the influence of experiments rises sharply
as sources of novel information on race-relevant attitudes, policy preferences, and participation strategies. This change is due, in part, to the growth
of Internet survey firms that have made the acquisition of experimental
data—on minority and nonminority populations—more feasible.
The primary virtue of well-designed experiments is that they allow
the researcher to isolate the precise causal mechanism responsible for
some politically relevant outcome. There are, of course, limitations to
this strategy as well with perhaps the chief drawback being the artificial
nature of many experiments, particularly lab experiments. Some recent
work has successfully avoided this limitation but introducing randomized
experiments into the field. An excellent example of this method is found
in the work of Butler and Broockman (2011). These researchers randomly
assigned state legislators across the nation to receive different versions of
an e-mail request for information on how to register to vote. One version
of the request was attributed to “Jake Mueller,” while another version was
attributed to “DeShawn Jackson.” The expectation was that legislators
would perceive Mueller as White and Jackson as African-American and
the research question was whether “race” would influence legislative
responsiveness. Butler and Broockman uncover strong evidence that White
state legislators—both Democrats and Republicans—were significantly less
responsive to the request of an African-American constituent compared
to the identical request from a White constituent. Interestingly, minority
legislators were systematically biased in favor of the Black constituent.
Another trend expected to proliferate in future studies is continued exploration of the neurological underpinnings of racial attitudes. Many scholars
have demonstrated that the more racially tolerant political environment of
the last half-century has not necessarily been accompanied by similarly broad
shifts in support among Whites for policies designed to achieve racial equality. Given this apparent puzzle, scholars of racial attitudes have been forced

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to rely on increasing subtle and unobtrusive methods to explain public opinion on matters of race. Studies exploring the manner in which racial attitudes are related to existing predispositions and personality types constitute
a promising vein of inquiry. Further, rigorous examinations of which areas of
the brain are activated by race-relevant stimuli can lend great insight to the
individual origins of racial attitudes.
Finally, a trend expected to characterize the future of research of racial disenfranchisement is the continued departure from the binary Black–White
paradigm and an increased examination of multiple racial and ethnic minority groups. Scholars will likely continue to glean novel information about the
ideologies and behavior of distinct racial and ethnic group populations concentrated in particular geographic regions, through either ethnographic studies or fielding of small-scale surveys. The 2003 Detroit Arab American Study
serves as a prototype for such data collective endeavors. In addition, the 2004
National Politics Study is a rare example of a nationally representative survey
data set that is a rich source of information on oversamples Black, Hispanic,
Asian, and Caribbean respondents. Moving forward scholars can utilize such
data—and find creative means of collecting their own—that allow them to
not only make inferences about distinct minority groups but also compare
ideologies and behaviors between groups. Such work will provide much
needed new paradigms for understanding minority disenfranchisement.
KEY QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES MOVING FORWARD
The Obama era potentially represents a new chapter of minority mobilization
and incorporation into mainstream politics, one fraught with unique new
challenges and opportunities. This era will both test established paradigms
of understanding minority disenfranchisement and provide valuable testing
ground for new paradigms.
Emergent work has already arisen to challenge the notion that the election
of the first president of African descent signals that race is no longer a significant inhibiting factor in the lives of racial minorities. Hutchings (2009) finds
a wealth of evidence that even at the outset of the Obama era, the attitudinal
divide between Blacks and Whites remains as stark as ever. And further, the
divide remains about as large among younger age cohorts. Piston (2010) finds
evidence that adherence to racial stereotypes played a significantly larger role
in voters’ decision not to vote for Obama than it has for previous Democratic
presidential candidates, suggesting that Obama lost some White support due
simply to his race.
Future work will inevitably grapple with the impact that Obama’s
tenure has had on the political orientations, judgments, and outcomes
of racial and ethnic minorities. Does descriptive representation at this

Racial Disenfranchisement

9

level breed increased activism or complacency? How does the presence of
an African-American in office affect the political strategies undertaken by
minorities to articulate and aggregate their demands? Will counter-insurgent
tactics such as protests be embraced or shunned? And going forward, does
the presence of a Black president significantly alter the broader strategic
paradigm of minority incorporation? Will minority leaders coalesce around
a strategy of mobilizing citizen action, or pursue with more vigor a strategy
of recruiting and grooming minorities for attainment of elite positions?
Finally, to what extent will minority incorporation at this level engender
retrenchment from the old guard?
Another key question concerns how the rapidly changing demographics
of the American electorate—particularly the rise of the Latino American
population as a “sleeping giant”—will influence race relations at the citizen
and elite levels. Immigrant groups have the potential to dramatically alter
the electoral landscape, leading scholars to ask how immigrants cultivate
political identities and what strategies they will pursue for incorporation.
To what extent will the processes of political identity formation and political
behavioral orientation for Latino and Asian immigrants be similar to or
deviate from the process for African-Americans? Going forward, what are
the prospects for coalition or competition between groups for economic and
political resources? What strategies will be adopted by political elites to
recruit these immigrant groups into their folds?
For scholars to gain the most leverage on these questions, they must be
willing to revise and at times even upset the extant modes of thinking about
minority ideologies and behavior. Forging new ground in our empirical
understanding of racial disenfranchisement requires continued forward
thinking, undergirded by the theoretical foundations laid by previous work,
while not bound to the paradigms established by such work.
REFERENCES
Baker, W., Howell, S., Jamal, A., Lin, A. C., Shyrock, A., Stockton, R., & Tessler, M.
(2009). Citizenship and crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Barrera, M. (2008). Are Latinos a racialized minority? Sociological Perspectives, 51(2),
305–324.
Barreto, M., Manzano, S., Ramirez, R., & Rim, K. (2009). Mobilization, participation,
and solidaridad: Latino participation in the 2006 immigration protest rallies. Urban
Affairs Review, 42, 736–764.
Bell, D. A. (1972). Race, racism, and American law. New York, NY: Aspen Publishers.
Beltran, C. (2010). The trouble with unity: Latino politics and the creation of identity. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Blumer, H. (1958). Race prejudice as a sense of group position. Pacific Sociological
Review, 1, 3–7.
Bobo, L., & Gilliam, F., Jr. (1990). Race, sociopolitical participation and Black empowerment. American Political Science Review, 84(2), 377–393.
Bobo, L. D., & Tuan, M. (2006). Prejudice in politics: Group position, public opinion, and
the Wisconsin treaty rights dispute. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Browning, R. P., Marshall, D. R., & Tabb, D. (1984). Protest is not enough: The struggle of
blacks and Hispanics for equality in urban politics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Butler, D. M., & Broockman, D. E. (2011). Do politicians racially discriminate against
constituents? A field experiment on state legislators. American Journal of Political
Science, 55(3), 463–477.
Gilens, M. (2000). Why Americans hate welfare: Race, media, and the politics of antipoverty
policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gillion, D. Q. (2013). The political power of protest: Minority activism and shifts in public
policy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human:
Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 292–306.
Hajnal, Z. L., & Lee, T. (2011). Why Americans don’t join the party: Race, immigration,
and the failure (of political parties) to engage the electorate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Hopkins, D. J. & And McCabe, K. T. (2011). After it’s too late: Estimating the
policy impacts of black mayors in U.S. cities. Working paper. Retrieved from
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1632390
Hutchings, V. L. (2009). Change or more of the same?: Evaluating racial attitudes in
the Obama era. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(5), 917–942.
Kinder, D., & Sanders, L. (1996). Divided by color. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Kinder, D., & Sears, D. O. (1981). Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial
threats to the good life. Journal of Personality and Social Context, 40(3), 414–431.
Lee, T. (2008). Race, immigration, and the identity-to-politics link. Annual Review of
Political Science, 11, 457–478.
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma (Transaction Publishers. Original edition).
New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to
the 1990s (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Perez, E. O. (2010). Explicit evidence on the import of implicit attitudes: The IAT and
immigration policy judgments. Political Behavior, 32(4), 517–545.
Phoenix, D., Piston, S., & Hutchings, V. L. (2013). The (Dis)empowerment effect?:
Revisiting the effects of localized descriptive representation on the participation
of African Americans. (Manuscript in-progress).
Piston, S. (2010). How explicit racial prejudice hurt Obama in the 2008 election. Political Behavior, 32(4), 431–451.

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Schreiber, D., & Iacoboni, M. (2011). Huxtables on the brain: An fMRI study of race
and norm violation. Political Psychology, 33(3), 313–330.
Smith, R. C. (1996). We have no leaders: African-Americans in the post-civil rights era.
New York, NY: SUNY Press.
Sniderman, P. M., & Carmines, E. G. (1997). Reaching beyond race. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Steinberg, S. (2007). Race relations: A critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Tate, K. (2003). Black faces in the mirror. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ture, K., & Hamilton, C. [1992] (1967). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York,
NY: Vintage Books.

FURTHER READING
Barker, L. J. (Ed.) (1992). Ethnic politics and civil liberties. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transacation Publishers.
Brown, R. A., & Shaw, T. C. (2002). Separate nations: Two attitudinal dimensions of
black Nationalism. The Journal of Politics, 64(1), 22–44.
Davis, D. W., & Brown, R. W. (2002). The antipathy of black nationalism: Behavioral
and attitudinal implications of an African-American ideology. American Journal of
Political Science, 46(2), 239–252.
Dawson, M. C. (1994). Behind the mule: Race and class in African-American politics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dawson, M. C. (2011). Not in our lifetimes: The future of black politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kinkner, P. A., & Smith, R. M. (2002). The unsteady march: The rise and decline of racial
equality in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press.
Mendelberg, T. (2001). The race card: Campaign strategy, implicit messages, and the norm
of equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morris, A. D. (1984). The origins of the Civil Rights movement: Black communities organizing for change. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance theory: A new synthesis. In Social
dominance (pp. 31–57). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sonenshein, R. J. (1993). Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stokes, A. K. (2003). Latino group consciousness and political participation. American
Politics Research, 31, 361–378.
Valentino, N. A., Hutchings, V. L., & White, I. K. (2002). Cues that matter: How political ads prime racial attitudes during campaigns. American Political Science Review,
96(1), 75–90.
Williams, L. F. (2003). The constraint of race: Legacies of white skin privilege. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press.

VINCENT L. HUTCHINGS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Vincent L. Hutchings is a Professor of Political Science at the University of
Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. His

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

research examines the ways in which political elites frame policy debates
in ways that activate and make politically relevant the voters’ sympathies
and/or antipathies for particular racial groups. His work has appeared in
the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review, the
Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.
He has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation,
most recently (2009) for his project entitled “Elite Communications and
Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century.” He is currently the Principal
Investigator (along with Simon Jackman, Gary Segura of Stanford University
and Ted Brader) of the American National Election Study.
DAVIN L. PHOENIX SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Davin L. Phoenix is an assistant professor of political science at UCI. His
research interests include race and representation, mobilization of marginalized groups, and political communications. He is a 2007 NSF Predoctoral
grant recipient.
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