It is summer 2016, and the politics of race and ethnicity has a certain “back to the future” feel to it. This throwback sensation seems most apparent in the United States, where a major party presidential candidate launched his presidential campaign with a series of slurs against Mexican immigrants. Far from paying a political price for such rhetoric, the candidate vaulted to the top of the Republican party's nomination process, with unsavory comments about Latino judges, Muslim Americans, and Chinese negotiators sprinkled along the way. Not only did Donald J. Trump's rise lay waste to any remaining notion of the United States as having entered a post-racial era with the election of President Obama—a notion already discredited in books by Tesler and Sears (Reference Tesler and Sears2010), Skocpol and Williamson (Reference Skocpol and Vanessa2012), and Parker and Barreto (Reference Parker and Barreto2014)—he also re-introduced explicit racial appeals to electoral politics and showed that such appeals might not be nearly as politically costly as presumed. In addition to playing a prominent role in presidential politics, race also played an important role in debates and political mobilization over policing, excessive use of force, immigrant detention, and immigration enforcement.
The United States was not the only country where race, ethnicity, and immigration played an important role in national politics. In Great Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) made immigration a focus issue of the Brexit referendum (Donnella Reference Donnella2016) and even went so far as creating a poster that was reminiscent of Nazi-era propaganda (Tharoor Reference Tharoor2016). Perhaps not surprisingly, exit poll results from the referendum showed a sharp divide by race and religion, with Christians and whites voting to leave the European Union and those identifying as Muslim, Asian, Black, and Chinese voting to remain (Lord Ashcroft Polls 2016; also see Colantone and Stanig Reference Colantone and Stanig2016). Race and religion also flared up as contentious issues in other parts of Europe, with the Syrian refugee crisis, Islamist terrorist attacks, and the rise of right-wing political parties all playing important roles. Finally, contentious politics over caste and religion emerged in India, with reverberations in the United States as communities fought over how to represent Indian society in California's high school textbooks (Medina Reference Medina2016).
The articles in this issue do not directly address these various developments; the contributions were written and reviewed several months prior. Still, they touch on some important areas that can help inform our understandings of race, ethnicity, and politics as they play out in the world today. First, Dvora Yanow and colleagues show that state institutions play an important role in the construction and measurement of “race-ethnicity” in European countries like the Netherlands, despite explicit prohibitions on the collection and use of data on race. Thus, schools, police departments, and even hospitals become important sites for the collection of data on national origins and ethnic identities, with the implicit equation of Dutch with European birth and Caucasian identity.
Next, Amit Ahuja and colleagues consider the extent to which colorism plays a role in India's electoral politics by analyzing the effects of skin tone on electoral support in an experimental context. Importantly, they find that complexion can serve as an identity marker for other political identities, and that mobilization by lower-caste groups can help neutralize the more general preference in Indian society for lighter skin. Kristyn Karl and Timothy Ryan pick up on a similar theme in their article, analyzing the extent to which race serves as an implicit marker for ideology among white voters, and whether providing new information can help blunt the impact of racialized stereotypes about the political leanings of black and white candidates. The authors find that white voters generally think of black candidates as more liberal than white candidates, but that providing specific information about party and ideology helps blunt the effects of racial stereotyping on race-neutral policies. Importantly, however, whites still think of black candidates as more likely to favor policies like aid to inner cities, despite being provided explicit information about the candidate's party and ideology that would suggest otherwise.
Continuing along the theme of race and representation, Tatishe Nteta and colleagues push back against the notion that presidents (including Barack Obama) are unlikely to represent Black interests. They concede that presidents are unlikely to be responsive to Black interests when they diverge significantly from the interests of non-Hispanic Whites. However, they also show that African Americans prioritize a range of issues other than economic redistribution and civil rights and, in the last four decades, their policy priorities have often overlapped with those of Whites. While this helps us broaden our notion of what counts as “Black interests,” the authors' ultimate finding is a sobering one—that Blacks are likely to have their interests address only when they overlap with those of Whites. Finally, the article by Benjamin Newman and colleagues ends on an equally sobering note. They find, in an analysis of survey data merged with contextual data, that the gentrification of black neighborhoods by white residents ends up demoralizing black residents (as evidenced by reductions in generalized trust in one's neighborhood), demobilizing them (with decreases in political interest and political participation), and displacing them (with increases in Black residents expecting to leave their community). Thus, while new investments in urban cores may be a laudable goal, the authors provide compelling evidence that the process of gentrification runs a high risk of marginalizing and disempowering black communities.
Not only are the various findings in this issue provocative, many also lend themselves to important new areas of research and intervention. As before, we provide a bridge between the worlds of academia, politics, and policy with a Q&A involving a policy practitioner. In this issue, we interview Christine Chen, executive director of Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote) and long-time community leader and civil rights activist. We discuss the rapid growth of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (or AAPI) electorate, its interaction with other communities of color, and on ways that the academic community can help advance the political inclusion of racially marginalized groups. As we look ahead to the rest of the 21st century, voices like Chen's will be critically important to ensuring political visibility and equality among communities of color in the United States and abroad.
