In Race to the Bottom, Lafleur Stephens-Dougan asks a deceptively simple question: Why would Black candidates, or any other candidate, infuse their campaign with racially inflammatory rhetoric? Over the next several chapters, she deftly demonstrates how “racial distancing” from Blacks can pay dividends for politicians across racial and party lines. Her theory of racial distancing “predicts that racially conservative whites and racially moderate whites will prefer candidates who signal that they will not disrupt the racial status quo, or that they will not favor their racial and ethnic minority constituents” (p. 8). Although the motivations for Black and White, Democrat and Republican, politicians may be different, one through line for all of them is that the wages of antiblackness are always useful currency.

This book elucidates how Americans of all stripes are accepting of racialized political messages, particularly when they come from Black messengers. Stephens-Dougan demonstrates that this was true in the Obama years, when many were so fixated on being a postracial America that they ignored the ways in which Obama himself deployed racial messages. In multiple places, she shows how Barack Obama and other Black politicians “emphasized personal responsibility, especially among black men, as the remedy for all that ails the black community, including the purported tendency to blame racism as an excuse for racial disparities” (p. 5). Although the politics of respectability is ubiquitous in Black communities, the potency of these messages is not confined to Black audiences; White audiences are also motivated by the performance of racial distancing in these messages. Therefore, if a politician, particularly a Black Democrat, wants to maintain Black support while increasing vote share among Whites, the best way to do that is to denigrate Black people.

Of course, this does not work the same way for all politicians. Partisan identity matters a lot, but Stephens-Dougan shows convincingly throughout the text that racial distancing does not produce the public censuring one would expect. Although there are penalties to be paid depending on whether the racial message is implicit or explicit, the race of the messenger is a powerful factor in the reception of these candidates. She finds that “regardless of whether respondents held neutral or negative opinions about blacks, they were still more likely to vote for a black Democratic candidate when he told Black people to ‘get off the couch’” (p. 105). Being Black seems to inoculate candidates from being considered racist; if you are a Black candidate invoking negative stereotypes of Black people, White folks of all stripes sit up, listen, and likely select those candidates. Even “the citizens who are presumed to be allies of African Americans (white Democrats) are unperturbed by negative racial appeals when the messenger is black” (p. 139).

There has not been a book to date that has framed these issues so clearly. Although many have seen deracialization as the default strategy for Blacks seeking elected office, Stephens-Dougan shows that this may not be the best road to electoral success. Likewise, she dispels the myth that one party has cornered the market on racist rhetoric; all parties traffic in these retrograde stereotypes around blackness and Black people: they are not just passive tropes to be used as electoral tools. Rather, “these politicians are contributing to a long history in which blackness is conflated with poverty and dysfunction, while whiteness is conflated with virtue and wealth” (p. 110). Such an approach in turn dampens the prospects for policies that may assist the Black people they openly chide. This is the real travesty of these messages, and Stephens-Dougan shows how easily these kinds of messages get incorporated into a virulent electoral cocktail that not only diminishes but also harms Black people in the long run. Even when Blacks are portrayed in a positive manner, this still primes racial animus. What seems to be at work here, according to Stephens-Dougan, is “a concern with white Democratic politicians governing on behalf of this group—even when the latter are depicted counter-stereotypically” (p. 164). This suggests that Black needs are considered illegitimate and outside the realm of politics.

Although I laud this book for the many ways in which the argument advances current scholarship, there were two big nagging questions that I had as I read it. First, what does any of this mean for non-White people? Stephens-Dougan confines her analysis to Whites, which makes sense given that much of the literature on racial priming is about White attitudes. Yet, as this book demonstrates, Black audiences are not unfamiliar with and endorse ideas of personal responsibility. If this is the case, then it would seem that understanding how these ideas work on Blacks would be important. There may be an interesting public/private effect between the racial rhetoric and candidates who engage in such talk. Blacks’ support intra-racially may be different from what and who they are likely to support inter-racially. Moreover, given the importance of Black women, who have been consistently at the forefront of Democratic politics, it would have been a useful intervention to see whether these messages produce support or defection from the Democratic coalition regardless of candidate race.

Similarly, the gender question more broadly is largely left off the table. Since the election of 2016, White women have received a fair deal of scrutiny for the ways in which they use antiblackness to achieve their desired political ends (Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, “Choosing the Velvet Glove: Women Voters, Ambivalent Sexism, and Vote Choice in 2016,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, 2018; Jane Junn, “The Trump Majority: White Women and the Making of Female Voters.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5 [2], 2017). As such, a gendered analysis would help us parse the ways that White men and women use racial appeals when appraising political candidates. Of course, we can imagine what the outcomes would likely be, but having the empirical evidence would make this already nuanced work that much richer.

For anyone confused about the role that race plays in American politics, this book is a must-read. It clears up any misunderstandings or misgivings one may have about the state of race and its potency as a political cudgel. One of its biggest strengths is that all the examples are contemporary. Many like to treat racism as an artifact of the past, but Stephens-Dougan shows that race is always around the corner. More importantly, there is always someone willing to exploit race and antiblackness for their own ends. This is a sad fact of American politics. From the elections Stephens-Dougan discusses in her book, the fictitious scenarios used in her experiments, and every case discussed in between, she demonstrates the truth that every election in America has been racist to a significant degree.

This book has laid the racism in American politics bare and showed that there are no winners here, other than the politicians who deploy race to their own electoral ends. Indeed, the racism that elites freely traffic in across party and ideological lines leaves us all, particularly Black people, worse off every time some story about “Cousin Pookie” is allowed to go unchecked. What Stephens-Dougan has amassed here is a wealth of information about how normalized antiblackness is in our country, so much so that it barely elicits a response—even from the very people it targets. Our discipline will have to reckon with the work of this text for a long while, and I hope the rich theorizing Stephens-Dougan provides is an invitation to other scholars who think that the race question and Black people have all been sorted out. We still have so much more to understand, and this book puts us on the right path.