Given the importance that Black Americans play in the US political system, questions abound. How and why are Black folks able to so frequently overcome the many political boundaries put between them and the ballot? If and to what extent will their voting bloc serve to shift the political winds for various candidates? But the question asked most often by social scientists, the media, and political junkies alike centers on why Black Americans appear to move in lockstep politically, especially when the Democratic Party does not always seem to acknowledge their contributions or reciprocate with the implementation of policies informed by the preferences of the average Black voter. Some suggest that Black voters’ loyalty to the Democratic Party indicates that the group’s members are simply victims of a “plantation” mentality. Still, even US presidential candidates believe that, although the “Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things,” Black folks are just the opposite (Barbara Sprunt, “Biden Backtracks Comments Contrasting Diversity in Black and Latino Communities,” NPR, September 20, 2020). Although these interpretations are superficial, condescending, and erroneous, they are common. Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird set the record straight in Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior.
The authors begin Steadfast Democrats by elucidating the notion that, to develop either theoretical frameworks of Black politics or fully specified models aimed at predicting Black Americans’ attitudes and behaviors, one must center their unique experiences in the United States’ racialized social system. It is only by recognizing that the United States is a society where political, economic, and social benefits and disadvantages have been historically and systematically doled out along racial lines (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62 [3], 1997) that we can begin to make sense of how and why upward of 80% of Black Americans identify as Democrats. Specifically, White and Laird explain that structural racism produced a society where racial homophily in most domains of American life was forcefully imposed both by law and custom. Black institutions and counterpublics arose due to the aggressive enactment of Jim Crow, later by white flight, and still today by white choice. White and Laird make clear that the racialized and racist structure of US society shapes not only where people live, who they interact with, or what kinds of opportunity they have but also their political outlook, behavior, attitudes, and strategy.
White’s and Laird’s racialized social constraint framework asserts that Black institutions have cultivated a system of accountability among Blacks; that is to say, norms for Black (political) behavior are not only produced in the Black counterpublic but they are also enforced within it. The authors explain, “Adherence to group norms of political behavior is produced through Black Americans making realized trade-offs between their ideological or individual self-interests and the potential for racialized social consequences that might accrue to them personally as the result of their decision” (p. 17).
In chapter 1, they delineate their logic and framework for readers. White and Laird launch their theoretical framework from a sound historical foundation and in a direction away from tried-and-true concepts integral to the Black politics literature—group consciousness, linked fate, and Michael Dawson’s (Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Press, 1994) Black utility heuristic. Their analyses of several American National Election Studies reveal that linked fate does not seem to differentiate Blacks who identify with the Democratic Party from those who do not. Moreover, linked fate does not explain why Black conservatives identify with the Democratic Party. However, in chapters 2 and 3, they show with data from about a half-dozen surveys that Black folks who live among, interact with, and primarily rely on other Black folks are more likely to identify as Democrats.
However, because there is little variation in Black Americans’ partisan identification, it is actually quite a challenge to empirically isolate conditions under which partisanship is created and maintained. In the remaining three substantive chapters, they employ a series of (lab) experiments to illuminate causal mechanisms. Each one, scaffolding on the previous experiment, serves to build the authors’ argument that one is better able to understand Black partisan identification and some Black political behaviors if one takes seriously the notion that Black politics is also social and that social pressure from community members is a fundamental factor incorporated into Black Americans’ decision-making calculus.
Overall, the book provides a contribution to the literatures of American politics, racial and ethnic politics, and Black politics both because of the questions it answers and the questions that are inspired as the reader engages with the text. In March 2020, I was expecting to interact with White and Laird in an authors-meets-critic panel, but then a global pandemic swept away the opportunity to pepper them with my questions. So I will ask them here instead. First, to what extent do the findings tell us what Black folks are willing to say in public more so than do in private? The authors analyze a “natural” experiment by leveraging the difference in Black survey respondents’ partisanship across the race of interviewers, and they find consistently that when Black respondents are either talking to White interviewers or are responding without an audience, they are less likely to identify as Democrats. These data provide evidence for the authors’ point, but they also raise questions about where the truth lies on the matter of Black partisan identification, as well as larger questions about the findings’ implications for survey research on seemingly innocuous questions.
A multi-methodological quantitative strategy provides a great deal of evidence for the claims that the authors are making, but there are often so few Blacks in national surveys, and even fewer Black Republicans and conservatives, so that some of their lab experiments rely on relatively small sample sizes. The formal and full analytical tables are not to be found in the book itself, but the translated figures reveal larger and larger confidence intervals as one moves from the Black political Left to the Right. What do we make of the notion that, to do excellent Black politics scholarly work, one must cull through a dizzying array of surveys to triangulate and support one’s argument? Given the difficulty of developing a high-quality nationally representative data of Black folks (Matt A. Barreto, Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, Edward D. Vargas, and Janelle Wong, “Best Practices in Collecting Online Data with Asian, Black, Latino, and White Respondents: Evidence from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 [1], 2018) and the expense of lab experiments, what kinds of sample sizes are necessary to make authors feel confident in their results?
The authors rely on a wide array of data and analytical strategies, but so much of how Black politics is communicated is through everyday talk (Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, 2004). Might the quantitative data be better amplified through qualitative data or even content analysis of Black political talk on social media or Black media outlets? I am convinced by the authors’ claims and empirical evidence, but I have personally seen how racialized social constraint works in real time. Black political “shade” cannot be fully appreciated when coded into ones and zeros.
What makes this book convincing is that it does situate Black experiences within a racially oppressive and segregated society at its core, but there are a few points that are not so clearly made. For example, it seems that the choice that Black folks have in America’s two-party system approximates a false one; as the Republican Party doubles down on racist rhetoric and even appears to move away from its own fiscally conservative principles, is community social pressure necessary to keep Black folks largely in the Democratic Party? The life chances of high-income Blacks—who appear to be great candidates for the GOP—are still influenced by racism, and middle-class Blacks are still more likely to live in segregated and economically depressed neighborhoods and have much lower levels of wealth than their white counterparts. In all, to what extent does the structure of American political parties do most of the work in leading Blacks to be steadfast Democrats? Between the findings around the race of the interviewer, the issues of external validity of controlled experiments, and the structure of the US party system, one final question that this book inspired is whether Black folks are actually more likely to be “swing voters” than we tend to think they are, whereby they either vote for the Democrats’ candidates because they truly want to or simply choose to sit out of American politics altogether?
