The Trayvon Martin tragedy, the optimistic spectacle of the election and inauguration of Barack Obama during late 2008 and early 2009, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina seemingly represent three very different events with little in common except the claim made by some that all were in some way related to racial politics in the US. Many would consider such a claim weak, noting each event's unique scale and relationship to the politics of race in the US. Yet I argue that that the events are in fact closely linked in fundamental ways that are important not only to political scientists, but, more importantly, to all who care about the health of democracy within the US. Each event demonstrates the massive racial cleavages within the US. Each event illustrates the nature of evolving racial order in the US. Each event illustrates the weaknesses and problems that confront contemporary black politics. And each event thus illuminates key questions that should motivate theoretical and empirical work on race and politics within political science. In this essay, I highlight the themes and processes that tie together these seemingly disparate events, some marked by hope, others by despair. I start by analyzing each event from the standpoint of the persistent, if evolving, racial divide in American public opinion. And I end by arguing that scholars of race and politics often have to adhere to the most rigorous scholarly standards while also fulfilling their duties as citizens.
The Racial Divide
The February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community in Sanford, Florida, has starkly divided Americans along racial lines. Early April 2012 polls by both Pew and Gallup demonstrated the magnitude of the racial chasm in how to interpret and understand Martin's killing. According to an April 3rd Pew report, 45 percent of whites, and only 6 percent of blacks believed that the case was receiving too much media coverage. An April 5th Gallup report illustrated the depth of this racial divide even more vividly. Gallup reported that 73 percent of blacks but only 31 percent of non-blacks believed that racial bias played a major role in the tragedy. A similarly huge gap was found in public perception of racial fairness in the justice system. Blacks overwhelmingly believed (73 percent) that Zimmerman would have been arrested if Martin had been white and not black, but only 19 percent of non-blacks agreed.
There are several points to be made about these poll results. The first is that, contrary to what some media commentators argued, these types of racial differences are in fact common and demonstrate some of the key systematized components of the racial divide. In survey after survey blacks are the most likely to see racial bias and whites the least likely. In 2008, for example, 71 percent of blacks believed that racism remained a major problem in the US, but only 32 percent of whites agreed.Footnote 1 Similarly, in 2005, 90 percent of blacks and only 38 percent of whites believed that Katrina had anything to teach us about continuing racial inequality in the US. Unsurprisingly, considering such results, the same study reported that 84 percent of blacks and only 20 percent of whites believed that the US response to Katrina would have been faster if the majority of its victims had been white.Footnote 2 The point is not only that these differences of perspective are mammoth—dwarfing any other cleavage found in American public opinion—but also that they demonstrate how blacks and whites view events through very different interpretive lenses. A large majority of blacks see America as still being governed by a racial order biased against blacks, and they believe that both the state (as in Katrina) and its citizens (as in Zimmerman and his sympathizers) treat blacks more poorly than they do white Americans. Only a minority—and sometimes only a small minority—of white citizens process events through similar lenses. One consequence of the racial gap is that over the past several years black opinion has been isolated and largely disregarded by the majority of whites and elected officials. This isolation is a consequence of the weakness of contemporary black politics, which can no longer use the opinion generated in black publics to influence discourse and politics within the US.Footnote 3
Public opinion specialists, students of American politics, and scholars who focus on race and politics more generally should all be interested in what social and political phenomenon are responsible for producing such diametrically opposed world views among blacks and whites. Is it that members of different racial groups rely on different information networks, follow different sets of elite cues, and/or go through remarkably different processes of political socialization which produce different sets of ideological predispositions?
The racial divide also raises questions for political theorists. How are we to understand deliberative discourse and rational communication when major segments of a polity's population seemingly inhabit different lifeworlds. Along these lines, I have made the following argument when describing the opinion gap between blacks and whites on Katrina:
White and black opinion was incommensurable because each is a product of a different worldview—the interpretive patterns by which we make sense of social and political reality. These interpretive patterns in turn are the product of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “lifeworld.” According to Habermas, the lifeworld “offers a storehouse of unquestioned cultural givens from which those participating in communication draw agreed-upon patterns of interpretations for use in their interpretive efforts.” It is the lack of “agreed-upon patterns of interpretations” that is so prominently displayed in the black/white cleavage in public opinion. The public opinion responses demonstrate not merely a difference of opinion between very large percentages of blacks and whites, but completely different patterns of assigning meaning to the events that followed, as well as different normative evaluations of those events.Footnote 4
If I am on the right track, this argument suggests that the racial divide reflects cleavages so deep that the basic communicative processes of democratic societies are fundamentally undermined.
The polling on the Trayvon Martin tragedy and its aftermath highlights one further point. Gallup reported the results divided by categories “black” and “non-black.” Unfortunately, these categories severely under represent the racial complexity of public opinion and American society more generally. Several scholars have shown that the pattern of black, Latino, Asian-American, and white responses vary widely depending on whether we are examining opinion on candidates, racial issues, or immigration. On racial issues other than immigration, blacks and whites almost always anchor the opposite ends of the distribution of opinion across racial groups. Even so, however, there is a lot of fluidity with respect to how Asian-American and Latino opinion compares to black and white opinion. In some cases Asian-American and Latino opinion is closer to black opinion, while for other issues those groups' median opinions may be closer to white opinion. On issues such as immigration, there are several questions for which black and white responses are much closer to one another than either is to Latino or Asian-American opinion. This fluidity is fairly well understood by scholars of race and politics, but is a clear example of the lack of communication between academic survey researchers and their counterparts at the major commercial and media firms, leading to an impoverished understanding of the opinion dynamics in contemporary American politics.
It might be argued that the racial divide I highlight is a function of the fact that both the Martin and Katrina cases represent tragedies where both conflict and pessimism are likely to be generated. In the next section I argue that even in a period of relative racial optimism such as the fall of 2008, we still observe the same racial chasm in public opinion—further undermining the claim by some that we live in a post-racial society.
The Evolving Racial Order and the Illusion of a Post-Racial America
It may be hard to remember given the toxic nature of contemporary American politics, but late 2008 and early 2009 marked one of the more optimistic periods in recent American political history. The scenes of euphoria in Chicago's Grant Park on the night of Barack Obama's 2008 election were exceeded only by the solemnity, grandeur, and euphoria that accompanied his inauguration on January 19, 2009. Despite some ugly racial moments during the campaign, Americans at large, and not just African Americans, were unusually optimistic about the future of race relations in the United States. The election of the first black president had many across the spectrum arguing that we now lived in a post-racial society—a society where one's life chances were no longer significantly determined by race and neither were the basic contours of politics and society. African Americans, who throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s had been extremely pessimistic about blacks' likelihood of soon achieving racial equality (as late as 2005, 80 percent reported they did not believe that black racial equality would be achieved in their lifetime), rapidly became more optimistic, with slightly over half of blacks by the fall of 2008 believing that blacks had either achieved, or would soon achieve, racial equality.
Yet a more careful analysis of this period yields three cautionary lessons to which political scientists should pay careful attention. The first is that the large racial cleavage in public opinion persisted even during this period of relative optimism. The second is that racial attitudes in the US are volatile and can be rapidly driven in a different direction depending on political, economic and racial contexts. And the third is that whether we are examining contemporary politics or the socioeconomic status of various racial and ethnic groups, the illusion of a post-racial society is increasingly hard to sustain.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the same magnitude of racial cleavages found during the tragic events of Katrina and the later killing of Trayvon Martin persisted during a period of national hopefulness and relative black euphoria. We see very large gaps between blacks and whites in their evaluations, for example, of then-candidate Obama, on whether felons should be allowed to vote after serving their time, and tellingly on whether racism remained a major problem in the US. For at least the past twenty years (for which we have systematic data on racial attitudes), the divide in public opinion persists regardless of whether the racialized events in question are tragic in nature, or suggest a moment of national unity and reconciliation.Footnote 5 In one sense we should not find this surprising. For in the US, we each have a deeply engrained set of filters through which we interpret racial events. These filters are likely to process information differently regardless of whether times are (relatively) good or bad.
Just as importantly, while the differences of opinion across racial and ethnic groups remain relatively stable, within-group beliefs can rapidly change and can be quite sensitive to changes in the racial environment. Between 2008 and 2010, both blacks and Latinos became more pessimistic about the prospects for achieving racial equality and believed that racism was becoming an even more substantial problem. It appears that blacks were responding in part to the increasing coarseness of racial rhetoric of that period as well as the economic slump. It appeared that Latinos, who became pessimistic at an even faster rate than blacks, were responding both to the economy as well as to more draconian immigration laws passed in states such as Alabama and Arizona.Footnote 6 One take-away point for students of race and politics is that large differences across races can mask significant variation and dynamics in opinion change within groups. When estimating the correlates of racial pessimism with all groups contained within the analysis, racial group membership overwhelms all other variables in the equation. When estimating the same equations separately for each group, not only do we see important patterns of predictors for racial pessimism emerge, but we can also see that each group has different factors that predict racial pessimism. Thus, understanding the dynamics of racial attitudes requires data of sufficient quality to support analysis both across and within groups. This is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, but it is essential to the production of both sound scholarly study and the kind of broad knowledge that can explain to those outside of the academy the factors that shape racialized discourse within the US.
Given the tenuous talk of a “post-racial” society following the Obama election, I have argued in my recent work that we should understand the period from the election to the inauguration as a spectacle. Using the definition of spectacle that originated with French theorist Guy Debord, I noted that the images generated by the inauguration in particular did not match the underlying racial reality, and promoted a false sense of unity. The separation between the images of reality and the underlying reality, as well as the promotion of a false sense of unity, are for Debord two key elements of events we label spectacles. I argue that “the Obama campaign played this role to significant degrees within the nation as the inauguration signified not only national triumph, but also national unity.”Footnote 7
The public opinion data clearly shows a country deeply divided, not unified, by race. One could also argue, however, that whether or not we live in a post-racial society is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly most whites as well as many Asian-Americans and Latinos believe we live in a society no longer marred by a major presence of racial discrimination. This relativistic “eye of the beholder” perspective may be plausible if one only examines the public opinion data. But it simply does not hold up if one also analyzes a wide range of economic, social and health outcomes by race.
Racial inequality remains a brutal fact of life in this country. Black poverty rates run twice that of whites, and disproportionately high unemployment—due to the economic pressures of neoliberalism as well as to long-standing patterns of racial discrimination—is a persistent cause. High levels of poverty, the concentration of blacks in segregated areas, and discriminatory loan practices magnified the mortgage crisis in black communities. Compounding economic disadvantage, the extraordinary rate of incarceration of African Americans is a disaster for the black community. African Americans also face severe health challenges, from lack of insurance to poor quality healthcare and the effects of the AIDS crisis. The health crisis is magnified by both black mass incarceration and economic deprivation. As we saw earlier, the interracial political unity that is supposed to herald a truly post-racial society also does not exist.Footnote 8
The tragedies of Katrina and Trayvon Martin may seem worlds apart from the buoyancy of the Obama election. But appearances can be deceiving. And these three episodes are more similar than much conventional rhetoric recognizes. All three episodes saw a deep and worrisome racial divide in public opinion, and demonstrated the importance of the black/white divide in understanding the politics of race in the US. All three episodes also illustrate that scholarship on race can no longer be confined to a black/white binary–or to any other redrawing of the binary—and that we must understand the shifting dynamics (across issue and time) of a very complicated racial terrain. Finally, all three episodes point to a range of issues that scholars must grapple with, whether they focus on empirical or theoretical approaches to the study of politics, issues that represent challenges to our discipline but also opportunities for further growth.
Implications for Black Politics
Two recent forums on the future of black politics in Boston involving several prominent political scientists and sociologists reemphasized that rebuilding black politics is a difficult but essential task if the US is to fulfill the centuries-old quest for racial justice, alleviate economic injustice and inequality, and transform its political system into something that resembles democratic politics. While the discussion focused on several aspects of black politics and the politics of race, here I summarize points that are of particular relevance to the three episodes under consideration.
A black political movement must do a number of things. It must address the issue of racial resentment, giving Americans a context for listening to each other so that they can begin to understand their real interests. As we have seen, the divide between blacks and whites on many issues is so large that it undermines our very ability to hold productive public conversations on race (or anything else for that matter). The Katrina example in particular is indicative of the weakness of black discourse and its inability to influence white opinion. Indeed, during this crisis black opinion and speakers were attacked in many media outlets. As I document in Not in Out Lifetimes, op-eds in The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal attacked black opinion, black commentators and academics for documenting how different black opinion was from white opinion and/or making claims that racial bias influenced civic and state responses to Katrina's aftermath. To effectively end black isolation in American political discourse requires the rebuilding of the black public sphere. This in turn requires innovating and experimenting with political and civic institutions as communities attempt to rebuild black publics to the point where they can more effectively intervene in national and regional debates.Footnote 9 It also requires nurturing the multiple political ideologies that once fueled black debate, including black versions of conservatism, socialism, nationalism, feminism and social democracy, and also nurturing the willingness to cast out what is no longer useful and to criticize blacks who mislead.
Black politics has always been contentious, and has always contained numerous ideological and political tendencies. As long as these differences are based in active political mobilization dedicated to achieving justice, this contention is a healthy and natural feature of black politics. What is not healthy is a black politics that is increasingly narrow, one-dimensional, and dominated by a deadly neoliberal ideology that rejects the central political and moral tenets of the black political tradition.
Neoliberal ideology calls for the privatization of what should be public services ranging from healthcare and prisons to parking and water supply—leaving government workers prey to unfair labor practices and/or unemployment, and public services reorganized not for efficiency, but for gaining the maximum profit possible from taxpayers. Neoliberal ideology calls for narrowing the scope of politics to just electoral politics, and tries to eliminate the more democratic forms of mobilization such as mass protest. Neoliberal ideology calls for the narrowing of political discourse to just that which celebrates markets and the liberal capitalist order to the exclusion of more radical and critical analysis and speech. This leads to the demonization and exclusion of much black speech. Markets and profit-seeking firms are celebrated as the model by which all institutions—artistic organizations, foundations, universities, health-care institutions, prisons, etc.—should follow with devastating consequences for the mission of those institutions. In sum, the embrace of neoliberal ideology by some black elites and others serves to deprive those seeking social, economic and racial justice from the ideological, tactical, political, discursive and democratic tools that have served us so well in the past, and are absolutely necessary for rebuilding blacks.
We need to reconstruct black politics. Black solidarity and rage must be institutionalized and organized, not simply felt. Building independent black organizations is one effective way to do that. We need not and should not simply replicate the movements of earlier generations, but should instead follow their lead by building movements based on our own realities. One of the hallmarks of the black liberation movement of the mid-late 20th century and the current Occupy movement is the willingness to experiment with new forms of mobilization, tactics, strategies, democratic processes, and institutional/organizational forms. To move forward, however, will be no easy task.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Political scientists who study black politics, race and politics, and related phenomena are often admonished to take pains to be objective, and to remain detached from the object of study. Otherwise, it is argued, one cannot conduct good science. I disagree, at least to a point. Certainly, our empirical research should be conducted with the most rigorous methods suitable for the questions we are studying, whether we are conducting the quantitative analysis of public opinion or are taking an interpretive approach to ethnographic research. Yet political scientists are also citizens, and as citizens we must realize that our research is centered on processes, conflicts, and events which continue to shape the efficacy of democratic life and governance, both within the US and in the world more generally. Engaged research has proven valuable in many disciplines even if the mainstream of political science still rejects the concept. Public health, for example, is a field in which scholars consistently combine their research with attempts to improve the health of the communities and populations under study. Often direct intervention and increasingly community participation are integral parts of the research design (including the design stage itself). Our research can illuminate public policy, situate and describe the terrain that shapes discourse on race, and illustrate both the massive areas of conflict that remain regarding race as well as potential areas for cooperation and mechanisms through which trust and understanding can be built. Political theory has a long and honored tradition of interrogating and developing conceptions of the good society. Our research can illustrate the degree to which our society (and others) lives up to democratic standards or fails to do so. In short, it is necessary to seriously discuss the kind of country we want to live in, and in a way that is informed by serious, systematic, and critical understandings of the kind of country we do live in. While in graduate school, I was told by a visiting professor that I knew too much about politics to be a political scientist. While an Associate Professor, I was advised by a colleague that political scientists should never read the newspapers, because being absorbed in current events undermines our ability to conduct theoretically-driven modeling. I disagree. Those of us who believe that we cannot understand contemporary American politics without understanding the long and continuing dynamics of racial conflict within the US; who believe that racial conflict and resentment undermine and continue to threaten our ability to achieve what Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others called our best democratic aspirations; and who continue to believe that racial conflict and animosity are still a very strong source of our worst violent impulses, should continue to conduct our research as rigorously as we can. But we should also engage with others in and outside of the academy to try and illuminate and address the racial conflicts and cleavages that continue to be sources of great injustice and tragedy, and occasionally, sources of hope.
