The fact that Blacks in the United States are longtime, faithful supporters of the Democratic Party is well known. Explaining the persistence of Black support for Democrats, nevertheless, remains an important task. For Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, existing frameworks for understanding this phenomenon fall short, particularly in light of increasing numbers of Black businesses, a widening of Black income gaps, and growing ideological conservatism among Blacks both in terms of self-identification and policy issues, all factors that one might expect to increase support for Republicans (pp. 3–13). In their book, Steadfast Democrats, White and Laird tackle this critical assignment, asserting that “racialized social constraint” (p. 3)—that is, a desire to maintain in-group belonging by affirming dominant norms in Black communities—is a framework that can solve the puzzle of Black support for Democrats.

In sum, four conditions undergird their theory: set norms for political behavior, sure means of knowing or verifying said behavior, social networks that are “homogeneous,” and sanctions and benefits (pp. 46–47). More specifically, White and Laird contend that Black support for the Democratic Party is a cultural norm that is policed through social sanctions and made possible by continuing racial segregation. Despite the end to de jure discrimination, de facto forms of segregation result in Black people living and working in largely Black communities. This reality shores up Black organizations, such as churches, as anchors for social networks. White and Laird highlight the racial homophily within Black communities in the United States, pinpointing Black communal spaces as contexts for communicating and reinforcing social norms, such as support for Democrats. When these norms are violated, there are clear repercussions in terms of community opprobrium. When these norms are upheld, there are clear social rewards.

White and Laird marshal an impressive array of data in support of their theory of racialized social constraint. They provide an historical overview of this concept from slavery through the mid-twentieth century (pp. 57–69). For instance, they recount that enslaved Blacks would mete out punishment to those among them who ratted out escapees or otherwise surveilled Black people on behalf of plantation owners (pp. 58–60). Likewise, they note civil rights activist Dick Gregory’s public shaming of community leaders and clergy who would not support civil rights agitation and the resulting increase in support from those who were previously reluctant (p. 65).

After anchoring their theory in historical precedent, they use a range of statistical data—from the American National Election Studies, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the General Social Survey, Pew Research Center, and the Gallup New Service, among others, along with their own surveys—to demonstrate the plausibility of their racialized social constraint model. They find, for instance, that the presence of interviewers of the same race affects support for party identification, as well as candidate support, not only in relation to policies seen as advantageous to Blacks in general but also in feeling thermometer ratings and voting (pp. 132–43). They show connections between racial constraint in a variety of contexts, which influence both shifts in attitudes and differences in actual and reported voting behavior. In each instance, they are careful to control for as many confounding elements as possible. Although they find much of their examination of interviewer effects supportive of their framework, they look to a series of “lab in the field” experiments to establish a causal basis for their model. In the presence of co-racial peers, even when there are financial incentives to act otherwise, Blacks are more likely to support Democrats (pp. 155–67). In one experiment at a Black institution, financial incentives were shown to facilitate defection from the norm of Democratic Party support, unless there is public exposure, in which case the norm of Black democratic support largely holds (pp. 184–86).

For White and Laird, the implications of their findings are unsettling. How will Black voting power maintain its strength when the conditions that make it possible dissipate? Will greater social integration, rising levels of intermarriage, and the decline of Black social institutions—such as historically Black colleges and universities, churches, and traditional media—enable “defection” to Republicans, thus, diluting Black voting power? They find some hope in new social media, such as Twitter, for replicating social sanctions that enable Black political norms (pp. 205–6). Still, if not apocalyptic, their research and their social constraint model certainly sound an alarm. But should they? Maybe not for the potential for less constraint, but for the negative implications of such constraint and the need for a different conception of Black politics, its deliberative processes, and its ends.

White and Laird make a convincing case that racial constraint is an important mechanism in maintaining Black Democratic support. Anyone whose life or politics transgresses Black social norms would not find this a hard sell, especially given the rich scaffolding of their research and argumentation. Relatedly, although they acknowledge that for some observers, such as Cathy Cohen (The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, 1999), racialized social constraint leads to “secondary marginalization” for those in Black communities who fall outside the respectability politics that conditions political acceptance, they discount its harm and political limitations. For White and Laird, a “group interest” can be “broadly shared” and “productive for racial liberation and greater racial equality in the American system” (p. 200). Racial constraint used in the service of such ends is good for democracy, they argue. The problem with this formulation, however, is that it imagines racial interests as unmarked by other concerns, as able to be cordoned off from other “liberation-seeking interests within the black community” (p. 201). Feminists, from senior scholars such as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, 2006) to those from more recent cohorts such as political theorist Shatema Threadcraft (Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, 2016), have long traced the ways in which patriarchal priorities shape seemingly neutral racial aims. Others, most notably Adolph Reed Jr. (“Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to a Left,” Dialectical Anthropology, 42, 2018), have critiqued the ways in which contemporary antiracism masks a class politics benefiting the Black middle class and elite. Hence, the question may not be how to incorporate “relatively disadvantaged black Americans” so that they, too, can exercise racial constraint on Black elites, as White and Laird suggest (pp. 201–2), but rather to acknowledge and continue to explore—and to disrupt—the ways that racial constraint provides the means through which some Blacks are abjected within Black communities.

The means of racialized social constraint, moreover, are not always “fairly mild,” amounting only to “question[ing]” or disapproval (p. 199). Most immediately, those who challenge or defy Black social norms may suffer ridicule, ostracization, harassment, sidelining (Bayard Rustin comes to mind), demotion, erasure, lost opportunities, excommunication, or the threat or execution of violence (psychic, material, and physical). Or, as Cohen highlights, lives are affected or lost because certain issues, such as HIV/AIDS, are not seen as part of a “black agenda.” These constraints concern voting behavior, political attitudes, and worldviews that make voting matter. Although White and Laird largely exclude the Black Power movement from their historical survey of the uses of Black social constraint in Black politics, a range of such constraints were a part of the theory and practice of Black cultural nationalism, as work by Margo V. Perkins (Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties, 2000), myself (Alexander-Floyd, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics, 2007), and others demonstrates. Indeed, the resurgence of Black feminist activism in the mid-twentieth century was born, in part, as a response to Black social norms, and feminists—such as those in the Combahee River Collective (see, e.g., Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, 2018)—recount the efforts at racialized social constraint they experienced as a result.

Racialized social constraint undoubtedly explains Black partisan support for Democrats. So, too, may the fact that Democrats have moved further to the right on some policy issues, such as welfare, and that Black elites also gain material benefits from supporting Democrats. The social bludgeoning of those who do not vote, those who vote for third-party candidates, or those who supported social democrat Bernie Sanders lends additional support for White and Laird’s racialized social constraint framework, suggesting its potential usefulness in not only explaining Black support for Democrats but also for shoring up a two-party system in general and for Black Democratic centrists in particular.

In Steadfast Democrats, White and Laird make a compelling case for the importance of racialized social constraint as a means of molding Black political behavior. As with any important work, their research provokes more questions than it can answer, staging an opportunity for conversation about critical issues and providing avenues for further inquiry. It is a must read not only for race and ethnic politics specialists but also for anyone concerned about the future of US politics.