Which factors contribute to sustained participation within the Democratic Party among Black voters? Practitioners and scholars of politics may take this question for granted in their work. Rather than questioning why Black people affiliate with the Democratic Party, practitioners expend energy trying to work this fact of American politics to their benefit. For many scholars, Black Democratic Party affiliation is a law of nature, something that we know well but do not unpack as much as we should. Enter Ismail White and Chryl Laird, who consider the puzzle of Black partisanship by asking, “How, exactly, have [B]lacks maintained Democratic Party unity since the civil rights era?” (p. 13). Why do the individual incentives to support the Republican Party fail to move larger numbers of Black voters? The answer, White and Laird argue, is explained through a theoretical contribution called racialized social constraint—“a process of enforcing the norms of [B]lack political behavior” (p. 15). Black people expect that members of their racial group will associate with the Democratic Party. When individuals express or demonstrate associations with the Democratic Party, they are rewarded. However, there is a high negative social cost for a Black person who associates with the Republican Party. Further, and important to note, the social sanctions a Black person experiences for associating with the Republican Party are levied against them by other Black people through individual and institutional interactions. White and Laird shine a light on an important part of Black culture that shapes Black political life.
The book’s methods are very well conceived given the authors’ aim to make racialized social constraint visible. The two lab-in-the-field experiments are among the strengths of this work—one conducted at a predominantly white institution and the other conducted at a historically Black institution. White and Laird examined variation in Black individuals’ willingness to indicate support for and/or contribute to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. As a person who graduated from and currently teaches at an HBCU, I felt joy to see that HBCU students had been able to participate in the scholars’ research process. The authors mention the choice to incorporate an HBCU in their research because it provides a “clean experimental test,” but this also feels like a positive intentional choice (p. 181).
The book has other strengths, but the important innovations and contributions of their idea are almost overshadowed by the overall framing of the work. The theory of racialized social constraint posits that Black people feel pressure to conform to norms of Blackness, specifically Black political behavior. These norms exist because Black Americans have come to understand the power in unified group action. Racialized social constraint is an important contribution to our thinking about Black partisanship. However, I think the primary reason why Black people continue to associate with the Democratic Party, in spite of their conservative political ideology, is that most of them believe the Republican Party is racist. Further, the weight that Black voters attach to the issue of racial discrimination is often the biggest consideration in their ideological formulation. In short, Black people care most about whether a party takes the right position on racial issues. This explanation for why Black people do not budge, in spite of their reported ideology, is consistent with recent scholarship on Black political ideology (Dianne Pinderhughes, Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory, 1987; Ronald Walters, Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach, 1988; Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics, 1994; Tasha Philpot, Conservative but Not Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology among African Americans, 2017).
White and Laird engage these earlier explanations of Black ideology in chapter 1. They argue that Black people with “ideological or self-interested reasons to defect from the in-group norm of supporting the Democratic Party… nonetheless maintain their support for the Democratic Party in pursuit of social acceptance or approval from other group members or in an effort to avoid negative social sanctions for defection from this group norm” (p. 26). They engage scholars who have written about Black political behavior and decision making with particular emphasis on racial group identification. For instance, there is specific attention to Dawson’s linked fate and Black utility heuristic (1994), as well as a discussion of racial group solidarity. White and Laird demonstrate that “linked fate is not what leads [B]lack conservatives to identify with the Democratic Party” (p. 34). They also express some skepticism, as did W. E. B. Du Bois, about whether feelings of solidarity may be enough to explain the unified behavior of Black voters.
Because the authors’ ultimate goal is to explain how group social pressures and sanctions influence party identification, the focus on groups and linked fate is necessary. However, it obfuscates a critical point. The organizing construct behind the sentiment that “the Republican Party is racist” does not necessarily or primarily have to be about Black solidarity. Foremost in the mind of Black voters is not the connection to their racial group or the social sanctions they may face for their political identification. Instead, it is a fear about potential personal harm that may follow from supporting a political party with drastically different views about the humanity of Black people. In other words, Black people are likely more worried about their individual personal safety than they are about other incentives to defect from the Democratic Party or about sanctions from the larger racial group.
Most Black people will be exposed to both individual-level racism and racialized social constraint. The experience with or potential for individual-level racism likely weighs most in Black political decision making. For example, a person like comedian and Saturday Night Live alum Jay Pharoah could be ripe for political decision making based primarily on his economic success. However, in April 2020, neither his professional accomplishments nor economic status was sufficient to protect him from physical violence inflicted on him because he “fit the description of a Black man in this area” (“‘SNL’ alum Jay Pharoah says police pulled guns on him mid-workout, knelt on his neck,” USA TODAY, June 13, 2020). The threat of discrimination or violence on the basis of Blackness is omnipresent, regardless of a Black person’s economic position in America. This came into stark relief for the global community in 2020, as the world grappled with the deaths of Black people at the hands of police (George Floyd and Breonna Taylor) and of people behaving with the same deadly force as police (Ahmaud Arbery). I think White and Laird are right that race may be less of an organizing factor for some Black people, especially those who have looser ties to the community or who do not believe that they may suffer personal violence or discrimination as a result of political actions. However, I also think the number of Black people for whom this is true is relatively small. Black people may be conservative, but they are almost universally constrained by negative experiences with non-Black people in the public sphere.
Being able to make political decisions using the mainstream liberal-to-conservative continuum of ideology in political science literature—which can be disconnected from race—is a level of political self-actualization that most Black people cannot attain. This lack of political self-actualization or trauma informs an ideology that is not entirely captured by the ANES linked fate variable or the conversation about group solidarity. Until all Black people can experience American citizenship freely and equally, we should expect to find significant space between the ideology they express in surveys—even as it pertains to their racial group—and their party identification (Michael Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, 1993; Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, 2004; Tasha Philpot, Conservative but Not Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology among African Americans, 2017).
Although my conception of Black people’s enduring attachment to the Democratic Party differs from White and Laird’s, I think Steadfast Democrats is an extremely important contribution to political science for at least three reasons. First, the book helps us tease out and understand potential defections from the Democratic Party. These findings suggest that Black attachment to the Democratic Party is malleable and contingent on the interactions among Black people. This has important consequences for our democracy and, most immediately, for the political parties’ efforts to use Black political participation in their electoral calculus.
Second, the work on Black social networks is a critically important contribution to our understanding of Black partisanship. White and Laird note that “the more integrated a [B]lack person is into white society, the more likely he or she is to act on incentives to violate norms of [B]lack political behavior” (p. 87). As we inch closer to a world where Black people actually do experience American citizenship freely and equally, White and Laird’s finding of potential changes in the weight Black people assign to racial issues in their ideology will grow in importance.
Finally, White and Laird’s description of the norms of political behavior is an important component of Black political decision making, even if it is not the most important. Most Black people have witnessed, experienced, or participated in this type of public or interpersonal norm policing. In Black Vernacular English this is called “getting someone together.” For this reason, racialized social constraint will be among the theories that scholars of Black politics use to decipher Black political behavior for decades to come.
