This article explores racial differences in politicians’ persistence in elections. Empirical data from California city council elections and a close election regression discontinuity show that losing an election leads to a large drop in the likelihood of rerunning for office. However, nonwhite candidates are 59% more likely than white candidates to rerun after a loss. Despite these differences in persistence, the likelihood of winning a subsequent election is similar across racial groups among those who choose to rerun. This persistence among losing nonwhite candidates helps narrow the racial representation gap in elected offices. Occupational heterogeneity analysis suggests that this difference is driven mainly by minority candidates with public or community service experience.

Queer people in the United States have been historically over-policed, in a long-standing history of criminalization and oppression by law enforcement. Despite scholars having extensively used administrative records of police stops to uncover racial disparities and bias in law enforcement practices, virtually no studies exist doing the same to examine the discriminatory policing of queerness—by itself, and in the intersection with race. In this article, I fill this gap by analyzing administrative records of ∼3,100,000 stops in the United States between 2018 and 2025, looking at whether civilians perceived as LGBTQ+ are disproportionately targeted by the police in post-stop decisions. Through multiple tests, I find consistent evidence that being queer is associated with a higher probability of being searched, arrested, and be victims of police use of force. Then, using an intersectional approach, I test whether the interaction of race with queerness worsens police discrimination. Results show that bias gets worse for racial minorities who are also LGBTQ+, indicating that a dynamic of intersectional, double disadvantage can be found in police discrimination. This research underscores the importance of applying an intersectional framework to police studies, and the ongoing role of policing in reproducing the marginalization of historically oppressed communities.

Several U.S. states expanded vote-by-mail in 2020, while other states made no changes. This uneven expansion occurred in a highly racialized policy context. We explore how the United States’ history of race-based disenfranchisement, racialized elite rhetoric, and the uneven policy expansion interact to shape voting methods and trust in government across racial groups. Using data from three national surveys and coarsened exact matching, we compare the behavior of voters across adopting and non-adopting states. We find that adopting no-excuse absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail in 2020 is associated with increased mail voting across racial groups, despite Black Americans’ historically rooted mistrust in new forms of voting. We also find that expanding mail voting was associated with increases in government trust in some cases. While prior work finds modest short-term increases in turnout, vote-by-mail may also affect perceptions of government, which can help close racial turnout gaps in the long term.

Museum visitors are not reflective of the diversity present in communities around the nation. In this study, we investigate the racial and ethnic diversity of art museum participants as well as the potential motivations and barriers to visiting a museum. Using the General Social Survey, we examine race and ethnicity and arts participation in the USA. We find Black individuals are less likely to attend an art museum than white individuals. Certain motivations and barriers to participating may explain part of the lack of diversity. We find Black and Latinx individuals are motivated to participate in art museums for cultural heritage reasons more than white individuals, but race and ethnicity are unrelated to perceiving admission fees as a barrier. This research highlights the urgency in the field to make museums more inclusive.

Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

This article addresses recent work on empire and colonisation which calls for a reappraisal of how agency and resistance manifests among groups responding to structural marginalisation. We argue that approaching these questions from within the colonial order reveals important idiosyncrasies regarding how groups understood resistance, agency, and popular organising as possible responses that emerged from within imperial landscapes. Using the example of race as a central regulatory category and practice of colonial power, we analyse two cases which we suggest benefit from an account of agency and resistance within colonial order: the Black Loyalists in English America and the Indigenous royalists of New Granada, two groups which pursued emancipation by choosing to remain under colonial rule. The resulting analysis produces a more dynamic account of resistance and emancipation which responds to the far-reaching influence of colonial order for resistance movements at local, national, and international levels. This account contributes to recent debates which call for theoretical analysis of “middle actors” and popular thinking as it relates to international politics, postcolonial movements, and studies of empire.

In this paper, I examine the factors associated with public attitudes toward foreign policy among white Americans and argue that racial attitudes play an important role. To test this hypothesis, I perform quantitative studies across four iterations of the American National Election Survey (ANES)—(1) 2012, (2) 2016, (3) 2020, and (4) the Cumulative Survey (1986–2020). While the results include white public opinion across several different areas of foreign policy across several decades of data, the findings are consistent: American foreign policy opinion among white Americans is highly racialized—meaning that their views on foreign policy are strongly associated with their views on race and racism. This study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively poorly understood phenomenon in American politics: how the American public forms their attitudes on foreign policy. Overall, I find strong evidence that racial attitudes play an important yet understudied role in the foreign policy attitudes of white Americans. This study also extends our knowledge of the role of racialization in public opinion and reminds us that while racism is one of the most central problems for U.S. domestic politics, we should also be wary of how these hierarchies of domination extend beyond our borders through its foreign relations.

Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

Do locals discriminate against themselves by favoring foreigners with higher expected purchasing power? Drawing on theories of prejudice, discrimination, and colonialism, I argue that in colonized and post-colonial countries, local home sellers discriminate against local potential homebuyers while favoring foreigners with expected higher purchasing power, anticipating a more profitable transaction. I support this argument with evidence from a preregistered online audit study targeting discriminatory attitudes toward local home buyers. In the study, fictitious home buyers with distinctive language and ethnic names emailed 1,512 home sellers (realtors and homeowners) across all municipalities in Puerto Rico. Home sellers reported more houses available to Americans and invited them to more house showings than Puerto Ricans. My estimates indicate that ethnic discrimination exists in the Puerto Rican housing market. These findings provide new insights into ethnic dynamics in colonized and post-colonial societies and underscore concerns about recent legislation that turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven.

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project and contextual measures from different sources, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities affect political trust and impact on the formation of different relations with the political system across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that at the individual-level interactions between inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

On August 27, 1992, the General Motors (GM) auto plant in Van Nuys closed after a half-century serving the Northeast San Fernando Valley. Its closure undercut the livelihoods of auto workers like Raymond Álvarez and his father Ramón. Today, the father and son duo look at “The Plant,” an outdoor shopping mall, and wonder whether the In-N-Out fast-food restaurant or T-Mobile store marks where they once stood on the assembly line. The departure of the GM plant and other long-standing manufacturing firms propelled the area into economic distress as Los Angeles was reeling from another crisis, the 1992 Uprising. In the wake of these events, elected officials clamored to revitalize the city. Six years later, “revitalization” came in the form of the shopping center, The Plant. By tracing the historical trajectory of one shuttered auto plant, from factory to shopping mall, this article demonstrates how neoliberal ideology gained legitimacy over the last several decades.

Thousands of Latin Americans migrate to the United States every year. This article seeks to understand how immigrants’ premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification upon arrival in the United States. This research proposes that premigration political experiences influence the acquisition of party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Utilizing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) and Proyecto Élites Parlamentarias Latinoamericanas (Latin American Parliamentary Elites Project), this paper analyzes how the ideology of the government in power in the immigrants’ country of origin influences party identification among Latino immigrants in the United States. Employing multinomial regression analysis, I demonstrate that the ideology of governments in power in Latin American countries when Latinos migrate influences the party identification of those immigrants in the United States. The results of this study contribute to the conversations on premigration experiences and challenge the applicability of classical theories of party identification for immigrants.