Closing out 2023, this issue of JREP brings together a great set of manuscripts. The eight articles that appear in the pages to follow address important questions about identity, political behavior, media framing, interethnic relations, and how racial inequality is rationalized. The authors in this volume analyze how racial and ethnic identity is shaped and contested, and the ways these identities in turn influence attitudes and political behavior. They examine how media shapes and racializes perceptions of political events and how entertainment shows like Survivor can be used to better understand minority decision-making. They unpack rationalizations for the support of Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and Blue Lives Matter and ask how intersectional identities can shape interethnic trust. This research not only expands on existing scholarship but also suggests new paths forward for the study of racial and ethnic politics.
This issue begins with an exploration of Latinx racial formation in the United States. Robin Dale Jacobson analyzes how the federal government sought to quantify a group they had difficulty in clearly defining. In detailing how the Census sought to enumerate the Latinx population from 1930, when Mexicans were defined for the first and only time as a racial group, to 1970 when self-identification was used, Jacobson demonstrates the shifting national and subnational definitions of Latina/o identity.
The article that follows explores how White racial identity influences partisanship among Latina/o Americans. Drawing on six iterations of the Cooperative Election Study (CES) from 2010 to 2020, Ivelisse Cuevas-Molina looks to develop a better understanding of Latina/o partisan identification. Specifically, what role does racial identification play in party identification? What Cuevas-Molina finds is that Latinos who racially identify as White are also more likely to be Republicans than those who identify as Hispanic or Latino, demonstrating the important role racial identification plays in partisanship.
Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale also draw on data from the CES to analyze how racial attitudes among Whites shape political participation. They find that among racially conservative Democrats, political participation is lower, but the opposite holds true among those who identify as Republican. For this group, racially conservative views lead to an increase in participation, demonstrating the mobilizing power of race for the GOP and the significance of racial alignment of the nation’s two parties.
The next article utilizes a unique methodology to better understand Black decision-making in the United States. M.Brielle Harbin draws on the reality television show Survivor to explore how Black contestants perceived racial social obligations and how this influenced their decisions in the game. She argues that the perceptions of racial duty that shaped contestant’s choices in the game can help us better understand how racialized social norms may influence political behavior. This opens an exciting new avenue of research for those interested in the political behavior of minority groups in the United States.
LaGina Gause, Steven Moore, and Mara Ostfeld also employ a media analysis in their study of television news coverage of protests between 2009 and 2016. Drawing on a dataset of transcripts from popular cable and broadcast news programs, their paper analyzes how the media frames protests using terms likely to provoke fear or anger. Comparing White and non-White protests, they find that anger and fear-provoking words are used more frequently in coverage of non-White protests, regardless of the ideological leaning of the network or the reason for the protest.
The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the conversations around Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and Blue Lives Matter that followed is the subject of Candis Watts Smith’s article. Drawing on a demographically representative survey of 1000 Americans, Smith interrogates the rationale underlying support for these three mantras through an open-ended survey question asking respondents to explain why they would choose to promote one of these slogans over the others. She finds that colorblind racial ideology, diversity ideology, white protectionism, and anti-racism are all part of the racetalk used to rationalize, or push back on, racial inequality through the lens of BLM, ALM, and BlueLM.
The wave of restrictive election laws that swept the nation after on Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 general election was stolen is the subject of the next paper. Kevin Morris finds that these laws were more likely to be sponsored by lawmakers in diverse or diversifying states where the political power of Whites could potentially be challenged. Additionally, based on data from the CES, lawmakers from districts with high levels of racial resentment were much more likely to sponsor restrictive voting laws, suggesting these are not racially neutral measures meant only to protect the electoral process.
Finally, Sarah Shair-Rosenfield and Amy Liu take us outside the United States to examine the role played by gender in interethnic trust in Romania. Drawing on a survey of 505 respondents, their paper asks how perceptions of cultural distance and gender shape comfort with a child marrying a member of an ethnic outgroup. What they find is that for female children, greater perceived cultural distance between the respondent’s own group and the one a child would marry into significantly reduced support for interethnic unions.
Competing interests
None.
