On the latest season of “Race Unwrapped,” host Michelle Tyrene Johnson has talked with leaders and experts about the many obstacles standing between Americans, especially Black Americans, and the ballot box.
Still, a 2022 study by the African American Research Collaborative found Black Americans were actually some of the most hopeful about democracy. It also found that white Americans were the least hopeful.
Johnson spoke with Dr. Andrene Wright from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to unpack the data. She also talked with Dr. Andra Gillespie from Emory University about a group that gets a lot of attention around Election Day, but receives little respect the rest of the time: Black women voters.
Here are parts of their conversations, edited for clarity:
In our country, I think Black Americans have been at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, which means that we've had to organize more. One of the places where I think Black folks have traditionally organized more is under the umbrella of the church.
And with organization, I would think that that does go with resilience and hope, because you're looking at concrete things to do. Do you think that that's part of it?
Wright: Yeah, no, definitely. The Black church is a big part of it.
There was this program that was in Chicago where they had several of the political candidates who came up to the floor in one of these predominantly Black churches in Chicago that included in the audience grassroots organizations and different folks who wanted to ask questions of their candidates.
So not only is it like this organizing space, but it is also infiltrated in the way that campaigns themselves use this as a tool to talk to voters and their communities. So yeah, the Black church has always been that staple for mobilizing and organizing efforts in voting.
Dr. Wright, do you think that hope can also have the opposite effect? I've seen some folks of color do this, particularly other Black folks who are like, you know, “They don't need me to go running down there to vote, we got this.” Can't hope sort of tilt things in the opposite direction?
Wright: One hundred percent. So I currently have this research too that talks about how Black candidates often leverage their lived experience as a means of persuasion.
But so often now we've seen a lot of Black mayors or Black representatives who share these same racial identities [who] don't often advance at least what voters would hope for folks to advance.
You would begin to be hopeful that this kind of commonality of these politicians would advance or do something different than what former politicians were like. But then once folks are in office, you know, we see that oftentimes they uphold the status quo and nothing much changes. And so it definitely works in the opposite direction, too.
I lived [in Louisville] earlier in 2020. And I just remember an election — because our polls close early here in Kentucky — I can remember seeing it on TV now, where they had closed the door and Black folks who'd been in line were banging on that door angrily, like, “I have been in line. Y'all better let me in.” And to me that's hope, that's resilience.
Hope to me, too, [is] imagining something better for ourselves. There's continuing conversations about gerrymandering in ways that folks can mobilize and organize to change the gerrymandering and legislators’ ability to manipulate these districts, right? And unless we have hope, then we can't have these conversations.
Dr. Andra Gillespie, why does so much get put on the backs of Black women voters, when we're only like, what, six, seven percent of the American population?
Gillespie: Well, Black women are the single largest demographic voting block of Democratic voters in the United States. Proportionally speaking, there's no other group that votes almost unanimously Democratic in the way that Black women do.
It's also amplified because of the way the criminal justice system works in the United States. So Black women don't make up half of Black voters. They make up a larger proportion of Black voters overall. Men are more likely to have their voting rights taken away from them.
I personally think that what separates how Black women vote from how everybody else votes is that we tend to look at who will do us the least amount of harm. Do you think that's true or fair, or am I off on that?
Gillespie: The concept that we think about here is this idea called linked fate. The term was coined by Michael Dawson, a recently retired professor at the University of Chicago.
At the time that Dawson was writing, he was thinking a lot about class, because the big question was, “Well, why aren't middle-class Blacks becoming Republicans, right? They should like the tax breaks that the Republican Party stands for.” And what he was arguing was, yeah, Blacks are discriminated against because of their race, even when they are of more affluent class status. Oftentimes they still maintain strong ties to Black communities.
Dawson and others like Katherine Tate have long noted that often Blacks’ political preferences have not perfectly aligned with the Democratic Party. We also have to consider, alright, which candidates and which parties have views that, while they may not sort of perfectly agree with your preferences, are actually closer?