After more than half a century in which American racial politics has been structured primarily as a clash between two rival “racial orders” or “policy alliances,” the longstanding coalitions are transforming into ones centered on significantly new themes. The racially conservative “color-blind” policy alliance is, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, becoming an alliance promising “white protectionism.” The “race-conscious” policy alliance is, with the mobilizations around the slogan of Black Lives Matter, becoming an alliance focused on “racial reparations” to end “systemic racism.” These new, even more, polarized racial policy alliances have counterparts across the globe, and they are likely to shape political life for many years to come.

In this paper, we consider the changing nature of today's protest–election connection by looking back to the Blue Wave of the 2018 midterm elections that led to Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives. We ask whether White voters' participation in the Blue Wave of the 2018 elections is related to the multi-racial participation in the #BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020. Could it be that White participation in both is symptomatic of a larger resurgence of racial liberalism that is likely to continue to play a significant role in our politics going forward starting with the 2020 election?

How well do we understand the political moment in which we find ourselves in the wake of the Trump presidency? The United States has long failed to keep up with its democratic peers on a wide range of social outcomes but the struggle to keep a pandemic at bay, coupled with increases in social violence and new uprisings over state violence have exposed the failures of the American state in a stark manner. While research on political attitudes continues to offer crucial insights into what Americans want from government and how race, class, and gender are formative dimensions of public opinion, we know considerably less about how these attitudes intersect with the highly fragmented and decentralized nature of U.S. political institutions. In this essay, I offer a framework for understanding our current moment through the lens of racialized anti-statism and state failure. I focus on the intersection of two reinforcing and overlapping features of the U.S. political system: the highly fragmented, veto-laden structure of American politics and the persistence of anti-egalitarian movements. By situating our analysis at this intersection, we observe the convergence of racial and economic power in an anti-statist alliance that undermines American state-building, even when large majorities of Americans favor it.

Democratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. So talk of “the” civic culture erases non-dominant groups. Without a framework to integrate different approaches and account for group variation, we cannot assess decline, nor specify for whom. And without those, we are unable to intervene to make things better. We introduce a theory of civic culture as a system of norms that integrates the main approaches to measuring civic culture and does so in a way that leads to a principled framework for understanding racial, ethnic, and other group variation within countries.

Political scientists have identified how resources, attitudes, and mobilization impact political participation across racial groups. However, the role of civic education has largely been overlooked in shaping these trends. I develop a theory that suggests exposure to civics curricula yields heterogeneous effects on the political participation of youth across racial groups. I test my hypotheses with data from the Black Youth Project's 2005 Youth Culture Survey, supplemented by two original data collections from 2017–2018. I find that civic education courses are associated with higher rates of external efficacy among white youth, but not for black and Latinx youth. Contrastingly, civic education courses appear to increase acts of public voice among black and Latinx respondents, but not for their white peers. Rather than viewing civic education courses as a panacea for low rates of youth political participation, scholars and policymakers should pay closer attention to the ways in which the content of civic education courses contributes to heterogeneous effects across racial and ethnic groups.

Dialogue about race-based topics is essential to combat prejudice, foster mutual understanding, and improve race relations. This study describes the extent to which political conversations—especially those about race-related topics—are taking place within and across racial and political groups. This national survey with a Black oversample found racially diverse discussion networks to be more likely among Blacks than Whites, but politically diverse networks to be more likely among Whites than Blacks. Blacks were more likely than Whites to talk about race-related topics such as police treatment of Blacks (and less likely about several topics not explicitly tied to race), but by no means did Whites entirely avoid race-related topics, even in their same-race discussions. Moreover, there was evidence that discussion in cross-race dyads affected the mix of topics Whites and Blacks discussed, revealing the potential for cross-race interaction to alter political agendas. Rather than being less likely to talk about police treatment of Blacks with Blacks, Whites were more likely to discuss this topic when in mixed-race dyads, while Blacks talked about it less often with Whites than with other Blacks. Findings are discussed in the context of political disagreement and intergroup contact theory.

This study explores Latino perceptions of commonality and competition with African Americans across the country, focusing on the South. Using the Latino National Survey (LNS), we test the existing inter-group relation theories using an original measurement approach. With the creation of relative measures of commonality and competition of Latinos toward Blacks, we find that Latinos perceive co-ethnics as a greater source of competition than Blacks when our relative measure is used to interpret Latino perceptions of competition with African Americans. Moreover, our results suggest that Latinos in the South have similar perceptions of commonality to Blacks as Latinos more generally, across both approaches that measure perceptions of commonality. Most importantly, we find that when the relative competition measure is employed, Latinos who live in Southern states do in fact have higher perceptions of competition with Blacks than Latinos at large. These trends provide a valuable addition to the extant literature focused on inter-group relations by emphasizing that not only place and context matter, but also the way perceptions of competition and commonality are measured and operationalized.