Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:17:35.255Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crises, Race, Acknowledgement: The Centrality of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics to the Future of Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Paula D. McClain Open the ORCID record for Paula D. McClain [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The United States, and the world, is in the grips of a coronavirus pandemic, and in the United States, we are facing a crisis of faith in the fairness of our political institutions, particularly the ability of Black Americans to live without the fear of dying at the hands of the police for going about their daily lives. Race has been and continues to be intertwined with American government and politics, in general, and how the United States approaches crises, in particular. Racial minority groups have been scapegoats for the failings of American policy makers to deal with numerous crises historically and at present. Race and racism are also at the foundation of the origins of American political science. The racism at the roots of our discipline’s founding have created a blindness to the significance and importance of the field of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) to the study of politics, democracy, and how American society reacts during a crisis. Our discipline is also at an inflection point that requires us to acknowledge its racist origins, confront its continued influence on the present, and finally to move forward in recognizing the importance of REP to the health and future of the discipline.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P6YAMO

References

Allport, Gordon W. 1959 [1948]. The ABCs of Scapegoating, 3rd ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith.Google Scholar
Anti-Defamation League. 2020. “Reports of Anti-Asian Assaults, Harassment and Hate Crimes Rise as Coronavirus Spreads.” June 18. (https://www.adl.org/blog/reports-of-anti-asian-assaults-harassment-and-hate-crimes-rise-as-coronavirus-spreads).Google Scholar
Artiga, Samantha. and Orgera, Kendal. 2020. “COVID-19 Presents Significant Risks for American Indian and Alaska Native People.” Kaiser Family Foundation, May 14. ()https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-19-presents-significant-risks-for-american-indian-and-alaska-native-people/.Google Scholar
Barge, Laura. 2001. “René Girard’s Categories of Scapegoats and Literature of the South.” Christianity and Literature 50(2): 247–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blatt, Jessica. 2014. “John W. Burgess, the Racial State, and the Making of the American Science of Politics.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(6):1062–79.10.1080/01419870.2012.730623CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blatt, Jessica. 2018. Race and the Making of American Political Science. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenthal, Henry. 1963. “Woodrow Wilson and the Race Question.” Journal of Negro History 48(1): 1–21.10.2307/2716642CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Branswell, Helen. 2016. “Patient Zero in AIDS Crisis Was Misidentified, Study Says, Rewriting Early History of Virus.” Statnews. October 26. (https://www.statnews.com/2016/10/26/history-hiv-aids-new-york/).Google Scholar
Brown, Lauren E., and Stivers, Richard. 1998. “The Legend of ‘Nigger’ Lake: Place as Scapegoat.” Journal of Black Studies 28(6): 704–23.10.1177/002193479802800602CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunche, Ralph Johnson. 1954. “Presidential Address.” American Political Science Review 48(4): 961–71.10.2307/1951005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burgess, John W. 1970 [1902]. Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876. New York: Da Capro.Google Scholar
Danticat, Edwidge. 2017. “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians.” New Yorker. December 29. (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-reopens-an-old-wound-for-haitians).Google Scholar
Dawson, Michael C., and Wilson, Ernest J. III. 1991. “Paradigms and Paradoxes: Political Science and African American Politics.” In Political Science: Looking to the Future: The Theory and Practice of Political Science, ed. Crotty, William J., 189–237. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Dennis, Michael. 2010. “Looking Backward: Woodrow Wilson, the New South, and the Question of Race.” American Nineteenth Century History 3(1): 77–104.10.1080/713998979CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. 2012 [1935]. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Towards a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America 1860–1880. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Dyer, Thomas G. 1980. Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Farmer, Paul. 2006. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520933026CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farr, James. 2004. “The Science of Politics: As Civic Education: Then and Now.” PS: Political Science and Politics 37(1): 37–40.Google Scholar
Frank, D. 2002. “Demons in the Parking Lot: Auto Workers, Buy American Campaigns, and the ‘Japanese Threat’ in the 1980s.” Amerasia Journal 28(3): 33–50. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.28.3.p74875252957n722 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Girard, René. 1987. “Generative Scapegoating.” In Violent Origins: Ritual Killings and Cultural Formation—Walter Burkheart, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G.. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gunnell, John G. 2004. Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Hedgpeth, Dana, Fears, Darryl, and Scruggs, Gregory. 2020. “Indian Country, Where Residents Suffer Disproportionately from Disease, Is Bracing for Coronavirus.” Washington Post, April 4 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/04/04/native-american-coronavirus/).Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville. 1941. “The Interdisciplinary Aspects of Negro Studies.” American Council of Learned Societies Bulletin 32:101–11. (https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/zp38wd21g?locale=en#/6/4[xhtml00000002]!/4/4/1:0)Google Scholar
Holden, Matthew Jr. 1983. Moral Engagement and Combat Scholarship. McLean: Court Square Institute.Google Scholar
Holt, Thomas C. 1998. “Explaining Racism in American History.” In Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S., 107–119. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, P. 1996. “The Social Construction of Identity in Criminal Cases: Cinema Verité and the Pedagogy.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 1(2): 348–489. (https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=mjrl).Google Scholar
Kalisch, Phillip A. 1972. “The Black Death in Chinatown: Plague and Politics in San Francisco 1900-1904.” Arizona and the West 14(2): 113–36.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, and Milner, Helen V., eds. 2002. “American Political Science: The Discipline’s State and the State of the Discipline.” Political Science: The State of the Discipline, 1–26. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Lanham, Andrew. 2020. “American Racism in the Time of Plagues.” Boston Review, March 30. (http://bostonreview.net/race/andrew-lanham-american-racism-time-plagues).Google Scholar
Little, Becky. 2019. “The U.S. Deported a Million of Its Own Citizens to Mexico During the Great Depression.” New York Public Library. (https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-repatriation-drives-mexico-deportation).Google Scholar
Marx, Anthony. 2001. America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I. National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9599.Google Scholar
McCauley, Michael, Minsky, Sara, and Viswanath, Kasisomayajula. 2013. “The H1N1 Pandemic: Media Frames, Stigmatization and Coping.” BMC Public Health 13:1116 (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/13/1116).10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McClain, Paula D., Ayee, Gloria Y.A., Means, Taneisha N., Reyes-Barriéntez, Alicia M., and Sediqe, Nura A.. 2016. “Race, Power, and Knowledge: Tracing the Roots of Exclusion in the Development of Political Science in the United States.” Politics, Groups, and Identities, 4(3): 467–8210.1080/21565503.2016.1170704CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClay, Wilfred M. 1993. “John W. Burgess and the Search for Cohesion in American Political Thought.” Polity 26(1): 51–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinley, Shepherd W. 2013. “John W. Burgess, Godfather of the Dunning School.” In The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, ed. Smith, John David and Lowery, J. Vincent, 49–76. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Mead, L.M. 2020. RETRACTED ARTICLE: “Poverty and Culture.” Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, J. 2014. An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
O’Flynn, Michael, Monaghan, Lee F., and Power, Martin J.. 2014. “Scapegoating during a Time of Crisis: A Critique of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.” Sociology 48(5): 921–37.10.1177/0038038514539059CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oppel, Richard Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Lai, Rebecca, Wright, Will, and Smith, Mitch. 2020. “The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus.” New York Times. July 5, 2020.Google Scholar
Rabban, David M. 2013. Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ray, Eric L. 2005. “Mexican Repatriation and the Possibility for a Federal Cause of Action: A Comparative Analysis on Reparations.” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 37(1): 171–96.Google Scholar
Rich, Wilbur C. 2007a. “African American Political Scientists in Academic Wonderland.” In African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Rich, Wilbur C., 38–52. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Rich, Wilbur C. 2007b. “Introduction.” In African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Smith, Wilbur C., 1–4. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Ruiz, Neil G., Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, and Tamir, Christine. 2020. “Many Black and Asian Americans Say They Have Experienced Discrimination Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak.” Pew Research Center, July 1. (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/07/01/many-black-and-asian-americans-say-they-have-experienced-discrimination-amid-the-covid-19-outbreak/).Google Scholar
Sáenz, Rogelio. 2020. “The COVID-19 Rising Toll on Latinos, a Look at the Beginning of July 2020.” Latino Decisions, July 14. (https://latinodecisions.com/blog/the-covid-19-rising-toll-on-latinos-a-look-at-the-beginning-of-july-2020/).Google Scholar
Scherr, Sonia, and Holthouse, David. 2009. “Swine Flu Prompts Anti-Mexican Sentiment.” Intelligence Report, August 30. Southern Poverty Law Center. (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2009/swine-flu-prompts-anti-mexican-sentiment).Google Scholar
Schoch-Spana, Monica, Bouri, Nidhi, Rambhia, Kunal J., and Norwood, Ann. 2010. “Stigma, Health Disparities, and the 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic: How to Protect Latino Farmworkers in Future Health Emergencies.” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 8(3): 243–54.10.1089/bsp.2010.0021CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scott, Joan Wallach. 1989. “History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story.” American Historical Review 94 (2): 680–92.10.2307/1873754CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smedley, Audrey. 2001. “Social Origins of the Idea of Race.” In Race in 21st Century America, ed. Stokes, Curtis, Meléndez, Theresa, and Rhodes-Reed, Genice. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, John David. 2013. “Introduction.” In The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, ed. Smith, John David and Lowery, J. Vincent, 1–47. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 2004. “The Puzzling Place of Race in American Political Science.” Political Science and Politics 1(1): 41–45.Google Scholar
Trauner, J. 1978. “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870–1905.” California History 57(1): 70–87. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25157817?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents).10.2307/25157817CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitalis, Robert. 2017. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.10.7591/9781501701887CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, Hanes, and McCormick, Joseph P. II. 1997. “The Study of African American Politics as Social Danger: Cues from the Disciplinary Journals.” National Political Science Review 6:229–44.Google Scholar
Walton, Hanes, and Smith, Robert C.. 2007. “The Race Variable and the American Political Science Association’s State of the Discipline Reports and Books, 1907–2002.” In African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Rich, Wilbur C., 24–37. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Ernest J. III. 1985. “Why Political Scientists Don’t Study Black Politics, but Historians and Sociologists Do.” PS: Political Science and Politics 18(3): 600–607.Google Scholar
Wilson, Ernest J. III, and Frasure, Lorrie A.. 2007. “Still at the Margins: The Persistence of Neglect of African American Issues in Political Science, 1986-2003.” In African American Perspectives on Political Science, ed. Rich, Wilbur C., 7–23. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Yancy, CW. 2020 “COVID-19 and African Americans.” JAMA 323(19): 1891–92. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2764789).10.1001/jama.2020.6548CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: Link

McClain Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P6YAMO
Link