Which means that for the first time in several years I have to sit down and figure out what I do next. I’ve already talked about what my next project is, a book about neoliberal governmentality, tentatively titled Can’t Knock the Hustle. But I’ve a number of other projects percolating. And I need to figure out how to gear up again. I’ve said before that this was a marathon and not a sprint. My challenge now is to take enough time somehow to recharge while not sitting on my ass because I’ve written A book.

I turned my blog off more or less since I made the push to get it done. A post here and there. I’m not turning it on necessarily. At least not post a day on. But I’m going to see if there is a way I can use this to kick around project ideas. To do some different things.

Next semester I teach black political thought at the graduate level and urban policy at the undergrad level. Am giving talks at dartmouth on the Obama experiment and at Hobart and smith on gender, race and neoliberal govermentality. Working with the National Legal Aid Defense Association on municipal underbounding, and just got asked to write a piece on self-segregation for The Urbanite.

A very busy year coming up.

It’ll do.

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You end up performing poorly on the test.

Similarly, if you’re Asian American and you take a math test…and in the course of taking that test somehow you are reminded that Asians DO well at math, you end up performing well on that test.

Anyway, the New York Times reported the results.

Now I’ve got to say off the rip, that these results have not passed peer review–that is to say the researchers here have not published their paper in an academic journal. Until THAT point, their results don’t mean a whole helluva lot.

But it got me to thinking. We wouldn’t necessarily expect that Obama would have an effect on academic achievement–this is why to be honest with you I don’t buy their argument.

We WOULD though, expect Obama to exert some type of influence on black and white public opinion. Isn’t this part of the whole “hope” thing? Electing Obama would not only change the government, but through electing him we would change the way we govern each other, the way we govern ourselves.

Beyoncé performed at one of the Inaugural Balls, and Robin Roberts interviewed her afterwards. I’ll never forget that interview because of what Beyoncé said. “He makes me want to be better. This is the greatest day of my life.”

And that’s it right?

So a number of political scientists have been interested in cue-taking. In how we as citizens take cues from our leaders, using them to fill in information we might not have. I might not have the time or the knowledge to go into depth about the banking scandal. But if someone I trust politically tells me that the banking scandal was caused by X, then I’m going to use that cue, that signal, to help me arrive at a conclusion. Without having to do all that heavy lifting. It’s efficient, it’s effective.

One slight problem.

What if the people you trust send you astray? Send you against your own political instincts, or rather what your political instincts SHOULD be given your background (your race, class, gender, etc.)?

So a couple of political scientists tested this with blacks. Would they be more likely to agree with the premise that blacks should rely on themselves if they were exposed to statements from prominent blacks saying they should? They found that not only were they more likely to agree if blacks said it than whites, they were more likely to agree even if the African American were someone like Clarence Thomas (who presumably votes against their interests but is black), compared to someone like Ted Kennedy (who presumably votes FOR their interests but is white).

Now I had a problem with this. I didn’t have a problem about the FINDINGS necessarily. But I had a problem with how the findings were EXTENDED. The political scientists in this case thought that taking the cue in this case automatically meant changing POLICY PREFERENCES. You believe blacks need self-help more than anything else? You support reducing government aid for welfare.

However it doesn’t have to work like this. All sorts of black folk–nationalists particularly–could believe that blacks should rely on themselves while still believing the government should take responsibility and do their part.

Now for political scientists this project is potentially important because of what it tells us about public opinion. And yes it’s important to me for that reason as well. However given Obama’s verbiage about black kids needing to get away from the XBOX, his verbiage about black nations needing to stop living in the colonial past, there is a more practical consideration that drives my research here. Does Obama’s statements like these actually DAMPEN support for progressive policy?

So I ran an experiment on blacks and whites. I exposed a group of 250 blacks and 250 whites to one of 8 doctored news stories. Four of them blamed black circumstances on black men. Four of them blamed black circumstances on the lack of government intervention. And each story was connected to one of four sources–Obama, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, or the New York Times. Because I had to make the stories plausible I couldn’t use a white Republican, nor could I use someone like Clarence Thomas–they’d never blame black circumstances on the lack of government intervention.

I then had them fill out a survey, first asking them whether they agreed with the person.

I got the results back and just started examining them.

My results so far are both heartening and disheartening.

I’ll talk about this more in depth later, but suffice it to say that when whites read stories featuring Obama blaming black men they are far more likely to agree with him than when exposed to the New York Times structural attribution story. And while whites also agree with the statement when Clinton says it, they don’t agree as much as when either Obama or Powell says it. NONE of the “government intervention” stories had an effect on them.

When it comes to blacks? The only elite black male blame treatment that has an effect on them is Powell’s. When they read the story attributed to Powell, they were much more likely to agree with him than when exposed to the control. On the other hand, there was only ONE government intervention story that had an effect on them–Obama’s.

So there are two sets of questions that are important here to me: does this translate into policy support? Does this translate into diminished sentiment towards blacks?

Answers to follow.

Thoughts?

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When Obama was elected President, a number of scholars tested the effect of his election on racial attitudes, on stereotype threat, on educational outcomes.

But for my interests the most important question has yet to be asked. When Obama claims that black poverty is more a function black DYSfunction, are blacks more likely to believe it? The struggle against racial disparities begins in black and brown communities. When black and brown elites blame these disparities on black and brown populations, they DEmobilize populations. When Minister Louis Farrakhan for example brings one million men to the seat of government only to say “we don’t want ANYTHING, but instead want to apologize” these men are shifted AWAY from political activism and towards the type of self-help behavior that does little to nothing to either empower black communities or reduce the effects of racism.

I wrote a grant proposal after Obama’s election to test the Obama effect on black attitudes about poverty and the black poor.

I just received word yesterday that it was accepted.

This will be an excellent opportunity to begin a critical conversation on the role of black leaders in black politics. I’ll keep you updated as to the results.

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For African Americans? Not so much. The abstract:

Critics have long feared that America’s winner-take-all electoral system would undermine the interests of minorities. Unfortunately, few available tests broadly assess how well minorities fare in a democracy. To gauge winners and losers in the American case, I introduce a new measure of representation. For any election, I count up how many voters from each demographic group vote for a candidate that loses. After comparing this new measure to its alternatives, I use data from the entire series of Voter News Service exit polls and a sample of mayoral elections to determine which kinds of voters end up losers. I find that across the range of American elections, African Americans are consistently more likely than other groups to end up losers, raising questions about equity in American democracy. The one exception to the pattern of black failure—congressional House elections—suggests ways to better incorporate minority interests.

This finding has all sorts of implications for elections, and for public policy. Cobb (Michael Bowen, not Dr. Jelani) argues that rights never generated wealth. This isn’t right at all. Coming with the right to choose winners and losers, among other things, is the indirect right to award contracts and to garner services. If that doesn’t lead to wealth, and health I don’t know what does. In the wake of news that political scientists don’t really bring much to the table in the way of policy prescriptions, it’s good to see research like this.

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Along similar lines I believe I’ve mentioned this on facebook, but my article “Episodic Marginalization, HIV/AIDS, and African American Public Opinion” was recently published in Political Research Quarterly. HIV/AIDS has been and remains a scourge in black communities, hitting black women particularly hard. Many blame the rise of HIV/AIDS among black women on black men who claim to be straight but engage in sex with other men. What I do in my article is test the effects of this particular story about hiv/aids transmission, on black attitudes. How does reading a story about a black man infected with hiv/aids through sex with another man influence black attitudes about black men, about hiv/aids, about solutions to it?

I’ve got a proposal in the works that will similarly test the effect of Obama on black public opinion. Well, not Obama per sé but black leaders including Obama. If blacks are exposed to a statement by Obama putting the blame for black problems on black men are they more or less likely to support it? Are they more or less likely to support the types of policy solutions that come along with this?

And my next book project is on neoliberalism in black politics. The goal is to get three solid chapters of this project done by this time next year…in fact sooner than that. We’ll see.

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I just stumbled on an interesting article from Public Opinion Quarterly. The abstract for “The End of Welfare as We Know It?” (Joshua Dyck and Laura Hussey, vol 72, No. 4, pp. 589-618):

Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare has lost its place among America’s most controversial issues. While there are many critics of the reform, many more declare it a success, and these elites are both Republican and Democrat. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public is favorably inclined toward the passed reforms. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence that the information environment surrounding welfare policy has changed. Given this, we pose the following research question: do negative attitudes about blacks continue to color people’s willingness to spend money on welfare programs? We address this question by examining the predictors of opposition to welfare spending in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies. The evidence suggests that despitethe changing information environment, welfare attitudes are as strongly racialized in 2004, as they were a decade earlier.

Dyck and Hussey knocked this out of the park. (And yes their last names are funny as hell considering the subject.)

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The abstract:

Modern Republics neglect to establish formal institutions that prevent wealthy citizens from exerting excessive political influence and they abandon extra-electoral techniques traditionally employed to keep office-holders accountable. Inspired by Guicciardini’s and Machiavelli’s reflections on the Roman, Venetian, and Florentine constitutions, this article highlights three forgotten practices that facilitate popular control of both economic and political elites: magistrate appointment procedures combining lottery and election, offices or assemblies excluding the wealthy from eligibility, and political trials enlisting the entire citizenry in prosecutions and appeals. I present a typology of regimes that evaluates the wealth containment potential of various magistrate selection methods, and propose a hypothetical reform supplying the U.S. Constitution with a ‘Tribunate’ reminiscent of elite-accountability institutions in pre-eighteenth century popular governments.

I’ve already presented an abstract from an article that studies how the rich dominate the public policy arena. You’d think that political science as a discipline would be concerned with this type of stuff more, but this focus is new–or rather new to me (and I’ve only got 5 years in the game).

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