Research
I have published papers on the legitimacy of the American courts in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election, on racism in popular culture, and on Pan-Africanism in African American public opinion. Below are some of the major projects I am working on now.
Stare in the Darkness: Rap, Hip-Hop, and Black Politics
With the explosion of hip-hop over the past thirty years, scholars, academics, and activists alike have made claims about the relationship between hip-hop and politics. With the seeming death of traditional civil rights politics, to what degree can or should we look to hip-hop as the political solution? In my book length project I examine the politics of the production, circulation, and consumption of rap and hip-hop, relying on a combination of survey research, experiments, textual analysis, and case studies.
Episodic Frames, HIV/AIDS and African American Public Opinion
Although African Americans are more liberal than their white counterparts on a range of issues, they also evince culturally conservative attitudes. How is this dynamic influenced by the mass media? The theory of secondary marginalization suggests that media narratives about African Americans influence their public opinion about HIV/AIDS, behaviors associated with it, and populations associated with it. However this has gone untested. Using an innovative experimental design, I find that episodic framing of HIV/AIDS not only activates negative attitudes towards behaviors associated with the disease and towards black men who engage in them, it also stimulates positive attitudes towards political mobilization and regressive policy solutions. This research extends our knowledge about the determinants of intra-racial attitudes.
Revisiting Black Empowerment
Black Mayors have been a prominent feature of the American political landscape since they began to be elected some 40 years ago. Early research indicated that black mayors were more likely than their white counterparts to render services to African American populations. Research also indicates that blacks in cities with black mayors are more likely to engage in political participation than cities with non-black mayors. But should these dynamics still hold some forty years later, when electing a black mayor is not as important? Using the National Black Politics Study I examine the influence of black political empowerment on the political participation of black citizens.
The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
Political scientists, sociologists, and geologists have become increasingly interested in the reproduction of neoliberalism across time and space. However scholars interested in race and in black life throughout the diaspora have yet to pay sustained attention to it. A cursory glance through important texts on black popular culture, urban politics, and black American political development turns up references to it. Tricia Rose (1994) argues that rap should be understood as a response to neoliberalism, and both Adolph Reed (1999), and Cedric Johnson (2007) reference neoliberalism in their works on black urban regimes and black power. However there is no single article or work dealing with black politics that places neoliberalism at the center of inquiry. To say that this is a problem is an understatement. In as much as neoliberalism and the process of neoliberalization shapes not only political institutions but political opportunities and political alternatives, it has shaped the activities of black political officials, the tint of black political ideologies, gender relations between black men and black women, and the political content of black cultural production. In this project I examine the influence of neoliberalism on black ideology, leadership, rhetoric, and institutions.