Insulated Blackness: the cause for fracture in Black political identity

ABSTRACT

The Black Political Identity is often treated as a monolith in American politics, with interest groups and political parties employing blanket policy solutions to appease and engage African Americans. However, observations and scholarship show that Black Americans are not monolithic, possessing divergent views about social policies, so much so that some Black Americans can hold political positions that are oppositional to collective Black advancement. Therefore, this work theorizes the concept of insulated Blackness – the extent to which self-identified African Americans oppose pro-Black remedial policies and/or disagree with commonly held ideologies about the Black condition, as a result of an existence insulated from frequent experiences of racial discrimination. This analysis will use the 2016 American National Election Study to assess experientially constructed political Blackness in terms of policies and ideologies considered synonymous with Blackness. The analysis also presents predicted probability models that demonstrate that political Blackness is rooted in the heightened racial discrimination experiences. We conclude that self-identified Blacks may exist outside of the identity of political Blackness because they perceive they are insulated from racial discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• African American
• political Blackness
• identity
• racial discrimination
• affirmative action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The terms “African American” and “Black” are used interchangeably in this study.

2 Dr Nelson responded to Washington on Twitter’s social media platform and response can be found at https://twitter.com/drjanaye/status/1115392202169970690?s=21.

3 Affirmative action and the preferential hiring of Blacks, which fundamentally mirrors affirmative action, are remedial policies because as Kuklinski et al. (1997) describes affirmative action policies, they are efforts to combat discrimination through policy mandates that allow for the use of race as a part of a set of considerations.

4 In the 2016 ANES study, Blacks were undersampled as they were only 398 Black respondents of the 4271 participants or 9% of the respondents (DeBell et al, 2018). The undersampling of Blacks is further justification for this study's methodological approach of using an interaction model; as an additive model of only Black respondents could not be used in generalizing to the entire Black population because of undersampling.

5 Policies and cognitions used were coded as follows: affirmative action (1 = Oppose a Great Deal, 2 = Oppose Moderately, 3 = Oppose a Little, 4 = Neither, 5 = Favor a Little, 6 = Favor Moderately, and 7 = Favor A Great Deal); preferential hiring of Blacks (1 = Strong Opposition, 2 = Not Strong Opposition, 3 = Not Strong Support, 4 = Strong Support); past slavery makes it more difficult for Blacks (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree Somewhat, 3 = Neither, 4 = Agree Somewhat, 5 = Strongly Agree); and, police treatment – Whites v Blacks (1 = Blacks are Treated Better, 2 = Treated the Same, 3 = Whites are Treated Better).

6 Education was recoded (1 = No HS Diploma, 2 = HS Diploma, 3 = Some College, 4 = Associate Degree, 5 = BA/BS, 6 = Master’s Degree, and 7 = Professional or Doctorate). Income was recoded using $75,000 as a benchmark (1 = below $75,000 yearly and 2 = $75,000 or more yearly).