A Black Feminist Rationale for Doing Public Facing Research: A Tale of Writing for Both Political Science and the Broader Public

I. Why I Do and Who I Do It for

Many political scientists will never read my research or engage with scholarship on identity politics. This is not an ego-driven statement. But rather I am reupping a claim made in the 2011 Task Force Report of the American Political Science Association, ² which forcefully argued that the discipline will is woefully unprepared to address issues of the 21^st century—racism, immigration, and gender being chief subjects that political science fails to fully tackle. Ten years later, these chickens have come home to roost. For instance, political science was dolefully slow to address the role of White supremacy and racism in the January 6^th insurrection. This lack of scholarly attention to racism happened, to my mind, because our discipline failed to incorporate decades of scholarship by REP colleagues who have warned against White nationalism and the powerful role of anti-Blackness in shaping American policy, public opinion, and political behavior. For those of us study identity politics, we readily recognized the role of racism as being an integral part of American political life. But, one thing that the Trump era has made apparent is the salience of identity politics.

I engage with public-facing scholarship to call attention to these long-acknowledged truths that America has a race problem. Unfortunately, I’m able to apply this scholarship to too many instances of race-based discrimination, violence, and public policy. There are scholars who do not engage with REP perhaps because they too believe that identity politics in and of itself divides us and is not a central feature of American politics. However, my engagement on Twitter and with op-eds around these issues indicates that my colleagues are paying attention to racialized (and gendered) critiques of political phenomena—even it is does not find its way into their published scholarship.

I routinely talk with news media about my scholarship and how it informs my analysis on political events. As a founding board member of Women Also Know Stuff, ³ I actively work to diversify the pool of experts that the media draw on to discuss politics. I view this an opportunity to share the salience of identity politics—particularly, Black women’s politics—with a broader audience. I also recognize that some in mass public often view “talking heads” who discuss racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on with disdain, and, as such, I work hard to make my work accessible so that others realize why and how identity politics matter. For instance, I couch Black women’s high levels of political engagement ⁴ —particularly for Democratic candidates ⁵ —as juxtaposed to the killing of Breonna Taylor ⁶ to argue that Black women must engage in politics as a life-or-death issue. I want to complicate the narrative of Black women as the mules of American political life and show the complicated (and pragmatic) nature of Black women’s politics. ⁷ In this way, I hope to provide a more nuanced and realistic account to why Black women’s politics are crucial part of the American electoral landscape.

II. Contributions

Black women’s politics was on full display last summer. Kamala Harris ⁸ became the first South Indian and Black woman vice president. Breonna Taylor did see justice in death, ⁹ and Black women political elites who agitated for social justice were punished. ¹⁰ As the lead editor of Politics, Groups, and Identities (PGI), ¹¹ I worked with Coordinated Editors Ray Block, Jr. and Christopher Stout to develop the Black Lives Matter Syllabus as a response to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders. We ungated a series of essays on Black Lives Matter for 3 months to help inform the public about protest politics, racial differences, electoral outcomes, race-based policing disparities, and the historical legacies of racism that can be readily seen in Black Lives Matter incidents. We published a post in The Monkey Cage, a political science research blog in the Washington Post, on how to teach this material. ¹² This syllabus garnered a tremendous amount of attention from political scientists, university officials, media outlets, elementary and secondary teachers, as well as activists.

In the tradition of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists ¹³ and as heirs to the legacy of Ralph Bunche, ¹⁴ the current PGI leadership prioritizes and publishes essays that are both applicable and accessible. Further, this link to research and scholar-activism is readily seen in the public-facing work of our editorial team and board members as well as our international advisory board. Therefore, it makes sense that PGI would be the vanguard at the intersection of research and public-facing scholarship. As the lead editor of this journal (and first Black woman to solo-lead a political science journal as the editor-in-chief), I am immensely proud of the work that we do. In this way, I hope to speak back to the discipline and engage with broader audiences in a manner that would make Anna Julia Cooper proud.