An interview series with authors Hajnal, Hutchings and Lee

Authored by three of the USA’s most well-known scholars on American politics, this undergraduate textbook argues that racial considerations are today-and have always been since the nation’s founding-central to understanding America’s political system writ large.

We sat down with authors, Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vincent L. Hutchings, Taeku Lee, to talk about their new book, Race and Inequality in American Politics. In the third and final blog of a 3 part series, find out more about the book’s important topics. To read the rest of the series, click here.

Important Topics

Is racially explicit or anti-immigrant rhetoric covered at all?

Zoltan Hajnal: This topic is especially highlighted in chapter 9, but also features more broadly in other chapters including attitudes and public opinion about these sorts of questions. This is a pretty good illustration of our earlier point being a honest empirical investigation. Rather than start the race and elections chapter saying race is central to the electoral process, we think, ok, is race central and what are the tools and data points that would be relevant to answering that question.

We start with who is voting for whom, which proportion of each racial group supports one side or the other, and we see that there is a connection between race and the vote at that level. We then talk about the potential connection between rhetoric and the vote and how that may connect to how racial attitudes predict who votes for whom.

Vincent Hutchings: I’ll just build on that quickly to say that while we do explicitly in Chapter 9, we also cover it in Chapter 8 and elsewhere in the book. In some cases these are nakedly racist appeals, particularly in the 19th century and the early to mid-20th century. More recently, the appeals are perhaps more adroitly referred to as racially intolerant or racially implicit or, you know, other kinds of language that are not the kind of naked racist appeals that were routinely employed in the early part of the last century. So, we do talk about that; we don’t shy away from it as it’s not something that’s made-up, something  that’s a product of our liberal imagination. American politicians have routinely used racist appeals, particularly in the distant past. In the more recent past, the use of race in ways which might or might not be referred to as racist has also been fairly common. It’s far more sophisticated nowadays, and we certainly do talk about that.

Do you cover affirmative action and if so, which chapter would that be in?

Vincent Hutchings: We do talk about social policies throughout, including affirmative action, the use of race, why it would be considered relevant for some, why others object to it, and what factors motivate that objection.

Is Artificial Intelligence addressed in the book in terms of analyzing the study/collection of votes and voting itself?

Zoltan Hajnal: It’s largely not a focus of the textbook. We did think about it, but the work on AI and race is just beginning to come out right. There’s a whole range of interesting questions and almost no answers. Maybe edition 2 will have more on AI or certainly raise more of those questions.

Takeu Lee: The subject matter is so salient today in American politics that the topics that we might cover and the way we might cover it and the facts that are relevant to how we would cover it were constantly changing as we were actually writing the textbook. AI would be another case in point where if there were to be a second edition, it would certainly have to feature in that second edition.

Read the previous blogs in the series: ‘Introducing the Textbook,’ and ‘Pedagogical Features and Student Engagement‘

Race and Inequality in American Politics: An Imperfect Union

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