Publications

The Right To Bare Arms: News Media, Public Opinion, and Black Women in Politics

Political science scholars have long posited that Black Americans and women face penalties in terms of how they are evaluated by the American public. Some researchers emphasize intersectionality, and have advanced the idea that Black female political figures are doubly disadvantaged due to their dual race-gender identity. There is nevertheless limited evidence of this intersectional claim. This book accordingly examines whether Black female political elites do indeed face a unique combination of disadvantages in the American political arena in the context(s) of both American public opinion and the news media. Using the intersectionality framework, Crenshaw (1989), I develop hypotheses based on previous studies that have examined the experiences of Black women in the political arena and beyond, particularly work suggesting the importance of intersectionality for understanding the combined effects of race and gender. I also examine both political attitudes and news coverage to identify the ways in which Americans’ beliefs about Black female political figures are (or are not) distinctive relative to White women, White men, and Black men.

Data & Methodology

My book utilizes a multi-methodological approach stemming from several empirical techniques:

I implement an original survey and survey experiment fielded with Dynata Research in order to first determine whether Black female political elites are subject to heightened negative evaluations in the context of American public opinion relative to White women, White men, and Black men. It is first important to establish whether Black female political elites encounter unique levels of bias within the domain of public opinion relative to their counterpart groups before exploring whether news media serves as a driver of this.
I conduct a series of qualitative interviews with Black women political leaders in positions of elective office across the New England region to determine the extent to which current Black women political elites perceive that they are uniquely disadvantaged relative to their colleagues of other race-gender groups. I use the findings derived from these interviews in order to motivate the empirical analyses to follow in the remainder of the book.
I employed automated content analyses of media data, to assess whether the type of news coverage that Black female political elites receive both in national television networks and across newspapers is distinctively unique relative to that of their counterparts. I analyze factors such as the tone of news coverage, the primary topics or themes that emerge in news stories, as well as the extent to which news coverage is more likely to highlight aspects of identity in discourse surrounding Black women political elites.
Finally, I implement an additional survey experiment in order to examine whether direct exposure to negative news has a disproportionately more damaging effect on public opinion and support for Black female political elites.

Broader Impacts

The Right to Bare Arms is critical for several reasons. First, there is limited empirical information surrounding the experiences of Black female political elites in both the public opinion and political communication literatures. Much of the preceding work in this area has frequently centered the experiences either of Black male political figures, or White female political figures, often leaving Black women largely unconsidered. Further, this book sets forth an investigation into the experiences of Black female political elites at the intersection of both race and gender- something that is not often done within the scholarly literature. While previous works have set out to understand the experiences of Black women in the political arena more broadly (e.g., Reingold et al. 2020; Brown and Gershon 2017; Junn and Brown 2008), few studies have examined whether Black female political elites are systemically disadvantaged within the political arena in ways that their race-gender counterparts are not.

Second, this book is timely given the increase of Black women entering into the political arena, in recent years at historic rates. We might look toward the inauguration of Vice President Kamala Harris (2021) and her most recent nomination as the Democratic Party presidential nominee for the 2024 presidential election. Or, on the other hand, we might also look toward the historic confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court (2022). And, Black women have also been sweeping the country in midterm elections at the congressional level, especially in 2018 and 2022. Black women have also enjoyed success in recent years in terms of being elected as mayor in some of America’s key cities such as Karen Bass in Los Angeles, CA and Keisha Lance-Bottoms who previously served in Atlanta, GA. Further, it is clear that we are at a pivotal moment in American history- a moment where Black women have been able to ascend to political prominence, and gain substantial success in being elected into high levels of political office. Furthermore, it is imperative that scholars of race, gender, and politics continue to advance this work and devote critical attention toward understanding the factors that shape the success of Black female political leaders.

Third and perhaps most important, this book is the first of its kind to combine a rigorous set of analyses from both the perspectives of American public opinion, as well as political communication. While previous studies have often focused on the experiences of Black and/or female political figures in the contexts of either public opinion or political communication, this book is the first of kind to bridge these literatures together. And, even fewer studies have tested the intersectionality framework in either of these realms. Leveraging data from a variety of empirical studies across a total of seven chapters, the intent of this book is to examine not only how race or how gender has implications for the experiences of marginalized groups in the political arena – but rather, for how the intersection of those two identities produces unique consequences for Black female political elites, who are often understudied in these fields. Utilizing a combination of several methodological techniques, this book is novel in that it presents a rigorous set of analyses to provide a comprehensive and thorough approach to testing an unresolved question.