Goodbye and Thank You

This is our final offering of THIS WEEK IN RACE. After more than three years and 165 offerings, we say farewell for now and urge our readers to continue to be meaningfully engaged in issues that reside at the intersection of race, politics and language.

Others Have Stepped Up

Partly because we have never taken advertising in this space and partly because of our interest in collaboration and solidarity with those who share a vision of a more racially just nation and world, we have never been interested in "competing" with any of the other bloggers. To the contrary, we try to promote others in as many ways as we can. Many of of our colleagues write daily or several times a day, and almost all of them have significantly more readers than we do. We have always told ourselves (and each other) that if only one person was positively affected by the work that we did here each week, it was worth it. We still feel that way, but there are so many other places where folks can learn about the complexities of these issues that we do not feel as if we are letting our readers down by bowing out now.

Filling Gaps

Scholarship is all about filling "gaps." Researchers and theorists build off one another's work to push forward the state of knowledge. Accordingly, we started this blog to fill a gap. Those of you who have been with us from the beginning will recall that we used to strive to incorporate the major stories that happened each week so that our readers were aware of what was going on with respect to issues of race and politics. That is something that we feel as if we still do well, but our Facebook Page and Twitter feed serve that purpose today. When Barack Obama emerged as a contender for the presidency in 2007, there was a noticeable spike in online content about race and politics. It is more important than ever to have that compiled in one location so folks know where to turn. In this way, the RaceProject is still unique and valuable, but shifts in the way folks get information have led us to fill this gap in other ways.

The other major purpose of TWIR was to apply scholarship in academic areas as diverse as communication, sociology, anthropology, political science and psychology to current events. While there may not be a precise substitution for that, there are a number of scholars who are making research relevant to folks who are interested in issues of racial justice. We will keep the Resources page of our website up-to-date, and we will continue to update the blogroll on the right-hand column of this space. It is worth noting that when we began writing here in September of 2006 -- five years after the founding of the RaceProject -- there were very few scholars who had blogs, very few blogs about race relations, and almost no Internet writing that featured a combination of both -- certainly not on a regular basis. As we approach 2010, the landscape has changed significantly. There are thoughtful folks -- many of them academics -- who are able to offer thoughtful, informed analysis in a timely fashion. By the time the end of the week rolls around, we are finding that there is not much more that we could add without sacrificing quality (which we are not willing to do). In short, there is not really a need for what we do here on a weekly basis.

We will continue to do what others do not. For instance, we will continue to provide guides to some of the major academic conferences so folks interested in these issues can navigate those meetings. When appropriate, we will write about what others do not, cannot or will not. We will publish here and/or in our space at Op-Ed News, and Charlton will continue to write for theGrio.

Time Crunch

Finally, the reality is that for well over a year, writing this entry each week has been a bit of a burden for us. We enjoy sharing our thoughts, and each note we get from appreciative teachers, students and folks from all sorts of places have helped to propel us along. For that reason, we are a bit sad about saying goodbye. But we spent a good bit of time together in Chicago this weekend thinking and talking about this, and we decided that, even if it does not seem that way now, our contribution to the broader conversation is better served with this decision.

We have our hands full with our traditional scholarly responsibilities, and while we are both tenured, we have professional obligations that must be (and should be) addressed with our full attention. We have a co-edited textbook to finish in the next few months, and we are putting the finishing touches on Race Appeal, the first book from the RaceProject, which will be published next year by Temple University Press. We are both teaching full time, of course, and the Facebook page and Twitter feed have created additional demands for our attention. We very much want (and expect) to finish the compilation of our congressional election database -- the most comprehensive of its kind to be made publicly available -- by 2011 (the 10th anniversary of the RaceProject), and we expect that the requests for us to speak at colleges and universities across the country will increase in the next twelve months with the 2010 election season and the emergence of Race Appeal.

With only 24 hours in the day, we are very concerned about making sure that we are attentive to our families, too -- a concern that increases with each new element of the RaceProject.

This Ain't a Retirement!

We will continue to keep this blog active so that the archives are available and that there is a place for us to write on occasion when we feel that there is a gap that needs to be filled. We will change the name to THIS SPACE FOR RACE, and we will continue to host This GUEST on Race.

We encourage you to stay connected with us by becoming a fan on Facebook and/or following us on Twitter. If you do not use either of those, you can subscribe to the content that goes out on Facebook and Twitter by clicking here and adding us to your favorite RSS reader. Please follow our Twitter friends, fan the Facebook pages that we have "favorited," and visit to the blogs that we list here and on our website. Look for our books next year, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like us to come to speak at your high school, college or university.

We are not disappearing; to the contrary, we may be more visible than ever. It is just that the evolution of online communities and the proliferation of thoughtful discussion about these issues have rendered this space a less valuable place for us to appear regularly.

Thank You

Thank you all so very much for the loving support, which includes your honest and challenging criticism, over the years. Thanks for sharing this blog with your friends, colleagues and family. Thanks for leaving thoughtful comments. Thank you for the re-tweets and for re-posting to your Facebook wall. Thank you for the "attaboy" emails and for the tough questions that forced us to work harder. We wish you all the best and hope to see you soon in these other spaces.

APSA Preview: New Research on Race and Political Communication

We are currently assembling our team of volunteer research assistants for the fall. If you are interested in helping with the Race Project (or if you know someone who might be), please scroll to the bottom of this entry to see the formal notice.

The mission of The Project on Race in Political Communication is to "contribute to the state of knowledge in the field of political communication and [to] share that information with the mass public in an accessible way." This blog is one part of our effort to do that, as is the RaceProject.org "resources" page and our public lectures. Our Facebook Page, which we launched two months ago, is yet another (more than 800 "fans" now -- thanks to all for the great postings and discussion!), and THIS WEEK, we expanded our online presence to Twitter. If you tweet, follow us @PRPC for information and commentary related to race and political communication.

Also consistent with our mission, we are offering a preview of the research on race, politics and language that is scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Toronto, September 3-6.

Academic conferences are opportunities for researchers in the various subfields of a discipline to get together, share their most recent work (and receive comments and criticism), meet with publishers and potential publishers, and network with colleagues and friends from around the world. As you know, we work in a research area (political communication) that spans (at least) three disciplines: political science, communication and psychology, and our specific work involves the interdisciplinary area of race and ethnicity/culture studies. Attending professional conferences in these fields affords us the opportunity to get critical feedback from other researchers and keep abreast of the most current work in which others are engaged.

Furthermore, because we live 800 miles apart, these meetings provide a chance to have some quality face time with one another to get re-centered with our work.

The research that we are presenting at this conference is a draft of a chapter from our book Race Appeal, which will be published next year. The paper is called "Racial Discourse in Political Advertisements: An Historical View," and it will be presented on a panel titled "Communicating and Framing Political Identities" at 8:00 a.m. Saturday, September 5. (You can download a copy of the paper here, or, like all of our papers, at the RaceProject.org "Studies & Data" page.) The panel is chaired by Hyun Jung Yun (Texas State University); Daniel C. Hallin (University of California, San Diego) will serve as the respondent. The other presenters on the panel are as follows:

Racial Framing in Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election

Kimberly A. Gross, George Washington University

Johanna Harvey, George Washington University

Claire Low, George Washington University

The Impact of Political Campaigns on the Nascent Partisanship of Mexican Immigrants in the United States: Evidence from Two Mobilization Experiments

James A. McCann, Purdue University

Katsuo A. Nishikawa, Trinity University

Stacey L. Connaughton, Purdue University

Like Parents, Like Citizens: Mexican Children’s Political Socialization

Juan Enrique Huerta, ITESM

Young Voters in the U.S. and Turkey: The Changing Landscape of Political Attitudes, Media Use and Individual Traits.

M. Selcan Kaynak, Bogazici University

We have selected about three dozen additional papers (in no particular order) that caught our attention. (You can view the list of panels and papers for all of the organized sections, including political psychology, political communication and race, ethnicity and politics on the conference online program website.) To date, we are only privy to the title and authors, but you should be able to download and read any of these papers at some point during the week (or shortly thereafter) by searching Google Scholar or by navigating to the Social Science Research Network's APSA 2009 page. In any case, just reading through the titles will give an idea about what top researchers and young scholars in the field are working on, which we hope you will enjoy.

Polemics, Political Racism, and Misrecognition: Naming and Analyzing Prejudice Against Arab-Americans

Emily Wills, New School University

Racial Bias by Another Name: Anti-Muslim Attitudes and Voting Against Barack Obama

David P. Redlawsk, University of Iowa

Will Barack Obama be Black in 2012? Stereotypes, Strategies, and Changing Views of a President

Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan

The Effect of Social Networks on the Quality of Thinking about Policies

Elif Erisen, Cal Poly State University

Cengiz Erisen, SUNY, Stony Brook

A Group-Based Approach to Understanding Deliberation: The Deliberative Justice Experiment

Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University

Tali Mendelberg, Princeton University

Truth, Relevance and Motivated Processing in Perceptions of Political Advertising

Daniel Stevens, University of Exeter

Barbara Allen, Carleton College

John L. Sullivan, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis

Thinking about Immigration: A Multi-Method Study of Individual Differences in Political Cognition

Shawn W. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine

Leah A. Hemze, University of California, Irvine

Why Do We Use Race and Gender When Policy Information Is Available?

Nathan A. Collins, Santa Fe Institute

Does Affective Contagion Promote Coherent Political Thinking?

Cengiz Erisen, SUNY, Stony Brook

Milton Lodge, SUNY, Stony Brook

Charles S. Taber, SUNY, Stony Brook

Public Responses to Global Threats: A Racial Divide?

Ted Brader, University of Michigan

Nicholas A. Valentino, University of Michigan

Black Elite Rhetoric and System Justification Ideology

Byron D'Andra Orey, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Hyung Lae Park, Jackson State University

Lester Kenyatta Spence, Johns Hopkins University

Where Race Matters: The Effects of Space and Neighborhood on Voting Behavior

Thomas K. Ogorzalek, Columbia University

Black and White Americans and Latino Immigrants: A Preliminary Look at Attitudes in Three Southern Cities

Paula D. McClain, Duke University, et al.

Multicultural Multiracialism, Multiracial Multiculturalism: Race, Mixed-Race and Diversity in the United States, Great Britain and Canada

Debra Thompson, University of Toronto

The Obama and the Clinton Factors: How Race and Gender Factor into Blacks’, Whites’, and Latinos’ Trust in the Representation of Group Interests

Shayla C. Nunnally, University of Connecticut

Shifting the Gender Gaze: The Intersection of Race and Gender in the Obama Candidacy

Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, University of Rochester

Food Politics: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Food Access

Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, Princeton University

The Rise of Indirect Affirmative Action: New Strategies for Promoting "Diversity" in Selective Institutions of Higher Education in the United States and France

Daniel Sabbagh, Centre d`Etudes et de Recherches Internationales

A History of Black Presidential Candidates: 1872-2008

Christina M. Greer, Smith College

Race, Class and Education Policy: Second-Generation Discrimination in the 21st Century

Kenneth J. Meier, Texas A&M University

Meredith Brooke Loudd Walker, Texas A&M University

Sadé Walker, Texas A&M University

Nationalism, Race and the Obama Victory

Joseph Bafumi, Dartmouth College

Michael C. Herron, Dartmouth College

An Experimental Exploration of Political Knowledge Acquisition from The Daily Show Versus CNN Student News

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, University of Delaware

Lindsay Hoffman, University of Delaware

Do Preconceptions Drive Voter Perception of Campaign Negativity?

Stephen C. Brooks, University of Akron

Rick D. Farmer, Oklahoma House of Representatives

The Role of Race and Age in 2008: A Series of List Experiments

Simon D. Jackman, Stanford University

Lynn Vavreck, University of California

Geo-Ethnic Political Dialogue: Multi-Color Skins with Blue, Red, and Purple Mindsets

Hyun Jung Yun, Texas State University

Lynda Lee Kaid, University of Florida

‘Whites Oppose, Blacks Support, Latinos Divided’: Making Sense of the Racialized Discourse Surrounding California’s Proposition 8

Victoria Wilson, University of California, Irvine

The Exceptional Electoral Style of Barack Obama

Roderick P. Hart, University of Texas, Austin

What is the Best Way to Measure the Bradley Effect? Lessons from the 2008 Election

Reuben Kline, University of California, Irvine

The Impact of Racism on Votes in the 2008 Presidential Election: Results from the Associated Press/Yahoo News!/Stanford Survey, the Standford MRI Survey, and the American National Election Studies

Jon A. Krosnick, Stanford University, et al.

Absence of Prejudice or Political Correctness? Comparing Survey-Based Indicators of Racial Bias with the Implicit Association Test

Shanto Iyengar, Stanford University

Kyu S. Hahn, University of California, Los Angeles and Yonsei University

Advancing Beyond the Local and Congressional Level: Under Which Conditions are Blacks Nominated for High Profile State-Wide Office

Christopher Stout, University of California, Irvine

Elections in Black and White: Race, Perceptions, and Voting Behavior in the U.S. House Elections

Matthew L. Jacobsmeier, University of New Orleans

The Effect of African-American Proximity on Latino Choice in the 2008 Presidential Primary

Ryan Donald Enos, University of California, Los Angeles

Turn Out or Burn Out? How Negative Ads Affect Latino and non-Latino Voting

Jennifer L. Merolla, Claremont Graduate University, et al.

Do Majority-Minority Districts and Reserved Seats for Minorities Undermine the Election of Women?

Robert G. Moser, University of Texas, Austin

Stephanie S. Holmsten, University of Texas, Austin

How Do We Get Along? Linked Fate, Political Allies, and Issue Coalitions

Dianne M. Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame, et al.

Equality, Inferiority and Electoral Competition: Black-Brown Partnerships in Newark, New Jersey

Andra N. Gillespie, Emory University

Fall Research Opportunities

The Project on Race in Political Communication has volunteer research opportunities for anyone who would like to be involved. While students (all levels) are a natural constituency in this regard, anyone is welcome to help. We are in the midst of the most labor-intensive phase of a very exciting element of the Project that will have implications far more widespread than the study of race and political communication.

We are compiling data and constructing a database that will be made available to researchers (in the form of a spreadsheet appropriate for quantitative analysis) and the public (in the form of a Web-interfaced search engine) that contains information about candidates for federal office (U.S. House and U.S. Senate) since 1970, including the candidate's race, gender, party affiliation, number of votes received, amount of money raised and spent, and other variables of interest. Research assistants are responsible for collecting information from a variety of sources (most of which are online) to compete the dataset. This is an important contribution that has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of elections, as this information is not currently available in one place.

The work requires no prior research experience and can be done from any location and at any time of the day (we can work around work schedules). For students, working as a Race Project research assistant affords the opportunity to gain experience with social science research for the purposes of CV building, instigating an original research project, and/or working toward a better understanding of racial inequality and injustice.

If you are interested, please Facebook message or email Senior Research Assistant Sidra Hamidi (sidra.hamidi@RaceProject.org). If you know someone who might be interested (or if you are a faculty member who has students who might be interested), please do not hesitate to pass this information along.

What the %@#& Do We Know?

Few folks feel confident enough to substantively question the writing of scholars in the natural sciences or even, to a certain extent, in the humanities. But in the social sciences -- particularly in those areas related to government -- there seems to be less of a sense of deference to scholars' offerings. In a number of ways, that's healthy because it allows folks without formal training (many of whom have not had the opportunity to get formal training) to weigh in on some of the most important problems of our times. It causes us to wonder aloud sometimes, though, what the %@#& do we know, anyway, and why does it matter?

Particularly in the age of the Internet, it is possible for interested persons to do "research" on a number of topics and feel that they are informed. The cycle can be vicious, though, as the information that is available is not always credible, though much of it sounds quite authoritative. Combine this with the conscious and deliberate attack on intellectualism in academia from conservatives who worry that young adults are being indoctrinated by liberal professors, and we are left with a situation where much of the information relating to politics and society appears to be quite similar.

This blog, for instance, gets about 400 hits a week. There are others who read THIS WEEK via RSS, email, etc., but even so, it's a pretty small audience overall. Each week, we try to apply (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) scholarly principles to current events so that our readers see clearly the ways that social scientists (at least two of us, anyway) "read" these issues. We are rarely sensationalistic, almost never call anyone names (remember: the scholarly use of the term "racist" is not an attack, but rather a truism; we use it as an adjective rather than a noun), and, as a consequence, we have a rather limited reach.

In short, we are pretty boring by the standards of more visible media sources (both new and traditional). So why are you reading this? What the %@#& do you know?!

We hope that you read us each week because you value the unique contribution that scholarship makes to public discourse (not just our scholarship -- all scholarship). We know that many of you are academics, but many of you are not. If you are not, you have come to appreciate what we and other social scientists offer to the discussion of race, language and politics because you realize that there is an important process that is in place that separates our writing from the less formal (though often just as thoughtful) writings of those who are not trained as scholars and do not spend their lives working within that framework.

At the heart of the scholarly process is an understanding of the work of those who have come before us and a commitment to the methods that are accepted as valid in the disciplines within which we work.

Training for a doctorate involves both of those areas. The graduate school years in social science programs are spent reviewing and re-contextualizing previous research and learning the nuances of the various methodologies accepted in the field. The creation of new knowledge centers on the double-blind peer review process in which all scholarly publications are subject to anonymous review by other scholars (who are familiar with the history and methodology in the specific area of inquiry) who determine if the work is worthy of publication in a scholarly journal or as a book. This process takes several years from the initiation of research until publication.

So it is disturbing to hear someone like Michele Malkin (left), who has millions of readers each week (as compared to the handful that we have) state proudly on The View THIS WEEK (watch here or below) that she spent six months writing her latest book about corruption in the Obama Administration. Six whole months! From the perspective of an academic, whether we agree or disagree with the "findings," it is quite suspect to rely on any evidence so hastily put together and screened only for its ability to make money (rather than any external intellectual standards). But in the free market, Malkin (who has no advanced formal academic training) is considered to be an "expert" on politics (she was a round table guest on This Week with George Stephanopoulos last week as she promoted her book).



Sour grapes? Sure. We cannot assume that is not part of our frustration, but it is not about Malkin, Beck, O'Reilly and others simply being more wealthy than we are. Most academics certainly have the talent and opportunities to enter professions where we would make more money. It is more about the frustration of being exposed to (and subsequently internalizing) the idea that information is more valid when it is held to scientific standards and practices. That is, something published in an academic journal or from a university press is a "better" source than something published in The New York Times, which (because it has editorial oversight) is better than something published on someone's blog.

For instance, a blogger named budwhite called Frank Rich and others who, like us, believed that there should be a teachable moment in the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. incident "racial hucksters." (We argued that there should be but would not be.) The commenters (and he has a lot more than we have each week!) tended to agree with him, even though there was no evidence that he applied scholarly principles to his opinion. Budwhite has a compelling story (World War II vet, retired LA police officer, starting law school in the fall) that (we feel) provides him with important perspective with which to offer his opinion. While we disagree strongly with his position on this issue, it brings to mind an important question about formal education versus life experience. Both are valuable, but in what ways? Under what circumstances? Do budwhite's life experiences make him equally qualified to comment on race as folks like us, who have earned doctoral degrees in related fields and who have published and spoken widely on the issue? Are we, in turn, as qualified as he is to speak on the nuances of police action? Is President Obama (when he claimed -- and we agreed -- that the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" when they arrested Professor Gates)?

How do we weigh the value of such differing perspectives? As college-level instructors, we expect students to understand that there is a difference between writing by academics and non-academics -- no matter how "smart" the latter are. But it is not as simple as reviewing the qualifications of the author(s). Academics are are also human, we are citizens, and we have a right to advance our own personal agendas, as well. Some of us do so in our own social network posts. Sometimes we make a serious effort to adhere to academic principles in these spaces (as we do); sometimes we do not. That is, sometimes we just wear our "citizen" hats. But we believe that, like a boxer who is not permitted to get into a bar brawl, academics should always remain committed to engaging in dialogue that enhances democracy. In other words, though no one can never be wholly "objective," academics have a responsibility to strive for objectivity by holding firm to the process that separates what we do from what those not trained as social scientists do. Being objective is not the same as being neutral, however; that is a distinction that folks need to recognize.

So we take the time THIS WEEK to reflect, but also to ask you: What the %@#& do we know?! If you are an academic, what do you know? If you are not, why do you read our stuff (and/or other blogs by academics)? Do you read scholarly journals and books, too? Why (or why not)?

It will come as little surprise to you that it takes us between three and five hours each week to put this offering together. Over three years, that is a significant time commitment, particularly when you consider that it has virtually no positive effect on our prospects for promotion. If we spent that time engaging in traditional academic pursuits, we might have an additional peer-reviewed article or two, or our books would be further along. We spend this time because we are committed to making the scholarship about race, politics and language accessible and relevant to our readers. We do it to (hopefully) serve as a model of what thoughtful dialogue can look like in the blogosphere. (For more about why we do this, see our last foray into blogger existentialism, "Defining Our Role," from last September.)

We're not going to stop. We know from your feedback that you are out there and that you appreciate our perspective (even when you disagree). But we know that we could exponentially increase our reach if we were to be more controversial. We also know, however, that you do not want that. Earlier in the week, we posted a link to a very disturbing bigoted web site on the RaceProject Facebook page, and some of our "fans" expressed concern -- not over the content of the site (it is expected that such garbage exists), but because they felt it was beneath what we do to engage with such mindless drivel. While we made a case for occasionally posting such material, we appreciate the sentiment behind the complaints. Folks were saying that they are attentive to the RaceProject because what we do is different than much of the other commentary out there. That has been our goal since we started the Project in 2001. Happily, it seems that you feel that (for the most part) we are doing it correctly.

But hey, what the %@#& do you know?!