No Strangers to Hardship:African Americans, Adversity and Politics of Resilience

• In Event: Mobilization, Civic Engagement, and Resilience

Abstract

How do varied forms of adversity foster a sense of resilience among African Americans? To be resilient is to persevere despite risks, adversity, stressors and various challenges that operate as barriers to reaching the preferred outcome (Bonanno 2004). Few accounts of African American political behavior have examined how resilience to adversity contributes to mobilizing political engagement – where the expected outcome of adversity is withdrawal or alienation (Schlozman and Verba 1979). Drawing on findings that demonstrate resilience serves as a protective factor, I explore the conditions under which experiencing adversity motivates political engagement. To date, few studies have systemically examined how group psychological traits, such as resilience to collective adversity, shape behavioral outcomes among groups in electoral and non-electoral settings. To address this, I rely on two original surveys with measures of racial resilience to highlight the relationship between perceived group resilience and political participation among African Americans, Latinos and Whites. I examine how Black Americans commonplace experiences of hardship condition them to be less affected by adversity, and more participatory relative to White Americans. Moreover, to further understand how different types of adversity are causally linked to political behavior, I rely on experimental evidence that manipulates both the type of and the source of the adversity on the perception of racial resilience. Overall, these findings reveal the influential role of resilience on political behavior and decision-making of African American voters. Together, these findings help parse directly how collective group identity motivates electoral behavior among African American voters who face institutional barriers to participation.

Author

• Christine Marie Slaughter, Princeton University