Speaking Truth to Power: How Racial Threat Shapes Political Beliefs

• In Event: Making and Unmaking Carceral Power: Imagining New Modes of Justice

Abstract

Since the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, greater attention has been focused on the ways that young Black Americans, among other vulnerable populations in the United States, confront daily threats to their safety. Threats like anti-Black policing, hyper-surveillance in communities, governmental disinvestments from education and work programs, expansive food deserts, exploitative working conditions, and a lack of consistent access to reliable healthcare shape the political attitudes and outcomes for young Black Americans. Most importantly, they are formative in shaping their political ideas and beliefs.

In this article, I ask: how do these experiences seed more radical political ideas among young Black Americans? More specifically, how do young Black Americans’ personal experiences with racial threat prime them for greater affinity toward abolitionist ideals? In response, I argue that racial threat and trauma, especially concerning police, influence young Black people toward political attitudes and beliefs rooted in abolition because they develop first-hand knowledge of the causes and effects of racial trauma and threat.

Using an original collection of interviews with 100 young Black Americans, I find that those who experience racial trauma and threat involving police also share four primary abolitionist commitments: 1) decarceration, 2) decriminalization, 3) reinvestment, and 4) adopting community-based care networks instead of police. A major finding is that Black women shared the most radical abolitionist political ideas when compared with other groups. This finding is in alignment with Black Feminist literature but pushes back against the long-held framing of radical politics through a masculine and patriarchal lens. These findings suggest that racial threat is not only formative of public opinion but also shapes underlying belief systems toward more radical political agendas.

Author

• Jenn M. Jackson, Syracuse University