Resilience to Adversity: How Black Voters Are Mobilized to Counter Supression

(Working Title, for Book Manuscript in Development)

For generations, African Americans have demanded equality despite the reluctance of America to not treat them as second-class citizens. Across the United States, in different ways, Black Americans have continually resisted racial inequality and have done so with fewer resources. Resilience to Adversity examines how and why African Americans cope with and respond to hardships the way they do. Resilience to Adversity argues that persistent racial inequality has led to a unique racialized coping mechanism of tenacity and resourcefulness for Black Americans that aids in their capacity to mobilize against injustices. When African Americans marry their beliefs about structural racial inequality to relevant cultural socialization messages to persist in the face of adversity, they exhibit higher racial resilience. In turn, increased racial resilience can provoke an obligation to engage in inconvenient and riskier forms of political action. Evidence from interviews, surveys, and experiments reveal that racial resilience is one of African American’s cognitive pressures to withstand challenges that arise from economic hardships, which accounts for individual political engagement for collective goals without organizational and leadership direction. Resilience to Adversity casts light on how political behavior scholars have focused too long on the deficits created by fewer resources that explain gaps in political participation without conceptualizing how the absence of resources, specifically for African Americans, has morphed into political strength.

Resilience to Adversity explains Black participation and engagement in a new way. It asks: What political psychological resources aid Black Americans in confronting and challenging suppressive tactics in American democracy? It argues that the orientation towards perseverance and the awareness of racial structural inequality affect Black Americans' motivation and intent to politically engage. The central theme of this book is that African Americans are motivated by, rather than deterred by, persistent inequality, reflecting a centuries-long collective struggle for political equality.  I argue that resilience is a racializing coping mechanism nurtured through embeddedness in Black organizations as a result of exclusion from mainstream organizations. Through Black cultural organizations, African Americans have developed an outlook of responding to adversity with an obligation to succeed. It is within this obligation that African Americans “make a way out of no way”, “do more with less” and “work twice as hard to get half as far” which collectively define the politics of resilience.

My current research is funded by the Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professorship at Boston University. The manuscript is based on my dissertation project, which was supported by the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2020), the Institute of Amerian Cultures and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA (2020), and the American Political Science Association (APSA) / National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Development and Improvement Grant (2020).   

For a synopsis of the research, listen to the Say More on That Podcast April 14, 2021 episode (hosted by Hilary Malfess) where I discuss racial resilience, Black countermobilization, and my research more broadly.