Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans

Abstract

Parting company with much of the existing literature that examines White attitudes toward punitive social policies perceived to target Black Americans, this dissertation explores the conditions under which Blacks are willing to support these same policies. Bringing to bear insights from multiple disciplines, the dissertation examines the role that respectability—or a concern about in-group behavior and comportment—plays in affecting Black Americans’ willingness to support policies that have adverse consequences for members of their racial group. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the dissertation and sets up the motivating puzzle that guides the remainder of the project. In Chapter 2, I more carefully define the politics of respectability and situate this work alongside existing scholarship in history, psychology, and political science. In this chapter, I also outline the theoretical framework that links the politics of respectability to punitiveness. In Chapter 3, I introduce a measure of respectability, the Respectability Politics Scale, and examine the distribution of the measure and its demographic, social, and psychological correlates. In Chapter 4, I examine the degree to which the Respectability Politics Scale provides explanatory leverage above and beyond existing constructs. Results indicate that respectability, as captured by the RPS, is strongly associated with Black attitudes toward a range of punitive outcomes, though results also suggest a need to further refine the measure developed in Chapter 3. Chapter 5 leverages a study conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that varies the racial identity of teenagers who create a disturbance in a movie theater. Analyses from this study help further inform our thinking about the role that emotional and instrumental consideration play in affecting individuals’ support for punishment that implicates members of the group. I find, for example, that Black respondents’ perceptions of costs for people like the teenagers corresponds with punishment when the teenagers are Black, but not when the teenagers are described as White. In the final chapter, I conclude by highlighting the findings of the dissertation and remarking on the importance of this work for advancing our understanding of the role of identity in our thinking about American politics and the politics of punishment, in particular.