Forged in the Fire: Racially-Targeted Violence and Implications for Political Behavior in the United States

Abstract

How do individuals in the United States respond politically to racially-targeted violence? While literature in comparative politics and international relations has considered the impact of diverse forms of violence on diverse forms of political behavior, the subfield of American politics has failed to thoroughly consider the political implications of violence directed against racial minorities. To address this significant limitation in scholarship, Forged in the Fire focuses explicitly on the connection between racial violence, responses to those incidents, and how those responses vary across ethno-racial identity groups. I develop framework for explaining political behavior in the aftermath of racially-targeted violence. Experiences with violence and histories of violence are not uniformly distributed across the American population, particularly when comparing between Black and white Americans. These distinctions have shaped the formation of racial categories and the collective memories of racial groups, and I argue that these histories are drawn forth in the aftermath of violence. Therefore, I contend that racially-targeted violence should evoke distinctly elevated responses among Black and brown Americans in comparison to White Americans. I pursue this framework using a multi-method approach that combines survey experiments and observational data. Chapter 4 highlights individual-level reactions to racially-targeted violence using a series of survey experiments. Histories of violence and racial identity are inextricably intertwined in the United States, and this chapter tests if this is apparent when studying reactions to racially-targeted violence in the present day. The findings in this chapter substantiate my argument that responses to racially-targeted violence are not uniform across racial groups. I find that Black respondents express greater anger when presented with news of racially-targeted violence against other Black people and greater sympathy when shown news of violence against Hispanic people. Yet, such anger and sympathy is not evoked among Hispanic and white respondents. In Chapter 5, I extend these findings further. I show that, even when accounting for other attributes of violence (e.g., tactic or magnitude), shared racial identity with the targeted group remains a crucial factor for the degree of anger and punitiveness that Black respondents express about the violence. But again, shared race with the targeted group does not impact how white respondents felt about an incident. Chapter 6 measures the impact of racially-targeted violence on electoral behavior. I use several mass shooting events and election data to understand if and how several mass shootings across the United States influenced local-level voter registration and voter turnout. I do not find evidence of racially-selective electoral mobilization among Black voters, in the aftermath of a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, nor among Hispanic voters, in the aftermath of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. However, I do find evidence in Las Vegas, Nevada that even when violence is not clearly targeted against a racial group, local organizations may influence outcomes that fall along racial lines. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the wider implications of this work and its contributions. Forged in the Fire expands the literature on conflict and violence in the United States, at the same time contributing to a better understanding of how violence matters politically as well as when.