African American political scientists speak out about their discipline, academic issues and racism in the profession.

An indispensable and exemplary reference work, this Encyclopedia adeptly navigates the multidisciplinary field of critical political science, providing a comprehensive overview of the methods, approaches, concepts, scholars and journals that have come to influence the disciplineÕs development over the last six decades.

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.

This dynamic and comprehensive text from nationally renowned scholars continues to demonstrate the profound influence African Americans have had—and continue to have—on American politics. Using two interrelated themes—the idea of universal freedom and the concept of minority–majority coalitions—the text demonstrates how the presence of Africans in the United States affected the founding of the Republic and its political institutions and processes. The authors show that through the quest for their own freedom in the United States, African Americans have universalized and expanded the freedoms of all Americans. New to the Ninth Edition • Updated sections on intersectionality, dealing with issues of race and gender. • Updated section on African American music, to include the role of Hip Hop. • Updated sections on mass media coverage of African Americans and the African American celebrity impact on politics, adding new mention of the CROWN Act and the politics of Black hair. • Updated section on the "Black Lives Matter" movement, adding a new section on the "Me Too" movement. • Updated sections on African Americans in Congress, with a new mention of the Squad. • Updated voting behavior through the 2020 elections, connecting the Obama years with the new administration. • A comparison of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. • A discussion of the way in which race contributes to the polarization of American politics in the 2020 presidential campaign. • An analysis of the racial attitudes of President Trump, and the institutionally racist policies of his administrations. • Updated chapter on state and local politics, including a new section on state executive offices and Black mayors. • Updated sections on material well-being indicators, adding a new section on the coronavirus pandemic and the Black community. • The first overall assessment of the Obama administration in relation to domestic and foreign policy and racial politics.

Hanes Walton Jr. (1941-2013) was a pioneering and prolific scholar of African American politics, and the architect of the modern scientific study of the subject.The first person to earn a PhD in political science from Howard University, Walton devoted his career to laying the intellectual foundations in his writings, and lobbying for the establishment of black politics as a subfield in political science. This study comprehensively analyses Walton’s corpus, while providing a history of the development of the study of black politics in political science. It concludes with an analysis of how the subfield has evolved since Walton’s pioneering work.

Teaching Research Methods in Political Science brings together experienced instructors to offer a range of perspectives on how to teach courses in political science. It focuses on numerous topics, including identifying good research questions, measuring key concepts, writing literature reviews and developing information literacy skills.

Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens’ political identities. But because of the nature of race—its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power—we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively. Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this extended argument. Together, they provide an understanding of American politics that challenges our conventional disciplinary tools of studying politics and our conservative political moment’s dominant narrative of racial progress. This volume, the first to collect essays on the role of race in American political history and development, resituates race in American politics as an issue for sustained and broadened critical attention.

The election of 2008 brought onto the national stage complexitiesarising when the member of a minority group assumes power over national political institutions. It also underlined the limits placed on that power by the double accountability such a figure faces. The question posed in this volume of the NPSR is: Might the ascendancy of President Obama lead to a deracialization of American politics or its opposite? The contributions to this volume examine this question in a variety of ways. David Wilson and Khalilah Brown-Dean analyze black attitudes towards the candidates for the Democratic Party nomination in the presidential race of 2008. Lorenzo Morris asks how perceptions of race have defined expectations of the African American ambassadors to the United Nations. Horace Bartilow and Kihong Eom use a game theoretic approach to examine US drug strategies in the Caribbean. A works-in-progress section follows with personal reflections by Michael C. Dawson and Andra Gillespe. They relate how personal concerns and curiosities guide their research. A book review section provides a discussion about works of interest to scholars studying black politics.

Human Behavior in the Social Environment from an African-American Perspective, Second Edition is an updating of the classic text that presents leading black scholars discussing complex human behavior problems faced by African-Americans in today’s society. This new edition provides fresh theories and the latest practical interventions not in the first edition that show, for example, how to enhance a client’s coping strategies and resilience by focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. This edition includes a new foreword by former Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Human Behavior in the Social Environment from an African-American Perspective, Second Edition acquaints practitioners with the Black experience, and provides the latest innovative methods of working with this diverse population. This edition also offers new insights on evaluating practice initiatives. Experts and scholars explore and interpret individual and group behaviors, the strength and resilience of the black family, the stresses and problems affecting children, the significant problem of the affects of colorism, the self-esteem and identity issues of biracial children, violence in the criminal justice system, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the stress and behaviors resulting from belonging to the armed services, and other behavior stemming from progression through the life cycle. Chapters include charts and tables of data, extensive references, and study questions for deeper study for students. Topics in Human Behavior in the Social Environment from an African-American Perspective, Second Edition include: the importance of the consideration of the black experience in analyzing black behavior behavior as a response to a hostile social system the black church’s role in leading African-Americans resiliency perspective as a positive force the use of strength behaviors for socialization and survival strategies to strengthen roles of fathers in African-American families military culture as a microcosm of the wider society the psychological effects of skin color on self-esteem the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its effects refreshing social work practice to better meet the needs of African-American girls examination of a study on the help-seeking behaviors of young African-American males empirically based creative intervention strategies to alleviate black-on-black crime analysis of street gang behaviors with a program to address it influences of hip hop culture strategies to lessen substance abuse in children practices that help assist administrators and social workers to lessen school violence Human Behavior in the Social Environment from an African-American Perspective, Second Edition is a supplementary text that is valuable for undergraduate and graduate students, human service practitioners, mental health and medical counselors, policymakers, school officials, and criminal justice personnel.

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a new vanguard in African American political leaders. They came of age after Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, they were raised in integrated neighborhoods and educated in majority white institutions, and they are more likely to embrace deracialized campaign and governance strategies. Members of this new cohort, such as Cory Booker, Artur Davis, and Barack Obama, have often publicly clashed with their elders, either in campaigns or over points of policy. And because this generation did not experience codified racism, critics question whether these leaders will even serve the interests of African Americans once in office. With these pressing concerns in mind, this volume uses multiple case studies to probe the implications of the emergence of these new leaders for the future of African American politics. Editor Andra Gillespie establishes a new theoretical framework based on the interaction of three factors: black leaders’ crossover appeal, their political ambition, and connections to the black establishment. She sheds new light on the changing dynamics not only of Black politics but of the current American political scene.