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.

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.

"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."--Provided by publisher.

"Over the last half century, there has been a marked increase in ideological conservatism among African Americans, with nearly 50% of black Americans describing themselves as conservative in the 2000s, as compared to 10% in the 1970s. Support for redistributive initiatives has likewise declined. And yet, even as black Americans shift rightward on ideological and issue positions, Democratic Party identification has stayed remarkable steady, holding at 80% to 90%. It is this puzzle that White and Laird look to address in this new book: Why has ideological change failed to push black Americans into the Republican party? Most explanations for homogeneity have focused on individual dispositions, including ideology and group identity. White and Laird acknowledge that these are important, but point out that such explanations fail to account for continued political unity even in the face of individual ideological change and of individual incentives to defect from this common group behavior. The authors offer instead, or in addition, a behavioral explanation, arguing that black Americans maintain political unity through the establishment and enforcement of well-defined group expectations of black political behavior through a process they term racialized social constraint. The authors explain how black political norms came about, and what these norms are, then show (with the help of survey data and lab-in-field experiments) how such norms are enforced, and where this enforcement happens (through a focus on black institutions). They conclude by exploring the implications of the theory for electoral strategy, as well as explaining how this framework can be used to understand other voter communities"--

February issue includes Appendix entitled Directory of United States Government periodicals and subscription publications; September issue includes List of depository libraries; June and December issues include semiannual index

Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. "I'm not a business man; I'm a business, man." Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly we're being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for developing our "human capital." Furthermore a range of institutions from churches to schools to entire cities have been remade, restructured to in order to perform like businesses. Finally, even political concepts like freedom, and democracy have been significantly altered. As a result we face higher levels of inequality than any other time over the last century. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence writes the first book length effort to chart the effects of this transformation on African American communities, in an attempt to revitalize the black political imagination. Rather than asking black men and women to "hustle harder" Spence criticizes the act of hustling itself as a tactic used to demobilize and disempower the communities most in need of empowerment.