The Intersection of Race and Gender in National Politics is an exploratory analysis that not only looks at the role black women have played in the national political arena but also examines the sociohistorical forces that have facilitated and/or prevented the presence of black women in this arena—most specifically, in the White House. The book utilizes refereed journal articles, newspaper accounts, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and secondary data analyses to identify and detail the individual and reciprocating impact of race and gender on black women in national politics. Looking at the experiences of select black women in the national political arena, challenges and opportunities for black women in the pursuit of the U.S. presidency are identified. Special attention is paid to the media, recent changes to the Voting Rights Act, and campaign finance.

Cutting-edge research on the intersection of race, gender, and politics Traditionally, there has been a significant lack of empirical attention given to the ways in which race/ethnicity, gender, and political representation overlap. Intersectionality and Politics is the groundbreaking collection of contemporary research and essays that applies the concept of intersectionality specifically to descriptive and substantive representation by African-American, Latino/a, and Asian-American elected officials. This unique compilation looks at numerous states and focuses on multiple racial/ethnic groups to demonstrate the importance of this theory for understanding the political leadership of people of color and women. Intersectionality and Politics is the wide-ranging text that is both informative overview and thought-provoking analysis of a subject that has received little practical study. Articles in this important text cover a expansive gamut—from women of color as elected officials and the changing face of leadership in America today to an exploration of the growing interest in intersectionality and a look toward the potential of future research—making it a useful and comprehensive one-stop resource. Contributors to Intersectionality and Politics explore critical topics such as: the contours and context of descriptive representation with a focus on women of color the puzzle of women of color’s proportionately higher percentage of office holding in state legislatures agenda-setting behavior of African-American female state legislators the impact of race and gender on the likelihood of legislative bill submission and passage patterns of gendered representation and related legislative advocacy within Latino delegations in the Southwest new findings on the Latino/a gender gap the public policy implications of intersectionality theory and many more! Complete with extensive bibliographies and a wealth of tables and figures to highlight the striking findings, Intersectionality and Politics is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students and educators in political science, ethnic studies, Latino/Black/Asian studies, gender studies, sociology, and women’s studies. Policymakers, politicians, and those working in high-minority areas will also find this to be an invaluable text.

It is well established that the race and gender of elected representatives influence the ways in which they legislate, but surprisingly little research exists on how race and gender interact to affect who is elected and how they behave once in office. How do race and gender affect who gets elected, as well as who is represented? What issues do elected representatives prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation takes up the call to think about representation in the United States as intersectional, and it measures the extent to which political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced. Specifically, the book examines how race and gender interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals. By putting women of color at the center of their analysis and re-evaluating traditional, "single-axis" approaches to studying the politics of race or gender, the authors demonstrate what an intersectional approach to identity politics can reveal. Drawing on original data on the presence, policy leadership, and policy impact of Black women and men, Latinas and Latinos, and White women and men in state legislative office in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, each chapter shows how the politics of race, gender, and representation are far more complex than recurring "Year of the Woman" frameworks suggest. An array of race-gender similarities and differences are evident in the experiences, activities, and accomplishments of these state legislators. Yet one thing is clear: the representation of those marginalized by multiple, intersecting systems of power and inequality is intricately bound to the representation of women of color.

A major publishing event, the collected writings of the groundbreaking scholar who "first coined intersectionality as a political framework" (Salon) For more than twenty years, scholars, activists, educators, and lawyers--inside and outside of the United States--have employed the concept of intersectionality both to describe problems of inequality and to fashion concrete solutions. In particular, as the Washington Post reported recently, "the term has been used by social activists as both a rallying cry for more expansive progressive movements and a chastisement for their limitations." Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to Crenshaw's work, readers will find key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality, collected together for the first time. The book includes a sweeping new introduction by Crenshaw as well as prefaces that contextualize each of the chapters. For anyone interested in movement politics and advocacy, or in racial justice and gender equity, On Intersectionality will be compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant theorists of our time.

This book provides the first in-depth look at male and female elected officials of color using survey and other empirical data.

How do multiple identities jointly shape political attitudes and behavior? In this dissertation project, I investigate three separate questions about the simultaneous effects of race/ethnicity and gender on American political behavior. Together, these three papers demonstrate the contingent effects of multiple identities. Treating identities as singular and independent obscures the way that multiple identity categories affect political experiences. In Chapter 2, I use two novel survey experiments to test how negative stereotypes about race and gender subgroups can transform into positive perceptions of candidate competence under racialized conditions. In the first experiment, I test the theory of stereotype transformation by priming White respondents with information about rising local crime rates prior to offering a choice between two candidates in an intra-party mayoral race. Consistent with theoretical expectations, highly qualified Black male challengers are advantaged relative to other candidates when respondents are informed that crime is on the rise. The second survey experiment supports the theoretical basis for this counterintuitive result: associations of African-American men with violence lead to stereotypic assumptions that Black male candidates are best equipped to handle crime policy. The findings suggest an exciting new understanding of the relationship between group stereotypes and political behavior. In Chapter 3, I leverage random assignment in a national survey of Latino Americans to test the effects of race/ethnicity, out-group ties, and racial threat on the boundaries of Black-Latino electoral cooperation. I develop and test a theory that the threat of anti-Latino discrimination broadens Latinos' conception of the in-group beyond ethnicity to include other racial minorities. In turn, this increases Latino support for Black candidates who challenge White incumbents. I find that this effect is contingent on Black candidates signaling their ties to Latino interest groups, and that racial resentment and panethnicity moderate treatment effects. In Chapter 4, I use observational mass attitude data and novel survey experimentation to investigate the gender gap in African-Americans' racial linked fate. I argue that gender discrimination limits African-American women's belief that their own fate is tied to the fate of their racial group. Using both the oversample data from the 2012 ANES and new experimental evidence from a national survey of African-Americans, I find that perceptions of gender marginalization reduce racial linked fate among African-American women. However, when racial and gender disadvantage are primed simultaneously, linked fate among African-American women does not diminish. The findings indicate the need to analyze diversity within the Black population, and suggest a need to reexamine the theoretical foundations of linked fate theory.