Lifestyle politics part 2

Nick — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:34:00 +0000

So Troy Elias and I are meeting tomorrow to discuss our reserach on how blackness can act as a moderating force in understanding levels of political participation in black church goers. Basically what we are saying is for some people blackness is the most important issue in their life. For these people all political decisions go through the filter of blackness. For other people race is an important issue, but other issues trump it. A great example of this idea are the Log Cabin Rebuplicans. The Log Cabin Republican are a group of gay republicans. For them (and this is greatly over simplified for demonstative purposes) homosexuality is not the issue they found to be most important when deciding what party to join. We are trying to create a measure to understand which people use blackness as their key issue and which view blackness as an issue of importance, but not their defining issue.

Here are some questions I have come up with:

- HBCU’s should recieve increased funding from the U.S. government or all university’s should get equal funding.
- I would prefer donating to the United Negro College Fund than a general scholarship fund.
- Affirmative action
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums
- No child left behind

I think these are going to be set-up as comparisons (e.g. do this or do this) on a scale.

Or they could be something like this:

Mandatory minimums…

a) should be overturned, because they are racist and proportionally affect more blacks.
b) should be overturned, because they constrain judicial power.
c) should be overturned, because they stress punishment over rehabilitation.
d) should be kept as they are.

Hmmm…well I think this has been a productive round of writing out my thoughts and hopefully I am ready for tomorrow’s meeting.

Lifestyle politics

Nick — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:24:47 +0000

Another project I am working on as a co-author looks at how lifestyle politics affect political participation. More specifically, we are looking at how people can use a single issue to shape all their political thought. The issue we are going to be looking at is race issues in the black community. For some people, race issues will define the individual’s whole being, while in others race issues are important but are not the basis of all their political thought. To quantify this, we are going to present the individual’s with a number of scenarios and then ask them how much they would agree with or support the proposition. These propositions need to speak to black culture and should be politically based. Lance suggested something about supporting the funding of HBCU. So far I have thought of another couple:

- Affirmative action scenario
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums

We are also trying to come up with a couple questions that do not speak to black culture at all.

NickGeidner.com » blackness

Lifestyle politics part 2

Lifestyle politics