Democracy is when fewer votes win.

Important and illuminating conversation

Black people are giving it these Confederates raw and uncut. This is how it’s gonna be now. You wonder what we’re thinking? It’s this. I believe this is activist Gary Chambers again in Louisiana.

“This is a break glass emergency moment.” Melissa Murray says the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is using “colorblindness” to turn the Voting Rights Act on its head: treating states that try to remedy racial gerrymandering as if they’re the ones discriminating.

Always good to chat with @perrybaconjr.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social, even if it’s often about difficult subjects, like the Court’s continued assault on the VRA. Check out our conversation: Trump and the Supreme Court Are Crushing Black Political Power newrepublic.com/article/2101...

Adding this to the syllabus for my fall Race and Ethnicity class.

Publishing this paper was an adventure. Reviewer at a top 3 worried that studying relative & continuous constructions of race might “normalize” them, arguing that a premier journal shouldn’t send such a “problematic social cue.” Our job is to probe societal understandings, even uncomfortable ones.

"We move beyond a homogenous racial sample to examine how different racial groups engage sociopolitical cues when classifying other"

Just reminding everyone that Black political representation has material effects on policy. It’s so effective that the last time Black politicians were run out of office (Reconstruction), it was with violent force. They paid with their lives for their success. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Great thread. Academia has become a tragedy of the commons. As an individual scholar I have an interest in producing publishable ok-ish articles on a regular basis (a fact of life I've begrudgingly come to accept). For my colleagues and the field, however, that increases the noise-to-quality ratio

There is an expectation now to produce a comprehensive treatment of a topic in an article to be publishable in the most prestigious outlets. It’s not clear how that is possible in any serious way. We need more space to develop and refine our ideas. Thinking is a process we should give space to.

I work in tech instead of academia, and a constant refrain of mine is, "focus on effectiveness, not efficiency." We need "better" not "more" or "faster".

Eager to read this important piece! Thanks for doing the work, @elina-rodriguez.bsky.social and @eschickler.bsky.social.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Congratulations, @mjstrawbridge.bsky.social! Michael is doing some of the most exciting work in the Black politics space, and you should follow his work!

Pre-print now available! If race is socially constructed, we should study how. We do so by asking who counts as Black. Parentage, skin tone, party id, neighborhood, & spouse's race all shape perceived blackness. Who is doing the classifying matters too. A labor of love. osf.io/preprints/so...

Agree! And as my research with @timlapira.bsky.social shows: pundits, like other political elites, believe that their exact policy preferences are much more popular than they actually are! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Pre-print now available! If race is socially constructed, we should study how. We do so by asking who counts as Black. Parentage, skin tone, party id, neighborhood, & spouse's race all shape perceived blackness. Who is doing the classifying matters too. A labor of love. osf.io/preprints/so...

Shame on the University of Michigan leadership for responding exactly as one expects weak university leadership to respond.

Congratulations to the pal @adambonica.bsky.social on being named a 2026 Carnegie Fellow. A well-deserved honor for a brilliant political scientist with a real commitment to the public good. news.stanford.edu/stories/2026...

The University of Iowa paid this bigot 34k for an hour of anti-intellectual (and anti-higher ed) propaganda. It is embarrassing that he has a platform outside of right-wing message boards, let alone at a state flagship.

It’s not surprising that some white, so-called center-left commentators express their most conservative views when issues of race get implicated. They keep telling on themselves & keep making the point they seem so eager to escape: we aren’t the only ones influenced by the identities we possess.

Katherine Tate’s “Black Faces in the Mirror” offered one of the first sustained empirical examinations of Black representation, analyzing both how Black legislators represent & how Black constituents evaluate that representation. In light of SCOTUS and VRA, RSVP: fsi.stanford.edu/events/black...

Want to know more both Black Republicans & the state of Black politics in this current moment? Join Profs. Katherine Tate, @coreydfields.bsky.social, & me as we talk Black politics & American Democracy. In-person & Zoom! May 18, 4–5:30pm PT Info + RSVP: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/events/black...

A necessary read. Those of us who believe in the promise of multiracial democracy must demand more from those who represent us. This Court has consistently undermined hard-won progress toward a freer and more equal country. Everything must be on the table. No court should have this much power.

“Polarization is a description of political temperature... A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.”

This piece from @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social is worth reading.

i was told by john roberts and sam alito that racism is over so i won't worry about white republicans in the south jumping over themselves to end black political representation wherever they can

This Court, and the right more generally, is not merely undermining democracy. They are targeting multiracial democracy. That has always been the dividing line. And as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue, it is multiracial democracy or no democracy at all.

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism

Always a good idea to read @adambonica.bsky.social on days like today.

To understand what the Supreme Court is doing, you have to recognize that this is how authoritarians in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela consolidated power. Scholars call it autocratic legalism. The Court isn’t complicit. It’s an active participant. Roberts is following a script.

If the Voting Rights Act is rightly seen by many of us as the real beginning of American democracy, then it is fitting that a Court hell-bent on undoing democratic rule, including granting the president king-like powers, would seek to dismantle it.

There was one time in US history that racial polarization (white and black vote differently) didn’t necessarily coincide with partisan polarization (people vote for one party consistently), and it was the mid 20th century. Under SCOTUS logic, the Civil War was just about party, not race

I had the privilege of serving on the selection committee for this year’s Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships. I learned a lot. Really exciting and creative dissertation projects in this cohort. Here are this year’s awardees: www.acls.org/recent-fello...

Today's demolition of Voting Rights Act by Roberts Court will likely trigger largest drop in Black representation since end of Reconstruction. They're taking America back to Jim Crow, when white supremacy and one party rule enshrined across South www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

What Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett is referencing here is Obama's 2012 statement that, if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin Feels absurd that a prestigious law prof is out here making posts with layers to the disgustingness!

Want to know more both Black Republicans & the state of Black politics in this current moment? Join Profs. Katherine Tate, @coreydfields.bsky.social, & me as we talk Black politics & American Democracy. In-person & Zoom! May 18, 4–5:30pm PT Info + RSVP: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/events/black...

NEW today in the New York Times: In the face of unprecedented authoritarian attacks, the AAUP is building a powerful and militant resistance movement in defense of American higher education, the freedom to learn, and our democracy. Join Us!

If we treated poor people as full humans worthy of dignity, we wouldn’t spend so much time policing them in the first place…

Big congratulations to @mirandayaver.bsky.social on the publication of this important book!

Very happy to share that I am going to be the new Director of the Democracy unit at the @wzb.bsky.social Berlin Social Science Center. I am excited to form a new research unit on democratic politics and to engage with people in Berlin and elsewhere to make liberal democracy more resilient.

We’re in a moment of democratic upheaval in the U.S., w/ race central to how many understand the crisis. Join Katherine Tate, @coreydfields.bsky.social, & me as we talk Black politics & American Democracy. In-person & Zoom! May 18, 4–5:30pm PT Info + RSVP: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/events/black...

Uber driver hitting me with “the civil war wasn’t about slavery” was not on my Chicago bingo card.

"We are pleased to share more than 125,000 U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs. These materials which span nearly two centuries of American law are now freely accessible online." "Includes records and briefs spanning cases from 1830 through 2019."

Really looking forward to this conversation. (Full disclosure: I expect to listen and learn more than I talk. But, I’ll do the best I can to be interesting in such impressive company!)

Despite his modesty, you really can’t talk about diversity in Black politics without talking about @coreydfields.bsky.social’s “Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans.” Stellar book. 10/10 recommend. And he’s smart and funny. You don’t wanna miss this.

I cannot wait to read this.

“These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.”

May 18 in-person event CASBS fellow @coreydfields.bsky.social a featured speaker at this @fsi.stanford.edu @stanfordcddrl.bsky.social event on Black Politics and American Democracy. Fmr fellow @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social moderates 😏 Details, bios, RSVP info: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/events/black...