Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics [Book Review]

In her 1993 majority opinion in Shaw v. Reno, the North Carolina congressional "racial gerrymandering" case, United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor offered neither empirical evidence nor conceptual rationale for her skepticism that most African Americans "think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls." University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson examines both theory and facts in this rich analysis of survey data, most of which is taken from the 1984-1988 National Black Election Panel Study, a telephone survey of 1,150 African American adults. As the economic interests of the growing black middle class increasingly diverge from those of poorer blacks, will this new middle class-- as O'Connor and such academic experts as William Junius Wilson in The Declining Significance of Race(1980) imply-- turn against the welfare state and vote Republican?