WSU Ph.D. candidate researches link between white identity politics and support for voter suppression

When Wayne State University political science doctoral pupil Jim O’Donnell considers how political and social opinion amongst white Americans have been radically shifting prior to now a number of years, he doesn’t essentially have to seek the advice of reams of analysis or pore over sociological research.

Sometimes, O’Donnell says, it’s so simple as a visit to an area gun retailer.

“I was in a gun store in Macomb County on the Saturday after the presidential election in 2020, and it was alarming,” recollects O’Donnell, a Ph.D. candidate who additionally has taught at Wayne State. “It’s one of the best places to hear this kind of fear that many white people have. There were also African Americans in that gun store, but they weren’t the ones yapping about all this Second Amendment stuff. Whites in these spaces think they’re just going to arm themselves and protect themselves from some threat, but really a lot of that is fear, fear of anybody who doesn’t look like them, immigrants, people who don’t speak their language.”

For the previous few years, O’Donnell, 55, has grown acquainted with that worry, with the weird and dishonest justifications behind it, and with the potential that racial worry has to undermine American democracy. As a part of his graduate research work, actually, O’Donnell has devoted himself to inspecting the connection between white identity and growing efforts, similar to draconian voter restriction legal guidelines in Georgia and different states, to make it more durable for non-whites to votes.

Earlier this 12 months, O’Donnell gave a hanging presentation of his work, titled “Support for Voter Restrictions: White Identity as a Factor,” as a part of a Graduate School symposium and is now gazing down the highway to see how his analysis and findings could be leveraged forward of upcoming elections this November to assist defend voting rights.

“I want to see how issues of white identity can be worked around,” he explains. “How can activist groups — groups like Fair Fight that are working to mobilize the electorate — deal with these restrictions?”

Citing students similar to University of Chicago political science professor Michael Dawson and Duke University political science professor Ashley Jardina, O’Donnell says that research underpinning his personal work present that the thought of racial identification amongst sure voting blocs isn’t uncommon — however that the degrees of hostility generated by the assorted teams is.

“There’s some solidarity among people who don’t identify as African American but see themselves as Black, like Caribbean people, people in the African diaspora and so forth. Hispanics, Asian Americans, too, all those groups expressed varieties of in-group favoritism being protective,” factors out O’Donnell, who additionally credit WSU political science professor Ronald Brown, an knowledgeable researcher on race and faith, for serving to to form his work. “We have heat emotions about individuals in our group — however whites specifically had extra ‘out group’ hostility.

“And this isn’t like the extreme versions of white supremacy, white nationalism. This is garden variety stuff, and you see it in policy. Like, why are some policies, like welfare, racialized while other policies, such as social security, are not racialized? It’s largely the perceptions among what whites think. Whites are the ones that racialize policies.”

O’Donnell says that his curiosity concerning the difficulty was sparked by the stunning final result of the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump gained following a marketing campaign that usually made racialized — and, to many, outright racist — appeals to white conservatives.

“He engaged this group of white voters that had really not been activated by the Republican Party for the most part,” says O’Donnell. “I wanted to know what was going on behind some of that. I wanted to study the issue of the activation of white racial resentment.”

When he entered the political science program at WSU in 2019, O’Donnell noticed his alternative to research. And then got here Trump’s subsequent loss to Joe Biden in 2020, which the previous president and his supporters falsely blamed on unfounded claims of voter fraud, resulting in a raft of voter suppression payments from conservative state legislatures nationwide.

“We saw an increase in efforts to resist further expansion of the vote on the part of many Republicans who hold elected office,” O’Donnell says. “And then also an attempt to restrict the vote, to strike people off the registration rolls, change where precincts are located. All this stuff that makes it harder to access. And I thought that those would be aligned because the existing research shows ethnocentrism and fear or distrust of ‘out’ groups, particularly among whites on certain policy issues. So why wouldn’t that be at play here? And how does white identity play into that?”

O’Donnell says that racialized voter suppression efforts improve the burden on teams that work to mobilize voters in communities of coloration, forcing them to divert treasured sources to combat restrictions and civil-rights rollbacks: “I view that as essentially a poll tax. Because of these restrictions, that labor and that money have to be assigned to getting people to vote instead of going to other uses.”

O’Donnell says political leaders in lots of city and suburban areas face an analogous problem in deciding allocate already-limited sources to combat towards voter suppression: “How are election administrators going to deal with it? Because election administrators in predominantly African American jurisdictions have to be on their game because of the scrutiny that these legislators and these Trump-type people have put on them.”

A former college board official in Ferndale practically a decade in the past, O’Donnell says he’s encountered first-hand the racialized worry that has impressed his work.

“Ferndale was the first northern school district where the Justice Department sued because of segregation,” he says. “Ferndale had arrange segregated faculties beginning within the ’20s. Now they did not explicitly use language, like was performed within the south, however they did the whole lot else. One of the issues that I believe has occurred in Ferndale is a sustained effort, because the ’70s, when a brand new college board [whose progressive slate included his uncle, Frank O’Donnell] got here in selling extra racial justice.

“I was elected to the Ferndale school board in 2012. And from the beginning, we explicitly set out a policy of racial equity and breaking down the systemic parts of the school district. We had a magnet school that was 80 percent white in a school district that overall is 60 percent black. One of the first things we had to do as part of our plan was change that. There was a big fight. People lost so-called friends over it. We didn’t lose enrollment because of that. Some people left, yes, but fewer people than before, under the old system. Now, people wonder what all the fuss was about — but that was when issues of race and fear became most tangible to me.”

And that have, he says, is a part of what motivates him to look at points surrounding white identity and voting rights and, extra importantly, what drives his need for equity and justice on the poll field.

“It’s not a component of my research just yet, but I’m wondering how do you mitigate (voter suppression)? What are activists doing to take countermeasures against this fence that people are trying to metaphorically create around the ballot box?” he asks. “If we’re going to have a classically liberal democracy — where you have rights and you engage in voting to express your views and choose your representatives, consent to your government through your vote — then everyone needs to have access to that. And understanding why some people want to restrict the vote is an important part of that.”