“Removing the Mule: How America Needs to Understand Its Changing Black Population”

Abstract

In the tapestry of African American identity, two distinct threads weave their way through history, representing the experiences of Generational African Americans (or GAA), whose ancestral lineage descends directly from the slaves taken from their homes and forced to perform labor on American soil, and Immigrant African Americans (or IAA), whose stories are shaped by a connection to their African homelands and the complexities of adapting to a new world. These group of people, with distinct identities, are both constantly conforming to minimize the concerns and additional scrutiny that Black Americans face. This thesis will use data from the nationwide Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey done by the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) in 2016 to get attitude data about different topics like economics and equity, police behavior and criminal justice, support for the LGBQ+ community, and government trust at both the local and presidential level. I hypothesize in this thesis that there will be substantive differences between the population on how they feel about each issue that relate to the way that each population has been forced to behave differently within the American state. The idea that these two groups might exist as separately behaving populations is not a new topic that has been approached in American academia as well. Scholars like Thomas Shapiro and W.E.B Dubois have commented on the difference presented within these two groups. Other scholars like Dawson, Alex-Assensoh, and Flax have discussed how the intra-social relationship between members of the Black populace has changed or grown over time. By using more authors whose work understands the different relations, trends present within this data can be given more context in its analysis. By both quantifying the difference in attitudes and providing past research that supplements the rationale of why these two groups differ, we can begin to understand how their perceptions on social issues differ from one another. The main goal of this thesis is to light the fire in research being done to study how the Black population’s attitudes are shifting over time due to impact that immigration is having on the country. This is different than the way that Black Americans have been represented in attitudes surrounding voting through practices mentioned in books like Dawson’s Behind the Mule. The final piece of this thesis will be using practices like adding nuance surrounding race in policy and collecting informed race-conscious data to make more impactful policy for Black America.