September 15th, 2020 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm. At what point must a female senator raised her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Hello and welcome to the second reading podcast for the week of September 14th. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Today. I’m happy to welcome my friend and colleague, Professor Eric McDaniel, who was an associate professor in the Department of Government here. It ut Austin. He’s the author of Politics in the Pews, the political mobilization of black churches and, among other affiliations, is currently serving as a public religion research institute. Public fellow will inevitably mentioned P R R I, and that’s what we’re talking about. So thanks for being here. Thank you for inviting me. So let’s just jump right to it. You’ve got a couple of pieces out there in the public ether that have come out in the last couple of weeks. Based on research that you’ve been doing on what you called. I may be changing your language here a little bit. The concept of threatened white masculinity. One of these pieces is in Salon. The other is on the Texas Politics Project on the blogging, our polling section, and I’ll put links to this in the block post for this edition of the podcast. So, you know, I want to start with kind of a broad view of your interest here. You started doing work back in the much earlier part of your career on politics and religion, particularly black churches. We mentioned your book. I’m wondering how you developed this idea and develop the interest in this idea of white masculinity and its implications for politics. Yeah, Jim, that’s a really interesting question of how I got here. I think it was a lot of it was observation, all things that I noticed. So the kind of good guys with guns or the differential treatment you saw kind of blacks with guns and whites with guns were once seen as protector, the other Encinas predator and really looking at the rhetoric of the 2016 election made it very, uh, almost hard to ignore. But what I’m what I’m talking about with the or showing with these data is something that’s been talked about for quite a bit now. Since the nineties or even, really, since the sixties, there has been this discussion of a kind of a threatening white masculinity. So there were a lot of conservative pundits in the fifties and sixties talking about with women working that men were losing their place in the household, but also with the advancement of the civil rights movement. Where were white men gonna be in regard to this? And then you see, kind of coming out the eighties and nineties a lot of stories about the, I guess, the fall of white masculinity and how white men feel like they are being left behind. And this became, you know, a clear aspect of it when talking about the 2016 election and the presence of a black president and then the potential for female president basically made it look like white men were no longer relevant. And there was this concern. And it’s something that, you know, President Trump tapped into and it was rhetoric. Was he being really stressed? Masculinity were calling me Little Marco. Uh, how biggest hands were. It was. It was something that was clearly a took to show that he was a big man in the room and this kind of stuck out to me. And so I started, uh, looking at the data really started with data from P. R. I. And they had two questions and so one waas societies become too soft and feminine. The other question waas, uh, that diversity comes at the expense of whites. So I started there and it was agreed that that was like an agree. Disagree, right? Yeah, like the extent to which you agree or disagree, right? And really, you know, gender mattered quite a bit. There’s a article by Melissa Dettman, which demonstrates that this gender thing really mattered, And but I’ve also found that, you know, the race thing matters. Well, maybe not as much as gender in that case, but all of a sudden, race and Jimmy became became interlocked. And you find that people who agree with both of these had based of those agree with, uh, both statements. About 90% of them reported voting for Trump. And so this is for men and women. And you could see that Democrats who agree with both independents more like to vote for Trump. You know, once you, the Republicans, you kind of hit a bit of a ceiling effect because you can’t push them further towards Trump. But the evidence suggests that that was also motivating factor E. I mean, it was one of the things that I found really interesting. As you know, we talked about this and I started reading this stuff that you were doing. And, you know, this really came out of a look at the historical development in the context of this. It didn’t really. It’s not this thing that seems to me really appeared to you. You know, the kind of quantitative, more behavioral work that people do, but rather it connects to a to a broad arc. And you traced it back to the sixties and the kind of you know, broadly speaking, a modern manifestation of this that comes in the post civil rights movement. My guess is, and you could tell me If you think I’m wrong about this, you could. If you were with one, was so inclined you could trace this pretty far back. As you think about, um, you know the discourses, you know, going Bacchus faras discourses about slavery, discourses then about freed slaves and then also discourses even about immigration to some degree. Although there’s an interesting asterisk asterisk on this that you know, there’s something really powerful that you’ve that you’re kind of developing there because you can see it really threaded through a long historical arc. And, you know, I’m not saying you invented this concept, but in the way that you you’ve seized on it, there’s a lot going on there that goes back pretty far, right? Yes, and it’s really a way of thinking about how Americans have come to define themselves. So Christian do may as a book titled Jesus and John Wayne, which talks about really evangelicals and how they latched onto this idea that there’s a threat toe white Christian masculinity and this idea, you know well, she talks about John Wayne issue. It was something that happened earlier in this century and something that’s kind of been re occurring throughout American history of the placement of white men. And if you think about the early early stages of the of the nation, you know the people who could vote were white man, usually white, middle class men. And so you have this idea that these are the this is the ideal type. So white land owning Christian male is the ideal type American. And this is, you know, this is continue to exist. We asked surveys. Now, you know, should you be a Christian to be American, you find that closer. Majority of Americans agree with this. Should you be white? Uh, should you have European ancestry, you you get this clear image of a white Christian nation. The gender part isn’t really highlighted. But I do think there is something about this, that it’s not just the issue of race, but race and gender, and it’s kind of establishing a hierarchy within the U. S. And while the US prides itself on focusing on egalitarian principles, it cannot messily move away from these classic descriptive, uh, ways of understand who is who is an American. Because class that we think of President White male. When we think of leaders, white men. And we were seeing Ah, female speaker of the house You’re seeing openly. Uh, I think people of color take on, uh, take on leadership roles. You’re seeing individuals who are part of the LGBT few community taking on roles. All of a sudden, this begins to reshape where they fall within this. And this is this kind of a critical thing, is just as important to their identity, understanding who they are, their role in the world. And this has been lost because they want one politically. They’re not the beacon. Economically, they’re losing out. And so there is this, ah, bit of angst and what should what should be done and a lot of what just being done with the rise of tea party and other groups is really a reaction to this sense of a threat to their identity and a threat to their their standing in society. I’m interested that you mentioned losing out in that because it also I mean, one of the things that I think is a little bit embedded in this and we’ll talk. We can talk a little bit about it in the data as we move on is that this undermines a little bit. You know, the debate that’s off that’s out there certainly was out there after Trump’s rise and after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, about kind of, you know, culture and identity on one hand, and and also in the tea party movement, culture and identity on one hand and economics on the other because really, status and relative position. And as you mentioned, hierarchy really is kind of a composite of all those things. And so it becomes about kind of teasing all that out rather than arguing one or the other. I think that makes sense. Oh, very much so. And it’s I guess the way I think about it is that race is baked into the cake, racism, everything in American politics. But it does have an effect on a lot of things. And so the same thing with gender S 01 of the things is important to note about the rise of the Tea Party and, I think, a great book to look into his map. Pareto and Chris Parker’s book changed. They can’t Believe in which talks about the Rising Tea Party, and they point out that this was not really an issue of being anti tax or the economy was really more of a reaction to a loss of status amongst white middle class Christian men. So and in addition to this, one of things we’ve seen or ah, lot of scholars have done is they have noted that the way white men to find themselves is based upon what white masculinity is, in many ways shaped in contrast to one white femininity and black masculinity. And, you know, when we think about economic standing that a lot of times economic standing is based upon how well is the other? If the other group, I’m doing better than the other group, that I’m OK. But if I see But I feel like I’m not doing as well as the other group, then I’m gonna gonna panic. And so it’s It’s one of these things that it’s very complicated. And, you know, there are a bunch of books which have talked about this. So one particular angry white man, where, uh, we’re basically a bunch of case studies with, you know, white men talk about what happened, and again they talk about the loss of status and when they director anger towards towards a group they directed towards immigrants towards feminists towards people of color. And this is something that President Trump has tapped into. We’re talking about the threat of immigrants thieves, very strong macho talk. And even right now, you know, the idea of keeping low income individuals out of suburbs is basically saying we’re gonna keep the rowdy people of color away from away from these communities. And it’s really tapped into this. And the problem is because it’s so reactionary that things aren’t well thought out. It’s done based out of anger and out of reaction as opposed to clearly being fought out, which can lead to disastrous, uh, disastrous conclusions. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting that you you track that kind of trajectory of the tea party. Um, you know, Josh and I, Kev, done a couple of you know, really just papers for the sake of an excuse or a reason to go and gather up data that you could really clearly see in Texas the way that people who identify with the tea party or or at least have a even have ah, degree of passive support for the tea party and some one of the items that we used in the poll across time, you know, begin. You know, you can find signs that in the beginning there catalyzed by this argument about the economy, but also about big government, but that over time you could really just see, you know, the displacement of that discontent on two issues, like immigration. And then, later on, I think, you know, we haven’t really gone back and looked at this. But later on, you can see race become entangled in that even more than it is explicitly in the immigration notion of the way that immigration triggers identity. And it kind of displaces all that and becomes a powerful, a powerful common point in the way that they think about politics. You know, with that. So let’s let Zedd we’ve raised Texas a couple in a couple of ways. Here, let’s talk a little bit about what you did with the Texas data. So, you know, first talk a little bit about how you operationalized the concept of threats, toe white masculinity and the data that you used from the Texas polling. So the Texas Poll I critic on additive measure. It’s a composite of how much do you believe certain groups are discriminated against? And so the Texas poll asked, uh, spattered questions about how much discrimination is target towards certain groups. So you had men, women, gays and lesbians, transgender people, Christians, Muslims, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians. So what I did is I took the respondents average score for blacks, Asians, Latinos. So I kind of after those three and divided by out of those divided by reading the average and subtracted that from the score for whites. Then then for men, I took the average for women, gay people, trans transgender people and to that average and subtracted from women and then added the two together. And so the way this works out is that if you believe whites and men are discriminated more so than these comparison groups, you’re gonna be at the high end. If you believe instrumented less, you’re gonna be a low it. If you’re in the middle, it means you. Do you think that estimated about the same amount? And so what we have here is a measure that basically puts people at two polar ends of one. White men are being targeted two white men not being targeted at all. And then those in the middle, like no, they’re being. They’re facing the same discrimination as anybody else. And that’s the the purpose of the measure and the thing about this. What I find is that it it works. It works very well. It seems to really indicate a deep seated attitudes that it’s strongly correlated with the number of with a number of attitude with a number of policy preferences and attitudes towards elected officials. Yeah, as you started running the state, it was amazing how well it fits. So tell us, tell us a little bit about, like, unpack that a little bit and we have to go into the specific. But in terms of the relative perception of you know, the intensity of the perception of threat among these different groups, like, for example, it was really held up pretty interesting ways that the intersection of within the categories of race and gender and then at the inter sector at the intersection of race and gender, right? Yes. So clearly, uh, if you think about this is white men scored the highest, but right below white men, you found kind of Hispanic men and white men. They were. They were up there as well through the top three in the top three in the perception of threat, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the top three in And then probably by Latino women, then black men and black women. We couldn’t include other groups because they were just there was just too small of a sample of those groups. But if you think about it in terms of, you know, it might men at the top, you kind of a tie for second place between Hispanic Hispanic men and and white women and the Hispanic women, black men and black women. So black women are clearly, uh, most opposed to this idea. And the thing about it is, there is a bit of a gap between black men and black women. But it’s a very smiler. Gap on gap between Hispanic men and women is small as well. And so really top three are gonna be where white men are clearly above everybody else. Then you know, white men what white women and Hispanic men are kind of tied in that regard. So there’s been a new interesting discussion like right now in the moment, and I, you know, I was gonna kinda have us go through some of this and do implications. But let’s just grab it now over Robert. On top of it, I mean that finding on Hispanic men. It’s hard not to look at that and think about the politics of the moment and this ongoing discussion about you know whether, for example, Republicans. But more specifically, Trump is doing better than he should, or worse than he should, or whether it’s interesting that you know that he is doing. You know that he is getting some share of the Hispanic vote despite, you know, lots of reasons you might think that he wouldn’t. Yeah, that is kind of an interesting point, and we’ve looked at one, wants to walk softly on this. I mean, it’s pretty preliminary, but still, Yeah, it’s it’s really not clear why they’re going so high. I mean, they score about the same both on the kind of white threat and the male threat, so it’s not sure if it’s if one is driving the other, and it’s not clear it all. There seems to be some issues related to religious conservatism that might be driving this, but it’s not. That’s not really clear. And I think one of the major issues we have on looking at the Latino population is that, unlike the black population, which is which is is a clearly formed racial identity, it’s not as strong amongst Latinos. I believe it’s more of an ethnicity. And so whereas black is something your race is seen, something permanent. When you’re born into and you can’t and you can’t leave ethnicity is seeing something that can be shed over time. Eso you can learn a new language. You can adopt a new culture and you know you could be part of this. I’m not saying that this is that’s the case. But I do think there, uh, that you do have a significant number of individuals and Latino population who may see themselves, uh, makes it, Yeah, Hispanic, but be more likely to understand themselves as being white, uh, than being Hispanic. So, yeah, I’m Hispanic, but I’m a white Hispanic. That might be driving it, or it could be a number of other things that are driving this, so I’m not really sure. And this is gonna take a deeper dive, and really, we probably need a much larger sample in order to in order to parse this out. But Latino politics is a lot more complicated. You see in black politics because of the immigration status, national origin, uh, then also Latino experience. Changes from region to region of Latinos in Texas have a different experience. Latinos in California than the ones in Florida than the ones in New York. And this kind of mixed things. It’s hard to say that this is one group, really. In reality, it’s a bunch of different groups, and they actually different different experiences and these experiences playoff different differently. Put well, we’re seeing that, you know, we’re seeing this, you know, im so long. You know, this has been going on for quite a while, but it’s making manifest again right now because of the election and the role of Latinos in the election that, you know, there’s, you know, it’s always struck me that there is a reflex, particularly in media coverage and among people that don’t pay only sporadic attention to this, you know, to do two things. One is to not quite realize that you know this regional and and country of origin and immigration trajectory. All of the ah bunch of factors lead to a lot of differentiation within the Latino community. I mean, we’re seeing it right now on the discussion of you know, why Biden is not doing well or ostensibly not doing well among Latinos in Florida, but seems to be doing well among Latinos also. And I’ve had, you know, a couple of people, you know, get in touch reporters recently kind of saying, Hey, what do you think of this? And the answer is fairly obvious that the ethnic composition of Latinos in Florida is vastly different than the than the ethnic composition of Latinos in in Texas and in California, just to take two examples. But also, you could add New York to that, given the the heavy presence of Cuban Americans and and Latinos. Otherwise, Cuban origin in Florida, which has always looked somewhat different than you know, some of these other Latino groups who in turn look different from each other, and this sort of line of argument and or this result in the work you’ve done recently also raises the’s big questions. I think you know the study of these groups has often been politicized in interesting ways. I mean, because, you know, I mean to me, the the specter of the very pointed disagreements within people that were doing Mexican American and Latino studies in the sixties and seventies and even into the eighties, you know, argued over the concept of assimilation is really lurking here, as are the very practical political you know, fights in Texas over. You know how civil rights legislation and civil rights court rulings in various ways that created, you know, legal categories of black and white. And this strategy the Latino political activists took and whether they were going to try tohave Latinos and Mexican Americans and Mexican Americans qualify as a minority group or something more like white. And that’s, you know, and that has caused practical political friction between black and Latino groups over the years. Yeah, it za really interesting take on this because give the Latino experience in Texas, you know, they’ve clearly been a market, and they classically been treated. We’re talking about his immigrants, but, you know, a lot of us says that we didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us, and so they’ve been here for generations, but still seen as seen It still see this outside? Yes. Subject to segregationist policies. Yeah, unambiguously, right? Oh, yeah. And you know, things such as, You know, the thing about these high schools. I was just, uh, a friend of mine’s mother talked about how the segregated high schools for my kids will go all the way up to graduation, but for Latino kids would stop attending. Great. And this is in the Austin area. And so if you want the kid to graduate, you to sit them down to the belt and so you have to send them away from family to graduate from high school to get those benefits. Um, California had the Russell. This is Well, there’s this film I show in my in my class called the Limited Grove Incident, and this is I. This has happened, I want to say, in the forties and fifties, where they tried to segregate the school between Latinos and whites and the courts world that because Latinos are considered Caucasian in the state of California, they can’t be said they were. They were Negro, they were Indians. They could be segregated. But since they were considered Caucasian. They cannot do. And that’s how they won the case. They don’t win the case because the court world segregation is wrong. The world you can’t segregate within prints. They were segregated in the end of the wrong category. Yeah, and so eso this thing, This presents a, ah weird way of understanding. What is How do we understand race, ethnicity? How do you understand this group, which is an ethnic group, and the idea that ethnicity is malleable and what is who’s accepted, who’s not accepted, and a lot of it is really based upon outside pressures. And we understand how racial groups form but not form well, internally, they, usually for extra external pressures, make it so that you understand that we are a group and these other two people, I mean, these other people see us as a group, and they’re gonna keep us as a group. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a function of how fundamental those categories are that when you try to talk about racial ization, quote unquote is of social process. People have a lot of trouble with it, you know, and it’s it’s, you know, at an intuitive level, which I, you know, I’ve always thought is, you know, underlines how well it works Is a social process, right? Or how effective and powerful it is. Yeah. I mean, for the longest time, you know Irish and a challenge when I consider the white they were because they would be outside of the white race. But eventually they were brought into the fold and shows just how malleable racism and again, the way we understand race the U. S is different. How we understand it might be understood in Latin America S O s. So it’s it’s a it’s it’s a fluid. It’s a, uh, fairly fluid concept where where you where you are in space and time depicts how you understand, right? Okay, I wanna I wanna move on before we run out of time too much and talk a little bit more. But let’s you know, you found this and I would urge people to go and look at the article that the Eric produce for a website. Because all of this and more is in there. You know, there’s there’s you you look at sort of how this plays out in the context of party in attitudes towards Trump, um, attitudinal, you know, questions that were on. And this was all from the, uh, June 2020 ut Texas Politics project poll in Texas. Attitudes about increasing diversity on police violence. But I also want to talk a little bit because it’s so of the moment about what you found in the context of covert 19. Because in some ways this, you know, as interesting as this is, as you go through party trump attitudes on race and gender attitudes towards diversity. You know, once you kind of get in your head what you’re talking about and what the concept of the ideological concept is here. It all kinds of falls into place, and these attitudes air stronger to some degree where you would expect them to be stronger. The cove in 19 stuff was, was an interesting extension of that that maybe not quite as intuitive on the surface of it. So maybe talk a little bit about which found there. So again, as you pointed out, when they looking at just normal political attitudes, strong support for Trump strong identification with the Republican Party, a concern about the amount of diversity then state is supposed to celebrating it. And then, of course, you know opposition to the protest. And when you move this to Kobe 19, what you find is that people who score high on this white masculinity threat measure are the ones who are most likely to downplay It s O. Whereas you find what more than half of those of Texan see it as a significant crisis. You find that only about one in five in the high category C that’s a significant crisis. So there’s really, really kind of downplaying. And I mean, you get about half of those in the high category saying it’s a serious problem, but not a crisis. But if you move to things, which is how concerned they are, they’re less concerned about the spread of in the community. They’re less concerned about them getting it or somebody else getting it. And this translates into, you know, just the belief that you know, we could go back to normal either immediately or very soon, and more focused on helping the economy as opposed to throwing the spread of the virus. Then, if you look at various activities, they’re just less likely to engage in these preventive activities, Uh, and, you know, far staying at home behavior. Barely. People are staying at home, but we find that the data shows that 40% of those who who strongly believe that there is a, um for and against white masculinity are basically said, I’m living, living normal where we find that in general one in five Texas says they’re living. So this this is abnormal, that if you compare them to the overall average Texans, that the reason why some of these these scores may be so high number people doing some of these things that may be seen as contradictory to preventing the disease is so high is because of those in this high category. They’re the ones who are kind of going How about everything’s fine? Let’s go back to normal. Whereas those in low category are like, No, you need to listen to the doctors. We need to stay away from everything else that’s going on and and also they’re less likely to participate in a variety of, you know, less likely get vaccinated, less likely to participate in tracking. And they’re just This is the group that is just strongly opposed to taking this to see this as a serious threat and following through with government recommend recommendations and public health recommendations on how to stop the spread of the virus and the The idea of masculinity is important because you’re seeing things coming up like Vice President Pence. You have the the couple other reports where people talk about wearing a mask is not a masculinity. It emasculated men like they put this in male concept in the context of masculinity and friendless. And most of us have been coming out of, you know, white politicians who argument masks are are harmful to men’s psychology. Well, that you you went where I was going to urge you to go. I was gonna ask you to spin that out a little bit and, you know, just sort of I mean, you know it Z and speculate for me. And you did that. And I thought I was It was a fascinating result in, you know that, you know, it added dimensionality to, you know, some other work that’s been done with the data and in that poll that Megan Mueller did, and also out of the government department at one point you know, looking really just a gender on that dimension. And it really fleshes that out and adds a bunch more structure, you know, to this idea that that’s that’s just based on gender. When you add, you know, this notion of a certain conception of gender identity. I mean, it’s it’s kind of it hones it down a little bit. Um, you know, So you know, what should we have talked about? That we didn’t Is we go down to the last couple minutes. What? Really? Or let me put it this way. What’s next? Like so you’ve looked at this, You’ve kind of thought three. You’ve looked at these kind of results that you’ve gotten. Where do you go next with this? So the results are presenting are the kind of cross that just this is the descriptive data. And I’ve done some multi varied analysis where I’m able to account for things just religion, a sex gender, partisanship, and then seeing, uh, is this really just a proxy for something else and the results of something it’s not and that, you know, even when I account for partisanship that you know these this attitude, this belief is still there and in some cases either as important or more important than partisanship. So the really the next step saying, How does this play out? Better understanding of who adhere to this belief and what other politics not just with Kobe, 19, but in other areas. How might this be shaping, really their ways of interacting with the government, what they expect out of leaders and what they want their nations have looked like. And I think this, this is this is critical because we’re at a very critical juncture in American history right now. And this is a group that is fighting for a particular image of the nation. And we need to understand what is the image that they want and what are they willing to do to achieve that image? I think that is a great summation of where you’ve been and where you’re going and what we should look for. Eric, Thanks for being here. Thank you for inviting. Thanks so much. Alright, man. We’ll do it again soon. I hope that’s it for the second reading podcast for this week. You will find this on the Texas Politics Project website and when we post this on the blog’s site will add links to the things that Eric has written and some of the things that we’ve talked about. You can also find this podcast from week to week on Spotify apple podcasts and stitcher. I want to thank Eric again for being here and thank our crew. As always in liberal arts I TS and the liberal arts development studio and thank our listeners. You’ll find this and other things at Texas politics dot utexas dot e d u and we’ll be back next week. Thanks. Second Reading Podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin