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The reason why so many African Americans identify with the Democratic party is because of racialized social constraint. Being part of the Democratic party has been the norm for group behavior and is expected of everyone. To vote democratic is just something expected by an African American

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African Americans are Democrats. Since 1968 no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of the African American vote and surveys of African Americans regularly show that upwards of 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats. However, understanding why African Americans…

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At first glance, it seems like all African Americans are democrats. In reality, A quarter of African Americans are conservative and 43% are moderate. It was found that African Americans are swayed into staying loyal to the Democratic party due to peer pressure. In a study conducted, African Americans were more likely to vote democrat when with another African American interviewer .

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At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes - the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That's one of the reasons why South Carolina's primary on Feb. 29 is seen as a bellwether for the Democratic field - if a candidate can't win a state where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black, what does that mean for his or her candidacy going forward?

But black voters aren't the monolith exit polls make them out to be. Pew Research Center found that a quarter of black Democrats identify as conservative, and 43 percent identify as moderate.

So how to square that circle? How can a big chunk of black voters be unwavering Democrats who differ ideologically from the party? We spent years investigating that question for our new book, "Steadfast Democrats." We found that black voters are so loyal to the Democratic party in part because of social pressure from other black voters. Rather than throw the whole book at you, we're going to highlight a couple pieces of evidence that show how that dynamic works.

Our first piece of evidence came from survey data collected by the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In that survey, interviewers asked respondents face to face which party they identify with. We then looked at the race of the interviewer and the race of the respondents to see if black respondents generally answered differently depending on who asked the question. We concluded black respondents were more likely to report they were a Democrat when they were with a black interviewer (96.4 percent) than a nonblack interviewer (83.9 percent) or an online survey (85 percent).

We ran a separate study around the 2012 presidential election to test the same theory. We wanted to determine the likelihood that black individuals would defect from the norm (supporting Democratic candidates) when offered money. In the study, 106 black students at a midwest college were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Each was given $10 by an interviewer and told the money could be donated to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. Subjects were informed that they were not obligated to donate the money and that they could decide to keep it. But if they chose to give it to a candidate, $10 would be donated for every $1 they allocated. (This was just a ruse - the money was not actually donated.) They were also told that they should make their decision once they entered a separate room, away from the interviewer, where there would be one contribution box for Romney and another for Obama.

But not all the students were in the room alone. One group of students was, but two other groups were paired with an actor pretending to be another participant. In each scenario, the actor was instructed to walk into the room and immediately say out loud that he or she was donating all the money to Obama, then make the donation. One group paired participants with a white actor; in the other, the actor was black.

People in the first group - the loners - kept most of the money, donating on average $3.74 to the Obama campaign. In the group with the white actor, individuals donated $4.45 to the Obama campaign. This amount was not statistically different from the scenario in which no actor was present. But in the third group, with the black actor, the average Obama contribution increased to $6.85 - a significant increase relative to the group where no actor was present.

In other words, black participants were less likely to pocket the money when another black person said he or she would be donating to Obama. The participant felt pressure to comply with the expectation of behavior by someone similar to them.

As you see the results from South Carolina and other states with a percentage of black Democrats, keep that dynamic in mind. The values of the Democratic party appeal to many black voters, but their steadfast loyalty to the party goes beyond common interest. Social pressure is what cements that relationship between the black electorate and the Democratic party.

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Why So Many Black Voters Are Democrats, Even When They Aren't Liberal

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At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes - the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That's one of the reasons why South Carolina's primary on Feb.

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Many Americans believe that race relations in America are very poor. In a study done by Wall Street Journal and ABC News, 56% of Americans said they believed that America was racist. When it came to exploring polls and the political realm...90% of Democrats believe that African Americans are discriminated against and a quarter of Republicans believed the same. There seems to be an agreement/skewed views on this subject.

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On the menu today: A new survey finds that most Americans are increasingly concerned about racial discrimination and racism in the U.S., some thoughts on the importance of Catholic education as politicians refuse to let private schools reopen, and a little good news from one of the trials for a possible COVID-19 vaccine.
A Majority of Americans Believes Race Relations in the U.S. Are Poor
In a new survey from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, a slim majority of respondents (56 percent) said they believe American society is racist. About 71 percent of respondents said race relations in the U.S. are either very bad or fairly bad, a figure that has risen by 16 points since February.

There's a lot worth exploring in the new poll, which surveyed 900 registered voters from July 9 to July 12 and gives us probably the best concrete data we've gotten yet on the way Americans have responded to the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent unrest that has unfolded over the last few months.

One of the most interesting points in the poll is the stark gaps in the way Americans see these issues across the political spectrum. Almost all Democrats (90 percent) said they believe black people are discriminated against, but only a quarter of Republicans said the same. Eighty-two percent of Democrats, meanwhile, say that American society is racist, and only 30 percent of Republicans agreed. Interestingly, independents come down much closer to Republicans on that question; just 45 percent of independents believe American society is racist.

On the question of Confederate statues, respondents have become a bit more hostile than they've been in the past, but their views actually remained fairly complex. A bare majority (51 percent) of all respondents said they'd support removing these statues from public property, and 47 percent would leave them in place. But their detailed positions are much more nuanced than that.

Only 10 percent of respondents said the statues ought to be removed and destroyed, while about 40 percent would move them to museums, about 30 percent would keep them where they are and add plaques to explain their history more adequately, and about 15 percent would leave them exactly as they are. Even so, the percentage of Americans who would prefer to remove the monuments has risen by 16 points since August 2018.

On another hot-button question, kneeling during the national anthem before sporting events, voters have moved in a similar direction. A very slim majority (52 percent) now says it is appropriate for athletes to kneel during the national anthem, an increase of nine points since 2018. Today, 45 percent of Americans said they still believe it is inappropriate to kneel.

Here's some of the Journal 's analysis of more data points from the survey:

Voters remain split on the root cause of racism and how to address racial bias and discrimination.

A majority of Black voters in the survey, 65%, said that people of color experience racial discrimination because it is built into American society, including U.S. policies and institutions. By contrast, a plurality of white voters, 48%, attributed racial discrimination to individuals who hold racist views, as opposed to institutions and society as a whole.

Views of the Black Lives Matter movement also differ by race. Among Black voters, 76% hold a positive view of the movement, while views were almost evenly divided among white voters, with 42% holding a positive view and 39% a negative one.

Overall, about half of voters see the movement in a positive light, up from 38% in 2016.

Three-quarters of voters said they were encouraged that the country is addressing longstanding issues of racism in society. At the same time, half said they were concerned that the protests over racial issues are creating social unrest and bringing too much change to the country, including erasing America's history and significant figures in it.

Finally, the survey has some disappointing news for President Trump's reelection campaign: A little less than two-thirds of voters disapprove of the way the president has handled race relations, while one-third approves. About half of respondents said they think expressing racist views has become more acceptable during the time Trump has been in office.

As is always the case with public-opinion polling, these statistics shouldn't be taken as the Gospel truth about what American society really thinks or will continue to think in the long run. Especially with this particular poll, we know it was taken in the midst of ongoing, sustained, intense social unrest over the issues being considered in survey questions. So while it's a helpful barometer for how Americans have reacted to the events of the last few months, there's not much reason to think these positions are necessarily exactly where they will fall on the same questions later on down the road.

In other words, something clearly has shifted in how Americans think about race relations in the U.S. as a result of this spring and early summer, but it's much too soon to know for sure how stable those changes really are.
Catholic Schools Are More Important Than You Might Think
Lots of Americans and lots of our institutions and businesses are suffering as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, so there are plenty of complaints and concerns to go around these days. But one issue that deserves more attention than it's gotten is the plight of private schools, especially religious ones, as government officials mull whether they will let children return to classrooms in the fall (i.e. as officials wrangle with teachers' unions over whether teachers will return to classrooms in the fall).

One huge casualty of the uncertainty and financial loss has been Catholic schools, 90 of which across the country have announced plans over the last few months to close their doors for good, primarily because contributions they rely on have declined in the recession. Many of these schools already were struggling financially, often barely getting by from year to year, and now they don't have the money even to pay their teachers or provide the aid they had been accustomed to giving out in student scholarships.

For more detail on the many ways in which Catholic schools contribute to American society, this excellent article by Nicole Stelle Garnett in the latest issue of City Journal has everything you need to know, and it highlights the importance of finding ways to craft policy enabling these schools to continue operating even during the pandemic.

In an editorial yesterday evening, the Wall Street Journal editorial board zeroed in on California, where progressive governor Gavin Newsom has declared that no schools, whether public or private, will be permitted to open until the state determines that it's safe to do so. Here's some of what the Journal had to say:

Large school districts including Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco had already announced plans to do virtual instruction this fall. But Orange County and some smaller districts - many of which have experienced a surge of new students in recent months as families have fled cities for suburbs - were planning to bring kids back to classrooms.

So were many religious schools including those in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. "Our goal is to strike a balance between preventing the spread of COVID-19 and providing children with the education, nutrition, physical activity, and mental health benefits provided through the reopening of Catholic schools," the Archdiocese Superintendent of Schools Paul Escala recently said. . . .

Most parents who send their kids to Catholic schools aren't wealthy, and many aren't even Catholic. They scrimp and save to provide their kids with a quality education that includes religious values, as well as the discipline and civility that are often missing in public schools. While public schools have a monopoly, Catholic schools have to compete for students.

This in part explains why Catholic schools such as those in Los Angeles were preparing to reopen campuses this fall even as local public schools planned to keep kids at home. Teachers unions claim schools can't afford to reopen safely without a deus ex cashina from Congress.

But on average tuition at Catholic schools runs between $1,000 and $4,000 less than what states spend per pupil to educate kids at public schools. If Catholic schools could find a way to open safely, what excuse do public schools have for staying closed?

In its conclusion, the editorial board called on Congress to use its next iteration of stimulus spending to establish that only districts and schools that go back to in-classroom schooling this fall will be eligible for federal funding. My proposal a few months back was that Congress establish a federal voucher program of some kind at least for the length of the pandemic, enabling families that have chosen private schools to continue making that choice even during the recession, possibly staving off some of these permanent closures that we're witnessing.
A Sliver of Good News from a Vaccine Trial
These days, it always feels as if any positive news reports must be too good to be true, but nonetheless, an early trial of one of the new potential COVID-19 vaccines gives us reason to have a little hope. According to data from a human trial of Oxford University's vaccine candidate, developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca, hundreds of participants showed a strong immune response. Our Mairead McArdle has more:

[The] trial . . . involved 1,077 people and caused an immune response in people aged 18 to 55 that lasted two months or slightly longer, according to data published Monday by the medical journal The Lancet. The vaccine, which is made from a combination of coronavirus genetic material and a virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees, caused the body to produce antibodies against the coronavirus and caused a reaction in T-cells, a type of white blood cell that also helps stave off infection.

"We are seeing good immune response in almost everybody," said Dr. Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, which focuses on developing vaccines. "What this vaccine does particularly well is trigger both arms of the immune system."

We'll have to wait a little longer for more details though, as another trial of the vaccine with about 10,000 participants is ongoing, and they are planning to conduct still another with the participation of about 30,000 Americans. As these trials unfold, AstraZeneca is manufacturing 2 billion doses that can be distributed publicly if the subsequent trials go well.

ADDENDUM: It's not just here in the Morning Jolt that I occasionally pinch hit for the incomparable Jim Geraghty; I'll also be stepping into his shoes and joining his cohost Greg Corombos over on the Three Martini Lunch podcast later today. But don't let that discourage you from tuning in!

Alexandra DeSanctis is a staff writer for National Review and a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. @xan_desanctis

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Dwindling Confidence in U.S. Race Relations | National Review

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On the menu today: A new survey finds that most Americans are increasingly concerned about racial discrimination and racism in the U.S., some thoughts on the importance of Catholic education as politicians refuse to let private schools reopen, and a little good news from one of the trials for a possible COVID-19 vaccine.

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Ever since George Floyd's death, White and Black Americans views are split. CNN conducted a poll on how racial relations have improved, worsened, or neither. Overall, 47% of Americans thought that racial relations haven't improved or worsened, 40% believe that it has worsened, and 13% state that it has improved. When it comes to black americans, 54% say that it has worsened and 51% of white americans believe it hasn't improved or got worse.

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race relations poll: white and black americans are divided over george floyd's death and whether race relations have improved - cnn

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White and Black Americans are divided over George Floyd's death and whether race relations have improved, poll finds

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White and Black Americans' perceptions of race relations and the circumstances around George Floyd's death remain split, a new poll has found.

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This article highlights the systematic racism in America. To confirm that racism is still prevalent and very much alive in America, the author brings up statistics such as how a majority of uninsured people are poor people of color. For example, due to the health care gap, 10.75% of black babies born today will die within a year (which is twice the number of white babies.) This article referenced many other systematic issues...

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The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. Lisa Padilla is CEO of Melba House Blessing Box and a public voices fellow through the OpEd Project. This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.
Racism has saturated U.S. society for so long that some people - including representatives in public office - continue to deny its existence.

"Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country," said Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, in response to President Joe Biden's address to the nation on April 29. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, recently said he believes "racism does not exist in America." And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, declared there is not "systemic racism in America," while affirming a recent "Confederate Heritage Month" in his state.

These statements reflect how unwilling some of our representatives are to recognize the truth that racism is present in almost every facet of this country, from health care and education to the justice system.

In 2019, after years of efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, 28.9 million younger U.S. residents were uninsured. Low income, people of color make up the majority of these uninsured.

And the COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted the health care access gap. The Centers for Disease Control reports that the infant mortality rate in some zip codes in the United States - mostly in Southern states - is close to 10.75 percent for Black babies. That means 10.75 percent of Black babies born today will die within a year, twice the rate for white babies.

In education, Black and brown students are far more likely to be disciplined or suspended than their white classmates. Also, their teachers are almost entirely white, as only 7 percent of public school teachers are Black, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Education. And the disparities don't end with grade school: Once in college, the six-year graduation rate for white students is 25 percent higher than it is for Black students.

The criminal justice system is also rife with racism. Latinx and Black Americans are now committing fewer crimes, but there is a wider disparity in sentencing, according to a Council on Criminal Justice report. They are also spending more time in prison than white people when the same type of crime is committed.

Of course, George Floyd's murder by a police officer on May 25, 2020, was not an isolated incident. Black people are killed by police every day. Since March 29, 2021, which was when testimony began in the Floyd case, at least 69 deaths have taken place at the hands of law enforcement, with half of those deaths being of Black or Brown people. Overall, the rate of Black people being killed by police officers is twice as high as that of white Americans.

In the face of daily evidence of U.S. racism over the long swath of history, it is ludicrous to deny that racism exists in this country. It is time to stop debating - we must address this issue straight on in the systems where it is pervasive and work toward creating an anti-racist society.

The president and the U.S. Congress has the opportunity to ensure that populations of color can live past their first birthday, get an education, access health care, and not spend a majority of their lives in the penal system.

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Opinion: The reality of racism in America

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The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. Lisa Padilla is CEO of Melba House Blessing Box and a public voices fellow through the OpEd Project.

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This article covers the racist undertones in a political legislator,  Werner Horn. It also references the things that make America a racist environment such as Police brutality, The gaps when it comes to funding minority schools compared to poor white schools, the fact that African American males will be sentenced longer for the same crime a white man committed, etc.

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A few years ago, while covering a story on Republican New Hampshire legislator Werner Horn, I summoned the best and brightest scholars that America had to offer. Horn, who represents his 95.9 percent white hometown in his state's House of Representatives, confounded people who actually know things by stating that "owning slaves doesn't make you racist." During an interview with The Root, Horn doubled down by insisting that the Founding Fathers were not racist.

In an attempt to disprove the premise of Horn's statement, I called on Dr. Henry Louis Gates, perhaps the most well-known historian in America (and co-founder of The Root). Gates began with an explanation of America's history of racism by citing David Hume's racist footnote to his essay s, in which he claimed that in all of Africa, there were no arts, no sciences. He noted that Immanuel Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublimealso expounded on the racial differences between white and Black people. He explained that Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, which was written the same year as the Constitution, was classical racism defined.

But Gates was just a world-famous historian and Werner Horn was a white man. So, to make sure that I had all the bases covered, I called professor, historian, and widely recognized super-genius, Dr. Greg Carr, who heads the Howard University Afro-American Studies Department, teaches at Howard University School of Law and instructs the largest Africana Studies classroom in the world. Before launching into a history of racism, Carr swatted down Horn's thesis with one request:

"Show me the white slaves."

Carr (who may or may not be an actual human-like android from the future loaded with all the knowledge that ever existed) was using the concept known as . In the fields of science, economics, or any reason-based pursuit of understanding, researchers adhere to this time-honored principle which states:

Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred.

Engineers know it as , or "Keep it simple, stupid." In research, the concept is called ontological parsimony. Medical researcher Theodore Woodward said: "When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras."Scientists from Stephen Hawking to Albert Einstein to Sir Isaac Newton, accept the premise that whenever there are two different possibilities, the simpler one is usually the correct one.

Unless, of course, white people are talking about racism.

There are a lot of things we know.

We know police disproportionately kill Black people. Although some people attempt to explain that the discrepancy is a function of the disproportionate Black crime rate, r esearch shows that does not hold true. Again, research shows that is a lie. Once more for the people in the back (I'm talking to you, ) every peer-reviewed study that finds police shoot and kill Black people at disproportionate rates and "the only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were Black," according to Justin Nix, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Louisville, who noted that police shootings do not correlate with crime rate, the neighborhood violence, age or mental illness.

Maybe it's racism.

In any other area of sociology, criminology or statistical analysis, this would be accepted as fact. But when it comes to racial data, the big brains in academia and scientific research will break their graphic calculators trying to explain away the outcomes of systemic inequality. They never can.

We know even the poorest majority-white school districts are better funded than the wealthiest school districts. It is an indisputable fact that majority-Black schools offer fewer advanced-level courses. No serious person can argue against the fact that Black students are punished more harshly than white students. Yet, the idea that the education system is racist at its core is somehow seen as incendiary, even though it is the simplest explanation.

It's easy for me to call the criminal justice system racist. Or, perhaps there's another reason why Black male offenders receive sentences that are, on average, 19.1 percent longer than white male offenders who commit the same crimes and have the same criminal history, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. Explain why white people use illegal drugs, possess illegal narcotics and sell illegal substances at higher rates than Black people but Black people are six-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested and convicted for drugs. The Stanford Open Policing Project-the largest police stop project that ever existed-found that Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be stopped and 4 times more likely to be searched than white drivers even though white drivers were more likely to have contraband.

Police are twice as likely to use force on Black people versus white suspects, according to a 2015 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Black defendants get charged with harsher crimes, receive higher bail and are offered fewer plea deals according to Harvard researchers...and researchers in ...and Philadelphia...and .

A study by the National Registry of Exonerations found that "African Americans are only 13% of the American population but...They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in 'group exonerations.'"

Racists love to point out the FBI crime data as an explanation, even though the stats only refer to arrests. Even knowing that most crimes go unsolved, we're supposed to believe that the cops who use force on, shoot, kill, stop, frisk, search, sentence, and wrongfully incarcerate Black people at disproportionate rates somehow have it right when it comes to arresting Black people.

Maybe it's poverty.

We know that crime is related to poverty, socioeconomic conditions and access to education. But Black people are not three times as poor or less educated. In fact, a Black child born to wealthy Black parents is just as likely to end up poor or in jail as a poor white child. A home in a Black neighborhood is worth than the exact same home in a white neighborhood, even if the crime rate and neighborhood amenities are exactly the same. A white high school dropout is more likely to find a job than a Black college student. Of all the manufactured hypotheses that attempt to explain these racial disparities, none of them even comes close to the simplest explanation.

It's racism.

Perhaps racism is the reason that these valiant scholarly attempts at whitesplaining away America's racial toxicity exist in the first place. In any other scientific discipline, the general consensus would adhere to the tried and true methodologies found in every other field of research. Maybe white people genuinely cannot fathom that white supremacy is responsible for these racial incongruities because, by proxy, it would also mean that they benefit from these inequities.

Maybe that's why "are satisfied with the way Blacks are treated in society." Perhaps that's why two out of every three white people believe Black people have "as good a chance as whites to get any kind of job for which they are qualified." The majority of white peopledo not believe Black people face discrimination in , medical treatment or when applying for a loan or mortgage, even though numerous studies have documented these systemic issues.

Of course, there is another possibility. Perhaps Black people are inherently dumber, lazier and more prone to violence. While this assumption is also racist, it is a more logical explanation than believing that-despite the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression and employment discrimination -this country made an about-face from its past and spontaneously regenerated itself into a bastion of equality and impartiality.

So either America is racist or America is racist.

Or maybe it's zebras.

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A few years ago, while covering a story on Republican New Hampshire legislator Werner Horn, I summoned the best and brightest scholars that America had to offer. Horn, who represents his 95.9 percent white hometown in his state's House of Representatives, confounded people who actually know things by stating that "owning slaves doesn't make you racist."