A FEW BAD APPLES OR A ROTTEN TREE?

RACIAL STATE FRAMES IN TIMES OF POLITICAL DISTRUST    

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, University of California, Berkeley

 Talk based on co-authored paper with Julie A. Dowling (University of Illinois, Chicago)

and G. Cristina Mora (University of California, Berkeley)

Although scholars and pundits have lamented decreased levels of political trust in the United States over the last several decades, political distrust remains conceptually underdeveloped, particularly in relation to minoritized populations. Seeking to advance theorizing on the relationship between racialization and political distrust, this article introduces the concept of racial state frames, or the interpretative lens through which actors variously perceive state action, intent, and harm in terms of race and racism. We apply this concept to the case of Latinos during the Trump administration. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 71 Latino respondents in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area, we argue that racial state frames powerfully mediate between personal biographies and racialized encounters with government officials and agencies, on the one hand, and political distrust, on the other hand. The article thus presents an alternative approach to the work on race and political distrust that centers meaning-making and has broader implications for understanding how minoritized individuals and communities perceive the government in unsettled times.

BIO:

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is part of Berkeley’s Latinx and Democracy cluster and co-director of the Latinx Social Science Pipeline initiative. His research and teaching focuses on politics of race and knowledge, primarily in Latinx communities and movements.

His first book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines contemporary political struggles and meaning-making processes through which individuals and societies come to envision and sense demographic change. The book is an extension of his award-winning dissertation. It has been awarded the best book prize from the American Sociological Association’s Latino/a Sociology section and Cultural Sociology section and received an honorable mention from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section.

His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Du Bois Review, American Behavioral Scientist, and Ethnography, among other outlets. He has also contributed chapters to several edited volumes, most recently The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois. He is currently engaged in several collaborative research projects, including an edited volume on Du Boisian Methodologies, under advance contract with Duke University. In addition, he is working on an oral history project on the afterlives of political repression against Puerto Rican anticolonial movements in Chicago. This project involves the creation of a community archive.