The Department of African American Studies welcomes Marcus Johnson from the Department of Government and Politics to speak about his chapter from "Racialized Democracy in Latin America." This presentation will focus on the theoretical chapter of my book manuscript, Racialized Democracy: The Electoral Politics of Race in Latin America. The predominant approach to salience in political science contends that racial identities, like other identities and issues, are salient when they explicitly motivate the political attitudes and behavior of voters and office-seekers. In this chapter, I conceptualize this framework for identity politics as discursive salience. We can juxtapose discursive salience to what I refer to as structural salience. Building on existing structural theories of race, I argue that race is structurally salient when elite and/or mass political behavior is explicitly motivated by ostensibly non-racial dimensions of a social or political system that are encoded within a society’s racial structure. This pathway to identity salience requires the activation or mobilization of non-racial factors that substantially overlap with racial boundaries (e.g. class, labor sector, geography, land tenure, etc.). This chapter provides a theoretical framework to explain these complementary yet distinct paths to racialized patterns of political behavior—a) collective political behavior and b) racial differences in political participation.
Attend using the following link: https://go.umd.edu/racializeddemocracy
"Marcus is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work examines racial disparities in political behavior in democracies that are stratified by race. He is particularly interested in how historical and contemporary patterns of racial inequality affect the political behavior of people of African descent in Latin America.
His various teaching experiences have allowed him to hone his approach to student learning, emphasizing the importance of choice and empathy. Moreover, Marcus' scholarship, teaching and personal experiences have helped him to identify diversity as a critical tool for pedagogy, mentorship and service. His goal is to prepare students to succeed at UMD and beyond. He is a proud UMD alumnus (class of 2011) and attributes a large part of his success to the mentorship from GVPT and BSOS faculty.
Marcus earned his PhD from Princeton University in 2017. He served as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland during the 2017-2018 academic year."
Source: Department of Government and Politics
