Taking Stock of Solidarity Between People of Color in U.S. Politics

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity is then supposed to boost support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own-for example, Black adults become more pro-Latino, Asian adults become more pro-Black, and Latino adults become more pro-Asian. In this talk, Efrén Pérez discusses his lab’s growing experimental evidence on this proposed mechanism. I then highlight new challenges and opportunities to learn more-both theoretically and methodologically-about interminority solidarity in politics. He concludes by discussing new research agendas to advance our understanding about interminority politics in a multiethnic democracy like the United States.
Efrén Pérez is Full Professor of Political Science and Psychology at UCLA. His research centers on political psychology, with specific interests in intergroup politics, group identity, language and political thinking, implicit political cognition, and psychometrics.
This talk was given on Sept. 23, 2024 as part of the Group Dynamics Seminar series, considered one of the longest running seminar series in the social sciences. It has been running uninterruptedly since it was founded by Kurt Lewin in the 1920’s in Berlin. The fall 2024 series, “The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism,” was organized by Nick Camp.
Since its establishment in 1948, the Research Center for Group Dynamics’ mission has been to advance the understanding of human behavior in social contexts. Learn more about RCGD and its interdisciplinary Group Dynamics seminars from rcgd.isr.umich.....