• DOI:10.1017/S1049096516002687
• Corpus ID: 157090566

The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas Executive Summary

@article{Hooker2017TheDB,
  title={The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas Executive Summary},
  author={Juliet A. Hooker and Alvin B. Tillery},
  journal={PS: Political Science \& Politics},
  year={2017},
  volume={50},
  pages={250 - 259}
}

• Juliet A. Hooker, Alvin B. Tillery
• Published 1 September 2016
• History
• PS: Political Science & Politics

©American Political Science Association, 2017 This report summarizes the work of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas. The main goal of the task force was to investigate the relationship between race and class in producing material, political, and social inequalities in the nations of the Americas. The task force also examined how the political systems in these countries work to foment and/or ameliorate inequalities that track with ethnic and racial identities and socioeconomic status. Clearly, enormous diversity exists among the 55 nations of the Americas (see Appendix I). At the same time, a sizable majority of these nations share features that make them ripe for comparative analyses along the dimensions of inquiry suggested here: inequality, particularly as it relates to race and class. All of these nations were founded on a history of European imperialism and settler colonialism that ravaged indigenous populations beginning in the fifteenth century (Jennings 1975; Todorov 1984). The majority of these nations also participated in the transatlantic slave trade that brought upwards of 12 million Africans to the western hemisphere between 1525 and 1866 (Eltis 2000; Eltis and Richardson 2010). Both the early economic growth of these nations and the expansion of their European populations through immigration are traceable to their participation in the transatlantic slave trade and the exploitation of African labor during their colonial eras (Drescher 1977; Eltis 1987; Williams 1944). At some point in their histories, almost all of the nations of the Americas have used ethnic and racial differences and/ or socioeconomic status to confer citizenship rights on an unequal basis (Andrews 2004; Telles et al. 2014). By the end of the twentieth century, nearly all of these nations had experienced some form of democratic transition that, in name at least, institutionalized the principle of equal citizenship. At the same time, many nations in the hemisphere had implemented various types of social welfare and poverty-reduction programs, as well as (in some cases) public policies aimed at reducing racial and ethnic disparities. Despite these changes in conferring citizenship status and legal rights, widespread disparities remain on most indicators of socioeconomic wellbeing, service provision, basic safety, and political influence along racial, ethnic, and class lines. The chapters in this report document these gaps and explore the causes of their persistence. The work of the task force unfolded in a period in which political science has begun to pay greater attention to the causes and The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial and Class Inequalities in the Americas Executive Summary