It is a rare opportunity that an author gets to discuss extensions of her work after it’s published; I am grateful to the journal and Nicole Yadon for this chance—and to Yadon for her thoughtful and thorough review of The Obligation Mosaic.
Yadon poses three questions: how can the racialized norms model, developed in the book, be extended to other racial/ethnic groups? How might interviews with white Americans and Latinos, instead of only Black and Asian Americans, have shaped the selected norms? And what are the broader implications for mobilization?
My book develops the racialized norms model to study political participation of the four largest racial groups in the United States—Asian Americans, Black Americans, Latinos, and white Americans—but Yadon is right to suggest that the model could be applied to other groups as well. Any set of groups who experience distinct histories with respect to their relationship with government and are segregated enough to have separate social spaces are likely to see variation in participatory norms.
Yadon suggests scholars might consider Middle Eastern/North African Americans and Native Americans; investigations of this kind could yield fascinating results of understudied groups. I will add further that since this book’s publication, at least two people have asked me how religious groups—especially those with strong ethnic histories—might operate within this model. This is another kind of extension of the logic ripe for investigation: do Jewish Americans, for instance, show distinctions in their participatory norms given unique histories and strong group boundaries? I think the answer is likely yes, but right now, this group is by-and-large folded bluntly into analyses of whites.
For these extensions, scholars could gather data using my novel survey batteries and examine across group variation. But Yadon suggests that additional interviews with these groups, as well as whites and Latinos, would be a welcome contribution. I agree and encourage others to embrace the method of interviewing, which was invaluable to my thought processes and later empirical tests. I’m once again grateful to my interviewees for their insight and hope I have done justice in the work to their ideas.
Finally, Yadon considers how my work may inform future mobilization, pointing to its nexus with Pérez’s Diversity’s Child (2021). The Honoring Ancestors Norm depends fundamentally on who we imagine our ancestors to be—and when I say “imagine” I really do mean how imagination fills in the gaps of history. Our ancestors, as a construct, are built from stories passed down through families, observation, formal lessons in school, and even pop culture. In the slippage between reality and perception is opportunity—opportunity to reimagine the boundaries of our groups and our connections to others. Pérez suggests people of color is an identity that unites and activates cooperation among minority Americans. How might people of color also encompass our stories of the past, building ties across historic social movements and changing what present-day Americans believe is demanded in honoring those before us? I’m eager to find out.
