“What The Kanye Controversy Can Teach Us About Black Voters”
“What White and and three other researchers found in a recent study is that social pressure from other black people is how this Democratic norm gets policed. They found that the expectations around this norm were so powerful that simply having a black questioner ask a black respondent about their voting preferences made that respondent more likely to say they were voting for a Democratic candidate.
Chryl Laird, one of the study’s authors, said this is how everyone votes. We like to think of our voting choices as purely rational, but we take cues from the people around us, especially when we don’t know much about a candidate or an issue. Laird said social influence and pressure partly explain why most white evangelical voters in Alabama supported Senate candidate Roy Moore last fall, even after he was accused of sexual misconduct involving minors…
Kanye has cast himself as an iconoclast, brave enough to flout prevailing expectations for black people. But it makes sense to ask how much his current ideological trajectory owes to his own changing personal arithmetic around social sanction and social rewards. He is not in Chicago anymore. And Kanye, ever the solipsist, could just be looking for affirmation from the people in his current social universe who can give it to him. (That math is different for John Legend and Chance, who are more closely tied to black communities through their activism.)”
This was a kind of great analysis
