Women of Color Political Elites in the US: An Introduction, Personal Reflections, and a Call for Scholarly Engagement

Abstract

More women of color were sworn in to the 117th U.S. Congress than ever before. For instance, Cori Bush became the first Black woman elected from the state of Missouri, accomplishing this feat by taking down William Clay, whose family served in that seat for decades. Cori Bush’s victory, along with those of other women of color, is simultaneously something to celebrate and investigate. How can it be that in 2021, women of color elected officials are still achieving firsts? How have scholars assessed, theorized, and studied these women who are novel players in American government? Political Science, as a discipline, is merely decades out from viewing women of color via a single-axis lens of either race or gender. Thusly, scholars are still grappling with how to examine women of color by their own merits. This special issue seeks to do just that. The essays in this volume are chiefly concerned with studying the multiplicity of women of color political elites as distinct actors in American democracy. As guest co-editors of two issues on the subject, we wanted to curate a set of essays from both established and burgeoning thought leaders and empiricists on the complexities of seeking elected office and governing as women of color. Political scientists have long recognized that women of color experience politics in a manner distinct from White women and men of color. Scholars such as Ange-Marie Hancock (2007) and Wendy Smooth (2006) have convincingly argued for the theoretical benefits of intersectionality research. In 2006, Smooth authored a piece in which she argued that intersectionality was “a mess worth making” and growing numbers followed suit by making a mess of traditional approaches to studying politics. For instance, Becki Scola wrote one of the first research articles with empirical data to show that the factors that account for the presence of women in state legislatures are really predictors of whether White women serve (Scola 2008). In 2014, Nadia Brown published the first book on Black women state lawmakers, and in the process introduced a novel framework, representational identity theory, for understanding these understudied actors. Just a year before, Christina Bejarano published a book arguing that Latina candidates are not doubly disadvantaged, but instead benefit from their racial and gender identities. In 2020, Reingold, Haynie, and Widner empirically demonstrated that when multiple identities are considered we learn something about politics that we otherwise would have missed. This is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of research on the subject. We simply cite these studies as examples of a larger discourse of how scholars have begun to study women of color political elites. From an even bigger picture perspective, let’s consider the creation of new journals centered on identity. Politics, Groups, and Identities was launched in 2013, and it is an outlet that has consistently published work on women of color and intersectionality research as well. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics was launched in 2016 and has also been an outlet for such work. The creation of such outlets, those committed to studying identity politics and racial and ethnic politics, have been instrumental in publishing work on women of color political elites. These newer journals joined other more established journals such as the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy and Politics and Gender which published scholarship on women’s politics that were often intersectional in nature.