Welcome to Group Threat: Notes on race and politics

We started Group Threat because, as sociologists who study race, we were unhappy with the way it gets talked about in American politics. Group Threat is a corrective to coverage that refuses to see race as a central motivating force shaping politics—from economic policy to popular culture.

Here we don’t subscribe to outdated (and fake) notions of objectivity, and we don’t pull our punches. We believe American politics is in crisis because of consistent failure to account for the ways racism warps our democracy.

Group Threat takes America’s eroding democracy seriously, contextualizing our contemporary political peril in the nation’s long history of denying democracy to those it others—whether they are the original inhabitants of this land, enslaved people brought here by force, or immigrants looking to the promise of opportunity in the United States.

As sociologists, we spend much of our time thinking about how people connect to—or separate from—one another. We are also preoccupied with why institutions like laws, policies, or organizations last as long as they do, and what causes them to change. How is it that over centuries, and across countries, systems endure to privilege one race over the rest? We bring these frames to issues of contemporary importance – offering analysis and context to our current political realities.

Although we both study race in our day jobs, we focus on different aspects of America’s racial order. Victor is best known for his work on the ways race is built into the foundation of American organizations. Heba is best known for her ethnographic work that sees a country’s policy regimes from the perspective of immigrants enduring their violence. We’ve both written extensively for public outlets and recognized that we were telling different parts of a cohesive story about the predictable ways racism shapes people’s lives.

We plan on sending a newsletter to you every Friday. Starting out, we plan on keeping the posts paywall-free, with any financial contributions going to building this platform into something bigger and more sustainable (hiring editors, paying contributors, etc). Paid subscribers will get access to chat and commentary (this is mainly to keep the trolls out). We will also post occasional mid-week commentary when the spirit moves us, or when current events simply cry out for contextualization or condemnation. We also look forward to publishing occasional guest posts from colleagues and graduate students looking to write for a broader audience, so hit us up if that’s you.