A $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will enable UCLA to further its commitment to social change and public service by establishing the UCLA Mellon Social Justice Curriculum in the divisions of humanities and social sciences of the UCLA College.

The funding will lay the foundation for a publicly engaged, data-driven approach to teaching and research on social justice issues, positioning more UCLA graduates to become social change leaders in their chosen professions.

“We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for enabling us to create new opportunities for our students to grow intellectually while obtaining the skills required to succeed in a host of professional careers,” said David Schaberg, senior dean of the College and dean of humanities. “The social justice curriculum will empower our students to put their humanistic vision to work in the service of social change.”

The five-and-a-half-year grant will support wide-ranging curricular initiatives, new degree programs and community-engaged research. It will also allow UCLA to hire faculty whose research, teaching and service will strengthen diversity and equal opportunity on campus, in particular scholars with expertise in the field of experimental humanities, which includes digital, urban, environmental and health humanities.

The curriculum will focus on four intertwined social justice issues at the core of the experimental humanities: racial and spatial justice, data justice, environmental and economic justice, and health justice.

“Addressing complex social problems requires the interpretative methods, critical knowledge, historical perspectives and values infrastructure informed by engagement with the humanities, culture, arts and society,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences. “With this generous grant, the Mellon Foundation has given UCLA the means to transform what and how we teach by centering social justice, community engagement and the critical tools and methods for knowledge creation.”

UCLA’s strong community connections will be leveraged, in partnership with the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, through academic courses that mutually benefit students and community partners, student internships, and summer institutes and workshops. Courses tailored to the curriculum will offer instruction in data literacy, statistics and computational research methods, linked with the study of narrative and media-making.

An introductory course for freshmen titled “Data, Society, and Social Justice” — co-taught by interdisciplinary faculty teams with expertise on the environment, cities, health and racial disparities in Los Angeles — will focus on humanistic frameworks for understanding social inequalities and train students to assess the practical and ethical implications of data-driven approaches to social change.

The new curriculum is expected to attract the rising numbers of UCLA students who are committed to social justice issues but have been underrepresented in courses and majors that provide critical training in statistics, computation and quantitative research methods. These include students from low-income households, first-generation college students and those from historically underrepresented groups.

Schaberg and Hunt are co–principal investigators on the project. The faculty leads are Todd Presner, chair of UCLA’s digital humanities program and the Ross Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, and Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies and chair of the UCLA social science interdepartmental program. Co-chairs of the faculty advisory committee are Safiya Noble, associate professor of information studies and African American studies, and Sarah Roberts, associate professor of information studies with affiliate appointments in labor studies and gender studies. Roberts and Noble also co-direct the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, which will play a key role in programming.

This latest Mellon grant to the College follows a five-year grant awarded in 2015 that supported innovative and more inclusive methods of humanities teaching and brings the foundation’s total support for UCLA to approximately $60 million.

This article, written by Margaret MacDonald, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

In less than five years, Million Dollar Hoods has already begun to influence criminal justice and policing in Los Angeles.

The program, launched in 2016, produced research on cannabis enforcement that shaped the development of the city’s Social Equity Program, which addresses the impact of disparate enforcement of cannabis prohibition. Its research on the money bail system, the first to document the scale of money bail in a large U.S. city, was instrumental to the passage of California legislation ending money bail for misdemeanor and nonviolent felony cases.

Its report on the Los Angeles School Police Department helped persuade the Los Angeles Unified School District to stop arresting children 14 and younger. And its analyses of Los Angeles Police Department arrests of homeless people unmasked the fact that arrests are outpacing the growth of the city’s homeless population — revealing an escalating focus on policing homeless persons.

Million Dollar Hoods is a big-data research initiative based at UCLA that uses Los Angeles police and jail records to monitor how much authorities are spending to lock up residents, neighborhood by neighborhood. In some communities, that figure is more than $1 million per year.

And not every neighborhood is affected equally by Los Angeles’ massive jail system. Data from arrest records shows that Los Angeles’ jail budget, nearly $1 billion per year, is largely devoted to incarcerating people from just a few neighborhoods.

Million Dollar Hoods researchers have researched and written dozens of “rapid response reports” in response to concerns from community members. Each report is made available on the program’s website.

Million Dollar Hoods researchers have also interviewed nearly 200 Los Angeles residents, under the guidance of Terry Allen, the lead researcher and director of the oral history project and a recent doctoral graduate of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. The oral histories tell stories of individual experiences of dealing with police and being arrested or incarcerated, as well as the impact of incarceration on families.

Its research team is led by Kelly Lytle Hernández, a UCLA professor of history and urban planning, and includes UCLA students, staff and faculty. Every project also benefits from the involvement of community organizations; Youth Justice Coalition, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Dignity and Power Now!, and JusticeLA are among those that have contributed to recent projects.

The project has attracted a passionate collective of undergraduate researchers, said Marques Vestal, faculty advisor for Million Dollar Hoods.

“There are lines out the door to get involved with this project,” said Vestal, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow and leader on the Million Dollar Hoods team who will joins the faculty of UCLA’s department of urban planning in July 2021. “Million Dollar Hoods gives students the chance to work with big data in ways that have a reparative impact on their communities.”

Next up: Thanks to a portion of a $3.65 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Million Dollar Hoods will expand its capacity to produce oral histories — including training students to conduct interviews — and digitize more records and work with members of the community to document their experiences with and perspectives on mass incarceration.

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

This time next year, Genevieve Finn ’20 will be studying creative writing at Trinity College in Dublin as one of 12 winners of this year’s prestigious Mitchell Scholarship. She is only the second UCLA alum to win a Mitchell Scholarship, and the first to win in 20 years.

The George J. Mitchell Scholarship Program is a national, competitive scholarship sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance. Up to 12 Mitchell Scholars between the ages of 18 and 30 are chosen annually for one academic year of postgraduate study in any discipline offered by institutions of higher learning in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

A native of San Anselmo, Calif., Finn majored in English in the College Honors program and completed her degree in just two and a half years, thanks to AP credits and some “excellent” academic counselors who helped her manage her course load, she said. She was a reporter for the Daily Bruin and interned at the New York Times’ Australia bureau and GQ Australia. She will work at the Mexico bureau of the Associated Press when travel is safe. Finn was also awarded an Overseas Press Club Foundation fellowship for her reporting about her experience sailing on a container ship from Hong Kong to Singapore.

Finn is currently a reporter at the Malibu Times, working to create a Spanish-language insert in the paper’s print edition to serve Malibu’s Latinx day laborer-commuter population. With the Mitchell Scholarship, she plans to develop her skills in long form journalism and poetry, report on Ireland’s unique political and cultural narratives, and explore her own Irish heritage.

Finn said her love of journalism was cemented during a summer she spent traveling around Mexico and writing about the people she met while couch surfing and hitchhiking.

“I love talking to people and am just genuinely interested in other people’s lives,” Finn said. “I love the craft of writing and storytelling and find it exhilarating to be edited.”

She said UCLA’s creative writing program, in particular its poetry workshops, helped prepare her for graduate study.

“My absolute favorite memories of undergrad are far and away the times I got to sit in the Sculpture Garden in the sun with my peers and listen to them read their poetry out loud,” she said. “The workshops taught me so much about how to edit and be edited, made me a nimbler poet and bolder essayist, and gave me so many really wonderful, lasting friends and mentors. I’m going to take all of those skills and relationships with me to Europe!”

In other scholarship news, three UCLA students were finalists for prestigious scholarships this year.

UCLA students Kai Huang and Kristy Hinds were finalists for the Marshall Scholarship, which also funds graduate study in the UK.

Huang, a senior majoring in psychobiology, is an advocate for the transgender community at UCLA. They serve as Undergraduate Student Representative for the Trans Wellness Team, a team of healthcare professionals from Ashe, CAPS and UCLA Health who seek to improve transgender healthcare at UCLA, and are on the Community Advisory Board for the UCLA Gender Health Program Research Collaborative. He co-founded the LGBT Student Advocacy Committee and is the Activism Coordinator for the pre-health student organization Lavender Health Alliance. Huang plans to become a primary care physician for transgender people.

“I never had the opportunity to study abroad before, especially before I legally changed my name and gender marker to match who I am, and it meant a lot to me to be considered as a Marshall finalist as a nonbinary trans person in higher education, since I don’t know of many other trans people in healthcare,” Huang said.

Hinds, a senior majoring in English, is a recipient of the UCLA College Reentry Scholarship for non-traditional students as well as the English department’s Fallen Leaves Creative Writing Prize.

She is working on a directed research project producing a short story fiction collection that looks at women and race, and is researching black authors from the 18th century to the First World War in the areas of sermons, spirituals and autobiography. Hinds said UCLA’s rigor, academic opportunities and support system has inspired her success.

“For me, being a Marshall finalist was a confirmation of what took years to uncover and believe about myself—I am good enough and I am worth it,” Hinds said. “I know it is not despite my story but because of it that makes me a Marshall finalist.”

Leann Pham ’19 was a finalist for the Schwarzman Scholarship, which funds a one-year master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing. At UCLA, in addition to majoring in political science and Asian American studies, she led a multi-year research study on responses to violence and taught a class to empower survivors of gender-based violence in the Asian/Pacific American community. She was also a Resident Assistant with UCLA Residential Life and helped organized sexual violence response training for over 300 RAs.

Pham is currently in Taiwan on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she is teaching and studying the Gender Equity Act in primary schools. She said it was an honor not only to be a Schwarzman finalist but also to see how her professors, advisors and friends all rallied to support her throughout the application process.

“Being a Schwarzman finalist meant that someone saw potential in me and my approach to gender-based violence between the U.S. and China,” Pham said. “But the experience of being a finalist showed me how lucky I was to have an entire ‘UCLA village’ support me.”

To learn more about scholarship opportunities for UCLA students, visit http://www.scholarshipcenter.ucla.edu/.

This article was written by Robin Shawn Migdol.

-Researchers sent 4,000 responses to real “roommate wanted” ads posted by millennials in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

-They used names that signaled the race of the room seekers; all other information, including job and college-degree status, was the same.

-White-sounding names received the most responses, while those that signaled Black, Asian or Hispanic potential roommates got fewer responses.

-Emails with names that combined ‘Americanized’ first names with Asian or Hispanic last names got more attention than those with more typically ethnic first names.

In attitude, millennials might be the least racially biased demographic in America, according to existing data about this this group. But a new study led by UCLA professor of sociology S. Michael Gaddis reveals that when it comes to actions — like judging who would make a good roommate — millennials still show strong racial bias and anti-Blackness.

American millennials — those between the ages of 24 and 39 — are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other demographic and have higher levels of education. Multiple surveys have found that these individuals typically respond to questions about their beliefs, hypothetical actions and attitudes about race in ways that have been deemed “post-racial,” or more accepting and progressive than previous generations.

Gaddis and co-author Raj Ghoshal of Elon University decided to test whether that body of evidence translated into how millennials behaved when making real-world decisions, like who to accept as a roommate.

For this experimental study, published today in the open-access journal Socius, researchers responded to real Craigslist ads posted by millennials looking for roommates in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The team used specific names that signaled the racial background of the room seeker, whether Asian, Black, Hispanic or white, and tracked responses to 4,000 email inquiries about the ads.

They found likely discrimination — in the form of fewer responses to their queries — against Asian, Hispanic and Black room seekers, even though each query about the open room included the same information on job and college-degree status. The only variable was the name of the applicants.

While queries from white-sounding names got the most responses, emails from Black-sounding names received the fewest.

“Essentially, when it comes to many racial issues, we cannot just ask people what they think and trust that their response is truthful,” Gaddis said. “Researchers must use a specific type of field experiment that requires us to engage in deception by pretending to be someone we’re not — for example, a Black room seeker — and examine how people react when they don’t know they are being watched.”

The Craigslist ads themselves provided a lot of information on the age, gender and socioeconomic status of the posters, though not definitive details on each poster’s race. Although Gaddis and his team presume many of these posters were white, it’s likely that other racial or ethnic groups were engaging in discrimination as well.

Rates of response to people with Asian or Hispanic names showed the most variation, depending on the first names that were used, the researchers found.

“Queries that used more ‘Americanized’ versions of first names, paired with a last name that implied Hispanic or Asian background got more responses than those with more typical-sounding Hispanic or Asian first names,” Gaddis said. “We think that probably comes across as a signal of assimilation.”

To select names for the made-up room seekers, Gaddis relied on a data-driven approach that uses names and information on race from real birth records and tests individuals’ perceptions of race from those names. He has previously explored how names that give a clue to race have an impact on the success of job seekers and college applicants.

► Related: Gaddis’ research on the connections between names and race

There’s an evolving science around choosing names for experimental research like this, Gaddis said, because names can also bear intersecting signals of social, economic and generational status.

“I’ve done a lot of work to investigate how people read these signals from the names,” he said. People do see names differently, and not everyone will recognize a certain name as white or Black or whatever you intended to signal. It’s also difficult because the vast majority of African Americans in the United States do not have racially distinguished names.”

For every last name of Washington, for example, which is a common Black last name, there are a handful of Mark Smiths who are Black men, Gaddis noted. And someone looking at an application or email from a Mark Smith, might not assume that person is Black. That is why, for this study, Gaddis used names his previous research had shown were most widely recognized as Black-sounding.

The disconnect between attitude and actions when it comes to survey responses about race can be chalked up to what’s called “social desirability bias,” and it’s something to which Gaddis and other sociologists are always keenly alert. People hesitate to respond to questions in ways they think might make them come across as racist. Whether that hesitation is explicit or implicit doesn’t change the reality of the bias itself, he said.

Gaddis is also working on two related reports. One is a survey that asks millennials to respond to a series of questions about whether they would discriminate based on race and what characteristics they value when looking for a roommate. So far, those findings are telling, he said. The way people respond to such questions in a theoretical setting is far removed from the behavior this real-life example shows.

Another study will look at the kinds of neighborhoods that made-up roommate seekers are able to get responses from. Do people with Black-sounding names get fewer responses from potential roommates in more affluent or “nicer” areas, even though the information about their job and college attainment is the same as presumably white room seekers? The short answer: yes.

This research has far-reaching implications, Gaddis said, because as millennials age, they will be the leaders and decision makers that drive our culture.

“Our study suggests that as millennials continue to gain access to positions of power, they are likely to perpetuate racial inequality rather than enact a post-racial system,” the researchers write.

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

UCLA College donors gave gifts to establish nine endowed centennial term chairs in the final year of the Centennial Campaign, taking advantage of the opportunity to enhance the impact of their philanthropy through a $5-million dollar match fund.

The Centennial Term Chair Match Fund was set up by Dean of Physical Sciences Miguel García-Garibay using proceeds of UCLA’s sale of royalty interest in the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, which was developed by chemists in the UCLA College’s physical sciences division. The fund was intended to bolster efforts to hire and retain early-career faculty through the establishment of faculty term chairs. Centennial chair holders also will form a distinct cohort that brings College faculty together and advises the College deans on various initiatives.

Senior Dean of UCLA College David Schaberg said, “By ‘sharing the wealth’ through the match fund, Dean García-Garibay found an innovative way to spur investment in faculty throughout the College and engage donors who share our commitment to faculty excellence.”

Prestigious endowed chairs play a key role in recruiting and retaining premier faculty whose interdisciplinary research, commitment to mentoring students, and talent for teaching are essential to the university’s vitality and impact. UCLA vies with other top-tier universities, including many with much larger endowments, for the best faculty. Along with the prestige and recognition that come with an endowed chair, chair holders receive funds for research costs as well to support graduate students who teach and mentor undergraduates. Term chairs, while renewable, generally are awarded every five years to ensure representation of a cross-section of academic fields.

Below are the nine centennial term chairs established or committed:

Division of Humanities

– Theresa McShane Biggs and Henry P. Biggs Centennial Term Chair in Linguistics

– George P. Kolovos Family Centennial Term Chair in Hellenic Studies

Division of Life Sciences

– George and Nouhad Ayoub Centennial Chair in Life Sciences Innovation

– Kevin Love Fund Centennial Chair in Psychology*

Division of Physical Sciences

– Randy Schekman and Sabeeha Merchant Centennial Term Chair

– The Andrea M. Ghez Centennial Term Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics (gifts from Astrid and Howard Preston, Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine, and the Heising-Simons Foundation)

Division of Social Sciences

– Benjamin Graham Centennial Endowed Chair in Value Investing (gift from the Havner Family Foundation)

– Mark Itkin Centennial Chair in Communication honoring Andrea L. Rich* (gift from Mark Allen Itkin)

Division of Undergraduate Education

– Centennial Director for Philanthropy Education (gift from Madeline and Mark Asofsky)

*Pending approval by UCOP

This article was written by Margaret MacDonald. 

-An analysis by researchers at the UCLA College found that women hold only 32.0% of studio chair and CEO jobs; minorities just 8.0%.

-Across broadcast, cable and digital, only 24.0% of credited writers are minorities and only 21.8% of episodes were directed by minorities in 2018–19.

-Representation of women and minorities in acting roles has improved since last year’s report.

-Ratings and social media engagement data show that audiences respond to diversity.

When it comes to gender and racial diversity in television industry jobs, the playing field continues to level for women and minorities, but there’s stubborn structural gridlock at the highest ranks and behind the camera.

Those are among the findings of the second part of the 2020 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, which focuses on broadcast, cable and digital programming for the past two television seasons. Part one, which was published in February, analyzed diversity in the movie business, and the authors concluded that the industry’s narrative on diversity was a tale of two Hollywoods. They write that the same is true in TV.

Women and minorities made gains in nearly all of the 13 television employment categories tracked by the report. But both groups still are not represented proportionately to their share of the U.S. population overall, even though audiences continue to show interest in programs whose casts, directors and writers represent the nation’s diversity.

“There has been a lot of progress for women and people of color in front of the camera,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of the division of social sciences in the UCLA College and a co-author of the report. “Unfortunately, there has not been the same level of progress behind the camera. Most notably in the executive suite, there has been very little change since we began compiling data five years ago. That’s very telling, particularly in light of our current racial reckoning.”

The report, which is compiled and published by researchers in the UCLA College social sciences division, tracks two seasons of scripted broadcast, cable and digital programming — 453 shows in 2017–18 and 463 shows in 2018–19.

In 2018–19, minority actors were almost proportionally represented (35.0%) among lead roles in scripted cable shows. (Minorities represent 40.2% of the population overall.) Women actors achieved parity in lead roles for of digital scripted shows (49.4%) and almost did so among lead roles in scripted cable shows (44.8%).

In all other job categories reviewed in the report, men hold almost twice as many jobs as women and whites hold at least twice as many as minorities. Still, there are signs of continued, albeit slow, improvement. Of all lead acting slots on broadcast shows in 2018–19, people of color held 24.0%, almost a fivefold increase from 2011–12 when it was 5.1%.

The analysis found that the greatest racial and gender disparities are in behind-the-camera jobs such as show creator, writer and director:

• Among digital programs, just 10.3% of show creators were minorities; in broadcast, 10.7%; and for cable, 14.7%.
• Women held 28.6% of show creator titles for digital programs, 28.1% for broadcast and 22.4% for cable.
• In 2018–19, only 24.0% of credited writers were minorities and only 21.8% of all episodes airing or streaming were directed by minorities, on average, across broadcast, cable, and digital platforms.

And white men still dominate the high-level TV executive jobs. As of 2020, chair/CEO positions were overwhelmingly held by white people (92.0%) and men (68.0%); and the statistics were similar for of senior executives (84.0% white, 60.0% male) and unit heads (87.0% white, 54.0% male).

“Just as with film, it’s those at the top of the television industry who have the most power to foster talent and invest in programming,” said Ana-Christina Ramon, a co-author of the report and director of research and civic engagement in the UCLA division of social sciences.

“The underrepresentation of people of color in the executive suite, and as creators, writers and directors is problematic, even if there are more people of color in acting roles. When people of color do not control their own narrative, their characters’ storylines may lack authenticity, may be written stereotypically or their characters may even be depicted as ‘raceless.’”

Now, Hunt said, a big question is whether the nation’s current racial reckoning will have a significant effect on the industry’s hiring practices in a way that will be apparent in next year’s report.

The report’s authors have tracked film and television diversity data since 2014, making the study the most comprehensive record of the industry’s progress on diversity hiring.

► Related: UCLA report outlines strategy toward diversity in Hollywood

Each Hollywood Diversity Report has further established that audiences value and respond to diversity.

Among Black households, all 10 of the top-rated broadcast TV shows in 2018–19 featured casts that were at least 21% minority. But the phenomenon held among white households, too: eight of the top 10 broadcast scripted shows among white viewers had casts that were at least 21% minority.

Social media engagement tends to be strong when casts are more diverse, too. Judging viewers’ activity on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter activity around scripted cable TV shows, figures spiked when the shows had majority-minority casts.

Among other findings in the report:

-Black actors reached proportional representation (12.9%) among lead actors in cable scripted shows in 2017–18 and lead actors in cable scripted programs (14.1%) in 2018–19. Black actors were also overrepresented in total cast diversity for broadcast (18.0%) and cable shows (18.2%) in 2018–19. The U.S. population is about 13% Black.

-Latinos and Asian Americans remain significantly underrepresented in nearly all industry positions.

-There is minimal presence in any job category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent, and virtually zero representation for Native Americans.

“Over time, work has been done to improve representation among certain groups — like Black actors in particular — but the near absence of Native Americans in these jobs is potent evidence that systems of racial erasure continue to exist,” Hunt said.

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

With less than two weeks until the election day, early voter turnout numbers continue to shatter records across the United States. But that doesn’t mean that Republicans or Democrats are ahead or that voters have easy decisions or safe options when it comes to casting their ballots, and that’s particularly true for people of color, according to a panel of UCLA voting rights experts who spoke Oct. 19.

“Right now, the right to vote is under attack,” Matt Barreto, professor of political science and the co-founder of the research and polling firm Latino Decisions, told the audience attending the webinar, “Protecting the Right to Vote in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Barreto was one of four panelists discussing the right to vote that also included Lorrie Frasure, associate professor of political science and acting director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, Natalie Masuoka, chair of the Asian American studies department, and Chad Dunn, co-founder of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. The panel was moderated by Darnell Hunt, dean of UCLA College’s Division of Social Sciences.

“There is a lot of nervousness about the effort to suppress votes,” said Barreto, who is also a professor of Chicana and Chicano and Latin American Studies and is working for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign. “The response we are seeing to that suppression is that over 27 million people have already voted. The fact that we are seeing such historic records during a pandemic is telling.”

But historic voter turnout doesn’t tell the whole story. This year marks the 55th anniversary of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices, but recent court rulings have severely weakened the act. The fundamental right to vote is not a federal law, and in the current political landscape, studies led by Barreto and Dunn note that suppression tactics are on the rise, effectively discouraging people of color to vote.

Frasure noted that Black voters, typically highly engaged in the political process, are more likely to feel their vote will be suppressed, particularly when it comes to mail-in ballots. They also are more likely to believe there will be trouble at the polls.

“In many states, Blacks know their ballot is more likely to be rejected if they mail it in, but there is a real fear about sickness in going out to the polls,” Frasure said. “This is heavy for voters. They are thinking: Am I six feet apart? Is my mask adjusted properly on my nose? They have all of these thoughts as they seek to be a part of the democratic process because they want to see change based on things they’ve seen in their own lives. It’s consequential.”

In terms of the Asian community, the experience may be different, but have no less of an impact.

“In many ways, for Asian Americans they have a different story. This community doesn’t have a longstanding history of seeing trustworthy and equity voting procedures,” said Masuoka, who pointed out that a higher percentage of Asians are immigrants than other minority groups and that more than 70% of whom are adults. “For many, this is their first election, and this is a problem example we’re setting for new voters about what it’s like to participate in American democracy. [Voter suppression tactics] are intimidating our new Americans and preventing them from casting ballots.”

Hunt and Dunn both noted that the notion we are in a post-racial period is not accurate. “We will never be in a place where we don’t need a law protecting the right to vote. Right now, we have more holes in the sail than we’ve ever had [in terms of protecting voting rights], but if we have enough of a wind, we can still be pushed forward. Vote denial only works in close elections. If we have enough people that vote early, we can turn this around.”

But just because early voter turnout is at an all-time high doesn’t mean either side is ahead, said panelists. Frasure pointed out that 90% of Blacks may lean Democratic, but that doesn’t mean they will turn out.

“Voters get complacent and say, ‘Look at the surge in early voting,’ and they decide to sit this one out,” Barreto said. “And none of us who believe in American democracy can afford to sit this one out. We are expecting a big number of votes, and while early numbers are encouraging, they are expected. No side is ahead right now. Don’t get complacent — push your community to get out and vote.”

On a final note, Dunn advocated for unity.

“Everybody’s vote counts,” he said. “The more we communicate that to our neighbors, the more that’s part of our public fabric, the better off we’ll all be as Americans.”

Voting tips:

-Cast your ballot early if you are going to vote by mail or if you plan to drop it off at an official ballot box. Track your ballot in California.

-If you are going vote in person, you will probably have to to stand in line. So wear a mask, bring food and a charged-up cell phone, and ask if friends or family can accompany you.

-Offer to help others fill out their ballot, particularly elderly or young people who have never voted before.

-You can serve a role in the political process: Talk to your neighbors, set up zoom meetings or join text-banking efforts.

This article, written by Melissa Abraham, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

As President-elect Joseph Biden prepares to take office amid an era of intense partisanship, UCLA political scientists encourage people to adopt a different perspective on the country’s politically polarized landscape.

Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, told the audience gathered for a “U Heard it Here” event on Nov. 17, that the emergence of more extreme differences among the public should not solely be attributed to the rise of social media or point-of-view-based cable news, which popularly get a lot of blame.

She and others who have been tracking voter attitudes for decades consistently find that voters tend toward confirmation bias.

“What people don’t understand about American politics is that voters always filter out information that is inconsistent with their prior views,” Vavreck said.

One thing that is definitely driving polarization is the behavior of elite politicians and the growth over the last two decades of more sophisticated and extremely well-funded campaigns.

These increasingly efficient campaign machines allow politicians to be more obstinate about compromise, even though large groups of voters in both parties might support an issue — like background checks on people who want to buy firearms or a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, Vavreck said. Both of those things have broad support in both parties, but to differing levels of priority, she noted.

“You have two ways you can go; you can hold out or you can compromise,” she said. “If you compromise you might get some of what you want now, but if you hold out you can see if the power flips and then get everything you want.”

Efrén Pérez, professor of political science and director of the UCLA Race, Ethnicity and Politics Lab who also spoke on the panel, agreed.

“It’s important to contrast what is available for public consumption versus what we know as social scientists,” he said. “A lot of the divisiveness is really among the elites in the parties. There is an enormous sea of individuals for whom politics is kind of a colorful sideshow, they only sporadically interact with it.”

The resistance to compromise is with the power brokers in each party and depolarizing is about showing and convincing those same people that there is broad-scale agreement on some issues, he said. Biden might be able to use his long experience to find common ground on how to respond to the pandemic and heal the economy, something that will affect voters regardless of party preference.

Panelists, which also included UCLA political science professors Erin Hartman and Daniel Thompson, also talked about identity politics at play in 2020, how the pandemic and social justice affected campaign messaging, voter turnout, vote-by-mail and how pollsters fared this time around.

– It’s clear we need better polling of people of color to understand intersecting identities and priorities, Hartman said.

– We have to consider the multiple identities in the voting populace, beyond race, such as “occupational identities,” Pérez said. This likely came into play for Mexican-Americans in Texas border towns who responded to Trump’s law and order messaging because they or family members hold jobs in border patrol or law enforcement.

– Pollsters were right about a lot of things, like Georgia and Arizona being competitive and the way vote-by-mail would shake out by party.

– There were some interesting split votes that bear further consideration, Thompson said. Florida went for Trump, but voters there approved a $15 minimum wage, which was considered too far left for Hillary Clinton to endorse four years ago.

– The pandemic and the havoc it wreaked on the economy changed the Trump message, Vavreck said. Gross domestic product in the first six months of 2020 was dismal, hitting a post-New Deal low. But the stimulus checks meant household income was high, which helped turn out voters for Trump.

– Democrats leaned heavily into the message of social inequality, rising to the challenge of summer protests, and building on decades of effort to position the party as a broad home for voters of color, Pérez said.

This article, written by Jessica Wolf and Melissa Abraham, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. 

Kamala Harris, only the second multiracial person and first woman to take office as vice president, is a groundbreaker, already seen as an example for young women and people of color all across the United States.

Harris’ achievement signals a distinctive cultural moment for everyone to interrogate and emphasize the historically different practices and structures of assigning race, paternity, heritage and identity, said Natalie Masuoka, chair of UCLA’s department of Asian American Studies. Harris, who is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant father and an Indian immigrant mother, represents an American demographic that has long desired fulsome representation in American politics.

“In terms of long-term impact, I hope this opens opportunities for women leaders,” Masuoka said. “The other long-term effect is seeing the power of voters of color. It is an important reflection of how the demographics of the Democratic coalition are recognized by the party. Voters of color are core supporters of the Democratic party and Harris’s position as vice president shows how critical it is that they be represented in party leadership. It will be interesting to what extent her diverse background can be seen in the different efforts she chooses to engage in as vice president.”

Masuoka is the author of “Multiracial Identity and Racial Politics in the United States,” in which she explores the rise of Americans who self-identify as mixed race or multiracial and the impact on politics. Her book was recognized as the best book in political behavior by the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

A change in the way the census tracked race in the year 2000 was a flash point, Masuoka said. There was a push by many activists and families to create a “mixed race” or “multiracial” option on the census form. Other civil rights groups disagreed with this option, arguing that collecting specific race data was critical to understand demographics and allocate resources.

The result was something of a compromise. Starting in 2000, individuals could select more than one category to indicate their racial identity on the census. More than 7 million of them did.

“Racial identification on the census is an issue about representation,” Masuoka said. “Because if you’re not counted then you effectively don’t exist. My book posits that with this administrative change in the federal government, it created a culture of us thinking about race as a product of identity, because it is about how you think of yourself, rather than how others classify you.”

Most of the structures around race in America were historically built to protect the power of whiteness, and still function that way, she said. The long-held “one-drop rule” professed that an American was considered Black if they had even one drop of Black heritage in their blood and paternity.

“There is a tendency to frame multiracialism as this 21st-century, new cultural trend of increased interracial intimacy,” Masuoka said. “But what I argue in my book is that we’ve had racial intermixing throughout the entirety of the U.S. and global history. What has been distinctive of American culture is this structure that whites are a really protected, pristine group. What 2000 changed is that it reintroduced this idea that there is racial mixing all the time. It’s a cultural change in the way that we understand race, but it’s not necessarily a marker of increased interracial intimacy.”

It’s a distinction that Masuoka tries hard to help students think about in particular.

“What they are living through is really different than what their parents lived through,” she said. “We lived in a very different culture.”

For many Americans those long held structures affect how they are even able to self-identify.

“While we want to celebrate the idea that race is an identity, there are still a lot of things out there that make race a constraining or imposed condition,” Masuoka said.

Oxford University Press

Former President Barack Obama acknowledged his interracial parents, but didn’t identify as biracial, but as a Black man, Masuoka pointed out. Obama often talked about the fact that while he had a white mother, he knew that anyone watching him try to hail a cab would simply see a Black man.

“I don’t want to challenge her inclusion Asian America, but Harris self-identifies as a Black woman, she has been clear about this in a similar way to Obama,” Masuoka said. “Like Obama, she is very proud of her mother and talks about the influences of her South Asian heritage, but Harris’s very progressive mother also recognized early on that her daughter was going to be treated as a Black woman by society at large.”

One of the problematic things about how race is socially constructed are the ways in which our norms and privileges associated with race, and particularly whiteness, are replicated over and over in every kind of historical cohort.

“It does seem to very effortlessly get re-mapped regardless of how our culture changes,” Masuoka said.

With Harris as vice president of the United States, her multiracial identity and that of other Americans will likely be part of the ongoing dialogue and distinct challenges of the new administration.

All of this represents a daunting unlearning for a culture that has prioritized whiteness for more than two centuries and one that relentlessly hews towards old patterns.

Masuoka points out that now is the moment when we need to create a more positive dialogue as the entire nation looks toward the future.

“Multiracial identification encourages us to think about how complex racial identity can be for many Americans,” she said. “This opens opportunities to have constructive conversations about how race impacts individual life chances.”

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.