As a formal academic discipline in the United States, political science was born in 1880, founded by white supremacists, amid a national political and cultural backlash against Reconstruction and Black civil rights, and early stirrings of U.S. overseas ambition in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Professor John Burgess of Columbia University, the man generally credited with founding the discipline, later wrote with great intellectual solemnity that “Black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”^{Footnote 1} Another first-generation political scientist, Frank Goodnow, helped draft the Chinese warlord’s constitution in 1914, defending its anti-democratic design by arguing that Asian (“oriental”) people lacked the capacity for self-rule and thus required centralized, authoritarian government.^{Footnote 2} As justification, he wrote that “the colored races sometimes lived ‘in the depths of barbarism.’”^{Footnote 3} In 1903, Goodnow had served as the first president of the American Political Science Association, and APSA’s premier award for service to the discipline is still bestowed each year in his honor. These were not only the most prominent political science proponents of a thoroughly racialized world view. There were many others.

I came of age over the several long hot summers of the civil rights movement, graduating high school in June 1968, a year that saw the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, and Robert F. Kennedy just two months later, nearly to the day. On April 5, in Cleveland, Senator Kennedy gave what remains one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve heard in my lifetime. In high school I worked with others to organize a biracial group of students to challenge segregation practices in our mayor’s restaurant and our community teen center. Our public schools in Jefferson County, West Virginia, were just integrated in 1966 following a federal investigation into the county’s non-compliance with desegregation orders.

Twenty years later, approaching the challenge to identify “missing” knowledge in the field of political inquiry in order to formulate a researchable dissertation thesis in 1987, I had already decided to merge the racial justice political activism of my youth with my commitment to complete a doctoral degree by putting international human rights at the center of my inquiry.

US political leaders in the 70s and 80s were quick to condemn human rights violations committed by our adversaries while hypocritically enabling those same violations by our “strategies allies.” But, as they say, when you point a finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at you. How did the US violate the internationally recognized human rights? I wondered.

Asking, “What’s missing” in international human rights, I saw what my public education had relentlessly tried to render invisible—the massive, even genocidal violations of human rights of Indigenous peoples. They were forcibly displaced and murdered, often in mass. The 1839 Indian Removal Act was nothing if not ethnic cleansing. Acts of genocide included summary executions, death marches, state-sanctioned massacres by settlers and soldiers, and later, forced sterilization. Regardless of how one counts Indigenous deaths from infectious diseases, often deliberately spread through US government-issued supplies, hundreds of thousands—even millions in some accounts—of Indigenous people were deliberately and intentionally murdered by state and state-sanctioned violence. JREP readers likely know all of this, but it remains mostly invisible in US public education at every level.

Reflecting particularly on the last three decades since the founding of the REP section, I see some progress, but as I tell my students, looking for progress in human rights is like staying up all night watching corn grow. And corn grows fast. The introduction of Indigenous peoples’ human rights has had a significant impact on political science and international relations scholarship, and here I will focus on two developments that I find particularly compelling and that I believe open doors for much more and richer scholarship on these issues: that racism is inherent in colonialism and therefore postcolonialism, and that racism and other dehumanizing hierarchies are normalized by the ideology of patriarchy. I will conclude with some thoughts about where we can go in the future of human rights scholarship on racism.

It is easy now to see the violations of Indigenous peoples’ human rights in a colonial and post-colonial context. My effort to see the contemporary global political landscape through the lens of Indigenous experiences led me to deconstruct the narrative of modernity and related narratives like progress and development. Modernity positions Western European—or white—people at the apex of civilization, with a mission, literally: by force and violence, to subjugate non-European people and erase non-European identities, replacing and superimposing on survivors a veneer of “Europeanness.” Fanon and Coulthard characterize this aspect of the colonial experience as self-hating non-Europeans wearing “white masks.”^{Footnote 13} Modernity is the narrative that rationalizes colonialism, and colonialism is violent and racist, most recently and devastatingly enacted and sanctioned privately and publicly by the Israeli government as dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The narrative of modernity normalizes domination and inequality—not only economic, social, and political inequality, but also inequality of humanness—it is inherently dehumanizing of non-European peoples, cultures, and identities. Reading my work on Indigenous peoples, the late Matthew Holden, Jr., was the first to see this connection and in 1993 invited me to submit an article to the National Political Science Review outlining the argument that the ideology of modernity that rationalized regarding non-Europeans as inferior and less human was globalized through colonialism and the racial stratification it institutionalized, although not all systems of institutionalized othering or racism fit this model.

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of anthropology at Columbia (and father of the newly elected mayor of NYC), has focused his work on postcolonialism by comparing cases of apartheid as a postcolonial phenomenon in South Africa, the US, and Israel. In a recent interview with Peter Beinart, referring to these practices as different versions of apartheid, Professor Mamdani defined apartheid this way:

Why do human collectivities keep choosing social norms and practices that normalize domination, inequality, stratification, and a fear of otherness? Was this the only normative path we could or can follow, then or now? These questions have driven my scholarship over three decades. I find the theoretical perspective on these questions outlined by Gilligan and Richards in The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (2010) very compelling. They argue that patriarchy is best understood as an ideology that produces a social system that normalizes fear, domination, and control. In that context, privileging and marginalization (including dehumanization) follow from the normalization of hierarchies, including racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and so on. Otherness as hostility to difference is also projected onto those whose sexual orientation and gender identity are inconsistent with (and threatening to) patriarchal constructions of gender, particularly disconnected masculinity.

Postcolonial and gender theories broaden and deepen our inquiry into racism as a settler colonial phenomenon that is transnational (if not perfectly or completely global) and normalized by patriarchal ideology. That’s where we are—or at least, where I am at this point. Where do we go from here? Addressing members as outgoing ISA president in 2024, Laura Shepherd proposed that international studies scholars should explore intersections indicated by marginalized theories, including, for example, decolonial, indigenous, feminist, and queer theories because they challenge disciplinary norms and, in doing so, point us to new futures that center relationality and care, to which I would add justice. Coulthard’s work does this, as does Mamdani’s.

Have REP scholars and scholarships impacted the political inquiry agenda? In 1995, the APSA annual conference had over 600 panels, with 3 on “Indigenous” issues (only one of the three used the term “Indigenous” in the way it is widely used now to refer to First Nations or Aboriginal and “people like that”). Another 3 were on racism, and 2 were on postcoloniality. Taken together, this means that just 1% of panels were on any of these three issues. Thirty years later, out of over 1500 panels, the APSA annual conference had 56 on racism, 37 on postcolonialism, and 20 on Indigenous issues. At 7% for the three totaled, this is a significant increase over 30 years. As for intersections, which I regard as the most intriguing and insightful area of research and scholarship, there were 3 panels on racism and postcolonialism and one on the intersection of racism, postcolonialism, and Indigenous issues. What do I conclude? That we clearly opened previously closed intellectual spaces for REP scholarship, and that we have plenty of work and mentoring to do from those spaces we opened.

I’m honored to have been invited to contribute to this 30^th Anniversary recognition of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section.

When I entered graduate school at the end of the 1960s and eventually the discipline of Political Science a decade later, the field was, shall we say, bleak in the number and range of publications on racial and ethnic politics. Hanes Walton Jr. and Joseph McCormick II explored the APSR in the 20^th century, and Jordie Davis, citing their work, noted that “in 1997, Walton and McCormick found just 27 of 3,683 APSR articles published from 1906 to 1990 dealt solely with Black politics.”^{Footnote 15}

Having started at the University of Chicago during the era of the Black Panthers, shortly after the intense period of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a lot to think about. Having grown up in Washington, DC, in the nation’s capital, during the era when the public schools and the civil service were segregated, the nation’s leadership in Congress was decidedly committed to maintaining that racially structured environment.

The arrival of a number of Black graduate students in Political Science at Chicago at the same time provided an intellectual environment in which young political scientists could begin to think about issues of race. Marguerite Ross Barnett, Lorenzo Morris, Toni-Michelle Chapman (now Travis), Charles P. Henry, Huey Perry, Linda F. Williams, Roger Oden, Robert Starks, and Dianne Pinderhughes, among others, created research and scholarship oriented toward racial politics, then known primarily as Black Politics in the 1960s and early 1970s. There were no Latino, Asian, or Asian American scholars in the program, although there were several graduate students from the African continent. Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o from Kenya, now Governor of Kisumu County (a state within the nation of Kenya), was among them.

In 1969, Chicago was also the site of the trial of the Chicago 10 and the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the same time as that cohort of graduate students’ work began. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in 1968, and immediately following that, Chicago’s Black communities had erupted in days of rebellion.

J. David Greenstone and Paul Peterson were working on what became Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty (Russell Sage Foundation, 1973). Marguerite Ross Barnett, then a graduate student, had just returned from completing her fieldwork in India; her book The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton University Press, 1976) was eventually published but was followed by a number of edited volumes on race, including, e.g., Public Policy for the Black Community: Strategies and Perspectives (Alfred Publishing Company, 1976), which included her important chapter “A Theoretical Perspective on American Racial Public Policy.” She had worked with Leonard Binder in completing her dissertation on India, and a number of others, including Morris, Travis, and Pinderhughes, also worked with him despite his focus on the Middle East and Iran.

The National Conference of Black Political Scientists, founded in 1969, grew over the next decades to provide an important intellectual space for scholars of Black politics. For some, NCOBPS was a singular or primary intellectual space. It provided a vitally important institution for exploring racial politics. For others, it was obvious that some structural representation was also required within the American Political Science Association. The Association had created Status Committees on Women and Blacks (1969) and Mexican Americans (1970) several decades before, but these focused on policy issues related to the respective groups in the discipline. More significant intellectual integration began in the early 1990s when Tony Affigne and Toni-Michelle Chapman Travis led the creation of the APSA’s Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and became its first co-presidents. The section is celebrating its 30^th anniversary in 2025.

The creation of an organized section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics provided a substantially expanded and increasingly complex intellectual space for examining the legal, constitutional, and political behavior of Native American, African American, Latina/o, and Asian American populations. As the impact of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) increased the population of color nationally, it also increased the representation of scholars of color within Political Science in graduate programs and faculty. REP became an important vehicle for collaboration across what had previously been singularly focused fields. Black politics scholars such as Lucius Barker, Charles Hamilton, Michael Preston, and Jewell Limar Prestage; Latino politics scholars such as Rodolfo de la Garza; and Asian American politics scholars such as Don Nakanishi and Pei-te Lien tended to focus on single populations and elected officials from their specific groups.

The next and younger generations of scholars enlarged the scholarly scope of vision with comparisons across groups and deepened the exploration of public opinion with surveys within each of the groups. The National Black Election Study (1984 and 1988) was led by sociologists James Jackson, Patricia Gurin, and Shirley Jackson, while Michael Dawson and Cathy Cohen collaborated with Jackson and Michigan scholars in their research and publications on African Americans. The 2006 Latino National Survey was led by PIs Luis Fraga, John Garcia, Rodney Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and Gary Segura. The National Asian American Surveys (2008, 2016) were led by Karthick Ramakrishnan, Jane Junn, Taeku Lee, and Janelle Wong on Asian Americans. Finally, the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (2008, 2016, 2020, 2024) facilitates large multiracial/ethnic, multilingual, post-presidential election online surveys by scholars across numerous racial and ethnic groups and multiracial scholarship in multiple languages. The initial (2008) PIs were Matt Barreto, Ange-Marie Hancock, Sylvia Manzano, Karthick Ramakrishnan, Ricardo Ramirez, Gabriel Sanchez, and Janelle Wong. 2024 CMPS PIs were Lorrie Frasure, Natalie Masuoka, and Angela Ocampo.

In addition to their previously mentioned research on APSR’s 20^th-century publications on Black politics, Hanes Walton, Joseph McCormick, and Cheryl Miller had recognized the very limited study of race in the major journals of the discipline in their exploration of “Race and Political Science: The Dual Traditions Politics and African American Politics” at the same time as the founding of REP in 1995.^{Footnote 16}

REP also had a substantial impact on leadership at all levels within the discipline. The Association’s first African American president, Ralph Bunche, was elected in 1953-54. The next Lucius Barker was elected in 1992-93 as REP was founded. Matthew Holden Jr. was president from 1998 to 1999, and Dianne Pinderhughes from 2007 to 2008, followed in 2019-2020 by Paula McClain. Rodney Hero was the Association’s first Latino president in 2014-2015, and John Ishiyama its first Asian American in 2021-2022, and Taeku Lee its second in 2024-2025. The Council’s leadership was also influenced by the size and strength of REP; with 871 members, it is one of the larger sections. The membership criteria for council nominations, which had included research field, gender, race, geographic region, size, and type of institution before REP’s founding, began to incorporate scholarship of race, ethnicity, and politics more regularly. The Association’s intellectual scholarship, represented in its editorial leadership of the APSR, specifically on its editorial board, also has shifted in recent decades. The strength of the field was also acknowledged with the very creation of this publication, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, in 2016.

Despite the current efforts by the national presidential administration to erase the use of the concept, policies, and even the language associated with race and ethnicity, the American Political Science Association has incorporated them into its organizational structure. This important challenge to the association is a long-term opportunity for further creativity and growth within the discipline.

The creation of the APSA Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in 1995 was immensely important to me and to my career. When I first joined APSA as a graduate student in 1970, I found no discernable network of political science scholars with a primary interest in understanding the dynamics of racialization in political life. About the same time that I joined the APSA, many Black political scientists left the organization in frustration and formed the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOPS). There were then only a handful of Latino political scientists, and those I knew were also frustrated with the larger discipline and soon focused their energies on building up Ethnic Studies programs. A similar thing happened with UCLA’s Don Nakanishi, the only Asian American political scientist whom I knew in those days. And I was unaware of any American Indian political scientists at the time.

It is important to recognize that these disciplinary developments were occurring at a time when U.S. politics at large was deeply divided over issues of racial inequality and segregation. My own political consciousness developed beginning in the 1950s, when campaigns against racial segregation were on my family’s television screen almost every evening, even in a small farm town in California’s San Joaquin Valley. That consciousness was energized in my student days at UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s, when I participated in the Free Speech Movement, a major protest against the university administration’s efforts to ban student recruiting tables for anti-racism campaigns in the larger community.

For many years, however, my professional aspiration to be part of a scholarly community aimed at understanding racialization in American public life was difficult to realize at both APSA conferences and in APSA journals. Indeed, it would be twenty-five long years after my first APSA conference until the formation of the Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in 1995. For much of that time, attending APSA conferences felt to me like being in an intellectual wasteland when it came to my primary interest in racial and ethnic politics. Panels on American politics featured papers on a variety of specialized and arcane topics, but rarely was the role of racialization in politics addressed. There were very few papers on the subject scattered in multiple subfields and some degree of concentration in the urban politics section. This was before email and the internet were available, and, as a shy person, it was difficult to develop relationships with others who shared my interests. In my teaching department, moreover, there was no one else who had much interest in the subject.

Having been consigned by the vagaries of the job market to teaching public administration for some fifteen years, I finally began a book on language policy conflicts and identity politics in the US in the 1980s. That work led me to present research papers at APSA (and WPSA) meetings, and gradually I developed a network of relationships with (mostly) younger colleagues interested in Chicano (then Latino, then Latina/o, then Latinx) politics. While Latinx politics scholarship began to expand and flourish during the 1980s and early 1990s, there was still little connection between those scholars and others working on Black politics, and the same was true regarding the few studying Asian/Pacific American politics and American Indian politics. For the most part, we seemed to be working in separate scholarly silos, with some overlap in the subfield of urban politics.

It was in the early 1990s that I met Anthony Affigne, then a graduate student at Brown University, and I soon observed that he was a dynamic leader who had begun a campaign with colleagues from multiple ethno-racial caucuses and committees to establish a section in APSA on racial and ethnic politics. I enthusiastically joined when these efforts came to fruition. In the Section’s early years, I served on several of its committees, and when my book on language policy conflict was published in 2000 and it won a REP Section Best Book Award^{Footnote 17}, I was nominated and elected to be co-president of the Section from 2000 to 2002. The change this organization brought to my scholarly and teaching life was enormous.

First, having an organized section meant that there would be a growing number of relatively concentrated and coherent panels and papers on the issues that I find most critical to political life, particularly in the United States. Attending these panels, as well as section meetings, enabled me to expand my understanding of ethno-racial politics in multiple ways, helping me to become a better teacher and scholar. Indeed, deep reflection on my many years of participation in these panels and related activities provided the foundation from which to write my third book^{Footnote 18} after I had retired from teaching.

Second, being an active member of the section meant that I had colleagues with whom to share ideas and to develop collaborative research projects. Several research and publication opportunities came my way from the relationships I had established with section members. In 2002, with help from Tony Affigne, I organized a theme panel for an APSA annual meeting paper on the impact of recent immigrants on US racial politics. After a well-attended and exciting panel at the annual meeting, my co-authors (Yvette Alex-Assensoh, Andrew Aoki, and Rodney Hero) and I decided to extend our collaboration to research and write a book that was eventually published in 2010.^{Footnote 19} It is unlikely that this very fruitful collaboration would have happened without the foundational network of the REP Section.

Third, being a member of the Section enabled me to develop deep personal friendships with some wonderful human beings who came from a wide diversity of backgrounds (geographically, ethnically, racially, linguistically, and generationally). I cannot imagine any other section in APSA where that would have been possible. It has been my great privilege to have worked with such a magnificent group of people for the past thirty years.

I am a proud founding member of REP when it was formally launched in 1995 as the 33^rd organized section of the APSA. I was a graduate student struggling to find quantitative data to complete a dissertation on a bold and inconspicuous topic on Asian American politics in 1994. I had a hard time convincing everyone, including myself, that I could find a tenure-track job based on this narrow and unheard-of topical interest in the discipline. I was lucky to have a mentor (Dr. M. Margaret Conway) who believed in me, but we were in Florida, far from the population center of my study. I was flattered to receive an invitation email from a professor at Providence College who urged me to attend an important plenary panel on “Race and Politics in the Americas: The Continuing Search for Theoretical Foundations” at the 1994 APSA meeting in NYC. Tony Affigne organized and chaired this historic panel attended by Manuel Avalos, Gerald R. Alfred, Manning Marable, Dianne Pinderhughes, Carlos Munoz Jr., Don T. Nakanishi, Ye Le Espiritu, John Mohawk, and Franke Wilmer.

When I rushed to the grand ballroom after finishing my own presentation, there was standing room only. It was a visually awesome and spiritually uplifting experience to be in the same room with so many concerned others and in solidarity with pioneering racial scholars from different origins and in multiple disciplines. Collectively, we advocated for the importance of studying the politics of race and ethnicity and the need to have a new organized section at APSA to help secure our presence in the annual meeting program and solidify the legitimacy of studying racial/ethnic politics as a subfield in the discipline. It was the first time I met Prof. Don T. Nakanishi, even though he had been very generous in offering advice and support for my dissertation, including informing me about a series of surveys conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll in Southern California. This data series became the backbone of my dissertation after I failed to secure support from the National Science Foundation for conducting the nation’s first Asian American political survey in my first attempt. The racially diverse and gender-inclusive panel lineup was in sharp contrast to the mostly white-only panels at the APSA meetings 30 years ago.

The intentional diverse and inclusive principle in panel organizing extended to the leadership structure in the new section, and it has been followed religiously over the last 30 years. Compared to colleagues on Black and/or Latino (or even Indigenous) politics, political scientists specializing in Asian American politics were few and far between. However, instead of feeling marginalized as one of very few falling into this tiny category, I felt included, mentored, and respected. I have attended nearly every single APSA meeting in the last 30 years, in part because I wanted to meet and chat with REP colleagues and receive critical insights and steadfast support that I could not find elsewhere in those early days. Because of REP’s pioneering efforts in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, this non-native English-speaking adult immigrant woman from Asia was able to serve in multiple leadership positions as a co-chair of the REP program in the APSA annual meetings (in 2001-02 and 2016-17), REP co-president (2007-09), and on the best book (2001-02) and best dissertation (2006-07) committees. Because of the avid lobbying efforts by REP section leaders and members to diversify the APSA council, committee makeup, and other leadership ranks of the Association, I also received opportunities to serve on the APSA council and multiple award committees and to review committees on research proposals, papers, and posters, and, most honorably, to co-chair (with Sherri Wallace and under the presidency of John Ishiyama) the 2022 APSA annual meeting program.

Auspiciously, it was through the REP network (in fact, through the connection made by Tony Affigne) that I got to meet with and be invited to collaborate with Andrew Aoki in co-founding the Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC) as a related group of REP in 1999. We copied the playbook used by our friends in the Latino Caucus to construct a budding scholarly community that has since grown exponentially. Both Andy and I became the founding members of the APSA Status Committee on Asian Pacific Americans in the Profession. We later used the same formula to lobby WPSA leaders to support the founding of the WPSA Status Committee on APAs in 2013. Among the key contributions of the status committee are to select the best paper on APA politics from the previous meeting and to organize a mini conference on APA politics. In 2016, in the wake of the untimely death of Professor Nakanishi, Andy and I organized a fundraising campaign to help WPSA establish its Nakanishi Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service in Asian Pacific American Politics. We also co-edited a special journal volume on APA politics in 2018, which has since been published as a standalone book that celebrates the influence of Don’s pathbreaking scholarship. All these accomplishments in academic collaboration and professional community building to help promote the visibility and influence of APA politics would not have been possible if an immigrant woman from Taiwan teaching in Utah had not gotten to be introduced to a visionary third-generation Japanese American guy teaching in Minnesota through REP events at APSA meetings nearly 30 years ago.

In addition to providing a personally most important professional network, the REP section has played a critical and indispensable role in advancing my career from an international student to a full professor through its creatively diverse and prestigious national awards. To wit, I received the 2002 Best Book Award in the category of Political Participation, Voting, Elections, and Political Behavior in Race/Ethnic Politics for my 2001 book The Making of Asian America Through Political Participation (Temple UP). In 2017, a co-authored book with three esteemed and pioneering political science women and founding REP members won the Distinguished Career Book Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. The book Contested Transformations: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in Twenty-First Century America (Cambridge UP, 2016) took 20 years in the making, and we were extremely thrilled and exonerated by this special honor. In 2024, I received a Distinguished Service Award, jointly presented by the APAC, the Status Committee of APAs in the Profession, & the REP Section. It was a most memorable highlight of my career to receive the award plaque in a standing-room-only reception in Philadelphia.

All in all, I am immensely grateful for the central and ubiquitous role REP has played since its founding in creating physical and virtual gathering spaces and social networks for the professional development of racial minorities in a white-dominant discipline. Together, we have made REP the most vibrant, diverse, and fearless community in Political Science.

When I started my political science career, REP was not a thing. If I had told my advisors that I was interested in the “rep” section, they would likely have directed me to the theater department and wished me luck. Our disciplinary lines have changed dramatically, and the organized section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics has been a major part of that transformation.

My perspective may be unique among contributors to this special issue. While not a member of the REP founding group, I was among the first to benefit from their goal of nurturing the study of race and ethnicity in politics.

I discovered the REP section’s initial offerings while leafing through the printed program (there were no other options back then) at the annual meeting. Most APSA panels were of no more than modest interest to me, but then I spotted a REP listing, and it seemed much more central to the work I was trying to do. Listening to the panelists confirmed my initial impression, as it was much more relevant to my work than what I had seen at APSA in prior years. I remember extensive references to Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States and enjoyed participating in the Q&A at the end.

One of the panelists was the indefatigable Tony Affigne, who raced to my seat when the session ended and asked if I wanted to be part of this new section. I was delighted to get the invitation, and REP soon became my APSA home. To borrow from Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

I believe the section has made a big difference for many people. We can never know what would have transpired had REP not existed, but given our scholarly parameters, it seems certain that the REP section has been very consequential, and there is some concrete evidence of ways that it has helped change the American Political Science Association, if not the entire discipline.

In its early years, the REP section played a key role in expanding the space for the study of race and politics. As anyone who has been on the annual meeting planning committee knows, there is substantial competition for panel slots. Every subfield wants to create more space for its scholars. The creation of the REP section guaranteed that the APSA annual meeting would include room for scholars of race and ethnicity, something of particular benefit to junior scholars who had yet to make a name for themselves. The creation of journals such as JREP created more opportunities for such scholarship to be disseminated.

The section has also served as a central node for critical professional networks. This could be seen from its earliest years. The reception has long been a place to publicize job openings in REP and allow like-minded scholars to build ties, and the panels have also been another invaluable place where attendees could discover common interests and nurture the seeds of collaboration.

I believe that the section has helped tout our work as well. Whenever I served on the REP Best Book committee, I enjoyed seeing publishers giving prominent attention to the books we had chosen, and recipients of our section awards could use them as evidence of disciplinary recognition when going through the tenure and promotion process.

The section has also helped birth other efforts to expand the study of race and ethnicity. In my position as REP co-program chair for the 1999 APSA annual meeting, I had the opportunity to see more closely the work being done by an impressive generation of younger scholars of Asian American politics—Claire Jean Kim, James Lai, Taeku Lee, Pei-te Lien, Karthick Ramakrishnan, Janelle Wong, and many more. Because they came together at the section’s panels and other events, I was able to talk to many of them to see if there was interest in creating our own organization, and at that 1999 meeting, the idea for the Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC) was born.

When I began the formal process to gain recognition for APAC as an APSA-related group, I benefited enormously from the experienced counsel of my REP program co-chair, Valerie Martinez-Ebers. Other founding REP members, such as Tony Affigne and Ron Schmidt, Sr., were quick to sign on as supporters. At times, we co-sponsored annual meeting receptions with other related groups, such as the Latino Caucus, and in recent years, we have been part of the larger joint reception, building more community among like-minded scholars.

Collectively, REP, APAC, the Latino Caucus, and kindred groups have helped to nurture new generations of scholars of race and ethnicity (I first met one of the co-editors of this special issue when she was an undergrad, attending the conference as one of Ron Schmidt, Sr.’s students). The mentoring that has been provided has always been helpful in teaching the hidden curriculum of our discipline but may be more important than ever as we confront the backlash to the progress we have made.

That progress matters a great deal. While professional associations can only do so much in the face of the present-day onslaught, they are potential resources of great value. APSA has offered important support to our section over the years, and the REP section’s activism has helped expand our ability to be part of APSA governance. REP members do not speak with one voice, but having our members at the table where decisions are made gives us much more chance to have our views reflected in disciplinary decisions. When I began grad school, the APSA governance body reflected a very modest level of diversity, but in recent decades, there has been a substantial shift, fueled in great part by the REP members who have sat on the council, including many who have served as APSA officers, including president.

The work of the section seems more important than ever. While we can hope that the assault on our scholarship will weaken in the next few years, the current attacks have helped to spotlight powerful forces opposing our research, and those forces will not disappear simply because of different election results. In addition, higher education faces enormous financial pressures that can make it easier to try to silence our work in the name of cost savings. The REP section and JREP journal serve as important scholarly institutions that can greatly enhance our ability to resist these pressures and help organize new generations in the continuing struggle.

It did not occur to me just how influential the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) organized section has been to my life and career until I was given this wonderful opportunity to reflect through an invited essay. More than thirty years ago, REP became an organized section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) at the same time I was completing my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In fact, by the fall of 1995, I was in Urbana-Champaign, IL, as a doctoral candidate and instructor in the Political Science Department. It became a tenure-track assistant professor line akin to how “bridge” post-doctoral fellowship programs operate today. Because the 1995, or 91^st, Annual Meeting of APSA was just up the road in Chicago, IL, I attended that August 31-September 3^rd meeting. Busy completing my dissertation, I did not present a paper, but I was thrilled to listen to the research presentations of other REP and Black politics scholars.

Because I have always been a prolific notetaker and packrat, I kept the notes I scribbled in the margins of my almost 300-page APSA program book. These notes included insights I gleaned from a panel entitled “Multi-Racial and Bi-Racial Conflict and Coalition Building in American Cities.” It was a panel sponsored by the Urban Politics Section (15) chaired by Michael Rich and Robert A. Brown of Emory University and co-sponsored by the Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Section (2) chaired by Toni-Michelle Travis of George Mason University. Life is funny, and political science circles (like many social circles) are small. Robert Brown is my long-time friend and collaborator (i.e., our 2003 JOP article and our 2023 After Obama edited volume), and Toni-Travis is one of my long-time co-authors on the REP textbook Uneven Roads: Introduction to U.S. Racial and Ethnic Politics.

As an urbanist and a scholar of REP and Black politics, multiple lightbulbs flickered on in my head from the cross-talk of that 1995 REP panel. There was a Black-Korean conflict paper by Patrick Joyce (Harvard University); a cities minority incorporation paper by Steven Light (Northwestern University); a Black, Latino, and Asian political outcomes paper by Paula McClain and Steven Tauber (UVA); a White Memphis politics and deracialization paper by Marcus Pohlman and Michael Kirby (Rhodes College); and a Los Angeles Latino-led multiracial coalitions paper by Katherine Underwood (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh). The panel was chaired by Charles Jones (Georgia State University), and Rufus Brown (San Francisco State University) was the discussant.

REP made uneven roads and my trajectory as a REP scholar possible. You will not find every one of the aforementioned APSA papers in the bibliography of the Uneven Roads textbook. Yet, each of the strains of research that these papers represent is to be found in that textbook, and thus such research has implicitly influenced the thinking of me and my co-authors—Louis DeSipio, Dianne Pinderhughes, Pei-te Lien (who joined us earlier in this textbook project), Toni-Michelle Travis, and now Lorrie Frasure (our most recent co-author). Partly as informed by a rich diversity of REP scholarship as presented at APSA, my co-authors and I labored to write a textbook as a fitting extension upon Paula McClain and Joseph Stewart’s pathbreaking Can We Get Along? Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics.

Without the emergence and growth of the REP section, it would have been so much more difficult for me as a young scholar to have my intersecting fields of inquiry—urban politics, REP, and Black politics—sit at respected intersections within the discipline of political science. I would have to hope that the urban politics section continued that subfield’s tradition of plumbing the depths of racial and ethnic politics in order to have some of my intersectional curiosity sparked and encouraged. Without the REP section, there would be so many fewer networks and collaborations and much less intellectual critical mass to argue for the establishment of courses at various colleges and universities to address racial and ethnic politics as an indispensable realm of knowledge to fully understand the American political condition. And thus, without such courses, the pathways for textbooks like Uneven Roads would have been far bumpier!

In fact, because Pinderhughes, DeSipio, and I attended and became quite involved in the REP section as faculty colleagues at UC-Urbana-Champaign, we naturally began to collaborate on a course, POLS 201, Introduction to U.S. Racial and Ethnic Politics became the precursor to us writing the Uneven Roads text. I distinctly recall being introduced to Pei-te Lien (UC Santa Barbara) at an APSA REP gathering. Her pathbreaking work on Asian American politics deeply informed my knowledge as I helped to draft the chapter on Asian American politics for the text. In addition, my early REP section interactions with numerous scholars—such as John Garcia (University of Michigan), Tony Affigne (Providence College), and Valerie Martinez-Ebers (University of North Texas), among others—had me ponder the similarities and dissimilarities of the racialization various communities of color have endured; eventually this pondering became the conceptual framework that frames Uneven Roads.

My career in political science, as well as the anniversary of my doctoral degree, parallels the birth and maturity of the REP section. And now many other REP scholars, as collaborators and contributors to the Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Study series led by CO-PIs Lorrie Frasure, Natalie Masuoka, and Angela Ocampo, join me and my co-authors in creating more knowledge about the political dynamics of race, ethnicity, and racialization in the United States. REP has been invaluable to me and my story. And my story is just one of the “many roads” that have emanated out from REP to create many more fruitful scholarly pathways and intersections.

I distinctly remember my first encounter with Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) as a section and subfield in Political Science and it wasn’t at a panel or business meeting but through word of mouth. I was deep into the third year of my doctoral program, having completed my coursework and enveloped by a mix of autonomy and anxiety that comes with comprehensive exams and dissertation prospectus writing. I was seriously doubting the wisdom of my life’s choices and contemplating the sustainability of a long-term career in Political Science when my friend Janni Aragon shared her experiences at a recent Political Science conference. At this point in my graduate career, I had already developed a healthy skepticism that anything interesting could happen at a Political Science conference and was half-listening as she excitedly recounted what she witnessed at an REP panel the week before. She was floored to find another Latina doing exciting work at the intersections of race, gender, and critical theory and marveled that it was someone smart and cool that she was sure I’d love. She was absolutely right.

The Latina she met at that conference was Cristina Beltrán, and the two bonded because they were virtual anomalies in the discipline (two Chicanas from California at a national Political Science conference) and because Cristina—as she always does—was speaking truth in that room. She was in the early stages of her own theories on Latiné identity, and my friend recognized in her the same intellectual hunger and radical desire for racial and ethnic justice we were experiencing. Needless to say, we connected with Cristina quickly, as well as an unprecedented cohort of Latinas in Political Science that included Janni Aragon, Cristina Beltrán, Lisa García Bedolla, Linda Lopez, Edwina Barvosa, Melissa Michelson, and Jesica Lavariega Monforti.^{Footnote 20} Collectively and individually, we found ourselves regularly asking how we as young women of color could exist within the field of Political Science that purported to be engaged in timely and relevant studies of people and politics but which virtually erased anyone who wasn’t white, male, wealthy, and privileged? We frequently wondered whether this discipline and the work generated in it could be harnessed to produce a more just and democratic future. Would it be possible to see ourselves and our work become part of that discipline, or would we simply be erased in the process?

Meeting Cristina and connecting to REP at that early stage in my career wasn’t just good fortune; it was a lifeline. As a first-generation graduate student attending school far away from home and trying to excel in an environment where no one looked or sounded like me, the prospect that there were others out there who understood what I was thinking, who didn’t require an explanation for my every thought, and who regarded my presence as valuable felt like home.

My first encounter with an REP meeting came not long after when I had dutifully attended two “highly recommended” Political Science conference as a graduate student and left both feeling utterly isolated and defeated. It was on the heels of these experiences that I walked into my first REP business meeting at the next APSA conference I attended in San Francisco in 1996. That space immediately felt more alive and welcoming than any prior experience I had in my entire graduate career. It wasn’t an especially important meeting, but I was immediately struck listening to Tony Affigne and Gary Segura talk about the group’s existence with the association and the effort to sustain and grow the section. I couldn’t help feeling awed watching Christine Sierra, Ron Schmidt, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers easily command the room with energy and generosity. Finally, I was overwhelmed at how willingly the people in that room welcomed my participation and my presence.

This meeting would mark the beginning of a 30-year relationship with REP that spanned over 25 APSA conferences and hundreds of committees, receptions, panels, and workshops. Like many members, I served on countless committees and served as co-president from 2011 to 2013. During my appointment, in addition to managing the business of the section, we finalized details on the creation of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics with Cambridge, signed the completed contract, and selected the first editorial team to lead the new journal.

What I remember about those early meetings was the clear, purposeful energy the section embodied and the warm and collegial relationships of everyone who came together, in contrast to the cold and often dismissive reception I had felt in much of the discipline. REP literally created space for me and other racially and ethnically marginalized students and wrote us into an academic field replete with a lengthy history of racism, sexism, and unearned privilege. It also represented a growing political movement intended to counter both the misinformation regarding racial and ethnic communities and the explicit and implicit forms of discrimination that pervaded Political Science. By the time I joined REP, it had already become a prominent voice at the national level, advancing policy changes in the association. To be sure, there was already a prominent body of research developed in studies of racial and ethnic inequality, but the field of Racial and Ethnic Politics as a community of colleagues who regularly read and cited each other’s work, who attended each other’s panels, who collaborated on key research questions, who supported and mentored each other’s students, who advocated for each other’s interests, and who cultivated a deliberate community was constituted with the creation of the section on Racial and Ethnic Politics and continues to serve as the epicenter of that intellectual movement.

I walked into my first REP business meeting in 2000 because I was invited by a friend, Andy Aoki. Beyond being impressed that Ralph Nader, currently running for president on the Green Party, was there—thanks to Tony Affigne bringing him—I remember how welcoming it was and how interesting the conversations were. It was a space that I had not run into anywhere else at APSA.

I was just learning to navigate my way through an APSA annual meeting, drawn there because of concerns about tenure and the need to network and publish, and overwhelmed by the size and wondering if I belonged there. I had just presented a paper on co-management of resources by tribal and state governments, and my discussant did not understand my topic. I was shoehorned into a panel loosely titled federalism along with a paper on the devolution of Scotland and another on regional arrangements in the Czech Republic, and apart from the concept of shared governance, we all spoke past each other. Looking throughout the entire program, I could only find a few Indigenous-related papers, and like mine, they had generally all been added to panels with other papers that seemed dissimilar in theme. There was a related group titled NASA-Native American Studies Association (not the astronauts)—but they sponsored one panel only. While I recognized the importance of presenting at the annual meeting of APSA, I had serious doubts about finding any useful feedback on any work I presented, assuming my proposal would even be accepted. The Organized Section, “Race, Ethnicity, and Politics,” gave me and other scholars doing research on indigenous topics a platform, an opening into the academy.

REP had been formed five years earlier in 1995 by other scholars who were also dissatisfied with the structure and topics offered at the annual meeting and so created a new organized section that was committed to creating a space in which African American, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian American scholars could present research under their own premises and theoretical foundations. Structurally, the section was designed to represent the internal coherency and central concerns of each group but also to feature shared themes and to encourage coalitions and collaborations within the groups and with related groups focused on the same issues.

Using the foundation of REP, those of us attending the annual meeting began to connect with each other to plan panels that were coherent, focused on important themes, and educated the wider academy of the relevance of the work. With an increase in membership of indigenous scholars, we were able to revitalize our related group and rename it the Indigenous Studies Network, which better reflected the global insurgence of Indigenous Peoples coexisting in settler-colonial nations than NASA had. REP was always the first organized section to be willing to co-sponsor panels with ISN, which increased the number of panels on Indigenous issues and expanded the topics that could be offered. More Indigenous scholars began to attend the annual meetings once there was an opportunity to present. “If you build it, they will come” felt apt.

In 2005, I, along with Gary Segura, was one of the two program organizers for the annual meeting. I had experience organizing the program for ISN, the related group, and had managed to expand a one-panel allocation into three through co-sponsorships and a theme panel, so I had some understanding of the process. But it did not prepare me for the deluge of paper proposals that we received, far exceeding the slots for papers in the panels allotted to us. Having to reject really promising proposals simply because we did not have room was the most difficult part of that job. But I also was not prepared for the many offers we received from so many other sections hoping to co-sponsor with us. Our scholarship, which had been considered marginalized ten years earlier, was now a hot topic emerging in almost every other organized section of APSA.

In 2005, REP faced a challenge concerning Native scholars, one of the core constituencies of the section, and how it fits within the coalition. In a retrospective roundtable to discuss lessons from the first ten years, a Native scholar, David Wilkins, pointed out that the title of the section “Race, Ethnicity, and Politics” did not completely capture the unique political status of Indigenous People and subsumed them under race, which is a distortion. To better reflect the political struggles of this constituency group, David proposed a new section name: “Race, Ethnicity, Sovereignty, and Politics.” It generated a lot of discussion for those present and for those at the annual meeting.

At the business meeting, a member officially proposed adopting the new section name, and it passed by a small majority. But, because a section name requires an amendment to our bylaws and notice for the vote, the vote was postponed until the next business meeting in 2006. The senior co-chair of REP, Joe McCormick Jr., spent a significant amount of time conferring with APSA and parliamentarians to find a way to advance it in a procedural way and to allow more time for discussion. Some members did not understand the need for a name change, and others were open to the name change but did not think “sovereignty” was the best term to use to reflect specifically Indigenous people’s concerns. Joe established a “kitchen cabinet” to discuss ideas. After one intense discussion, Andy Aoki suggested that we could always rename the section “Race, Ethnicity, Sovereignty, Politics, Equity, Culture, and Traditions” (RESPECT) and use Aretha Franklin’s anthem as a theme song.

Ultimately, the name was not changed. Members of ISN, the related group, declined to offer an opinion concerning what the section should do. Members of the section couldn’t reach a consensus on whether to change the name, and if we did, what it should be in the next business meeting in 2006 and again in 2017.

Since those early years, the presence of Indigenous scholars and those conducting quality Indigenous research has expanded and evolved in gratifying detail across many subfields. Current scholars are building on the foundation established by Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff Corntassel, David Wilkins, Michael Lerma, Dale Turner, Sheryl Lightfoot, Kouslaa Kessler-Mata, Franke Wilmer, Kevin Bryneel, and many others, bringing new ideas and new approaches into the section.

But, in thinking about recommendations for the future, I would suggest revisiting this possibility of a name change to further strengthen the coalitional strength of the organized section, especially to better withstand the coordinated attacks against DEI scholarship and the diminution of tribal sovereignty. The Canadian Political Science Association renamed their REP organized section to “Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples, and Politics” in 2007, and we could do the same. (If we couldn’t agree on REIPP, we could always consider RESPECT.) It’s also possible section members could decide to keep the tradition and not change the name, but it’s always good to revisit issues.

In 1995, REP came together to provide a platform for scholars to present research on groups and peoples who were marginalized politically and whose perspectives were not represented in other sections. It’s grown into an impressive community united by coalitional strength and the affirmation of difference.

My systematic ventures into race and ethnicity (and all of their permutations) began some sixty years ago. By virtue of blending my own experiences with training (enhancing my knowledge, thoughts, investigation approaches, and insights), I grew, as did the field. Some of my initial observations would include extant literature for these communities that was quite limited, especially in the policy/political realms; graduate committee members with virtually little or no knowledge, particularly of racial/ethnic communities; and my need for self-training and exploring literature beyond political science with interactions with other interested individuals not associated with my department/discipline. Early in my career, when asked to review journal submissions, it was quite evident that scholars from these communities were not included in the existing literature, nor were their perspectives/theories present in many other social science fields (and humanities) that were not incorporated in political science research. In addition, publication in “mainstream journals” in these fields was barely present. A potential revise and resubmit action by a mainstream journal had a caveat that the editor indicated skepticism about the existence of an interested “audience” that would play into the decision-making.

Clearly this leads to the basis for the creation of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics (JREP) and its celebration of 35 years of producing research regarding race, ethnicity, and political realms. A quick search of social science journals that focus on race and ethnicity since 1990 shows slightly over twenty-three other journals^{Footnote 23} that started publishing since 1990. One “tenet” about ethnicity and race is the interdisciplinary nature of this field. With politics and policy, the underlying strand for JREP, it is quite clear the sets of interrelationships among racial and ethnic communities cut across academic disciplines and theoretical foundations. Among its many objectives, JREP served to open up outlets for research on race and ethnicity, broaden the participation of scholarship and scholars of diverse experiences, widen recognition of this emerging field, and provide opportunities for the academy to incorporate this field more fully within Political Science. JREP has accomplished these objectives and, more importantly, expanded the scope, boundaries, theoretical development, and analytical approaches to understand the myriads of relationships and consequences of race and ethnicity on individuals, groups, institutions, policies, and socio-political society.

The last section of this retrospective covers two themes: a brief discussion of critical dimensions of race- and ethnicity-related research and some brief discussions of contemporary issues and areas for expansion, delineation, and clarification.

Critical dimensions for the study of race and ethnicity include the following: 1) race is a social construct based on social and political context rather than any essential biological difference between groups; 2) individuals have considerable agency in placing themselves within racial/ethnic categories (such as social identities, labels); 3) racial/ethnic self-identification is cognitive dimension of one’s self-concept and a developmental process; 4) individuals do not “choose” racial identity or group membership in isolation being heavily influenced by a host of externalities (i.e. social interactions, historical context and patterns, legal status constraints, and other factors; 5) race/ethnicity is dynamic, so that meaning, understanding and/or expression of one’s race can change over time; 6) race/ethnicity is an element of multiple social identities in which the “constellation” of self includes race among other salient social identities; 7)physical features (phenotypical characteristics) are part of the basis for racial/ethnic classification, affected by individual socialization, and particularly, in terms of how others see her or him; and finally; 8) there is a “separate but related” notion of race and ethnicity which can serve as overlapping/inter-sectional concepts and/or perhaps inter-changeable concepts (Garcia 2007).

Two other dimensions are critical to the study of race and ethnicity involving the integration of the concepts of complexity and uncertainty (i.e., modelling, analysis, and interpretation) despite its challenges. This involves interactions, feedback, thresholds, interdependence, time delays, accumulation, non-linearities, and emergent behaviors. This discussion of complexities and uncertainty deals with matters of fuller conceptualization and methodological and analytical techniques. Race and ethnicity are complex systems that include multiple interactions within structures, contexts, situations, and interdependent behaviors that are influenced by others. For uncertainties, analysis and interpretation of research are challenged by contending with the lack of knowledge, natural vulnerabilities, limited data, ambiguity, and ignorance. At the same time, racial and ethnic politics are dynamic such that adaptation, learning, and interactions operate in complicated organizations and even include randomness factors, which affect our acknowledgement and understanding of race and ethnicity via conceptualization, model development, and analytical treatments.

I will illustrate these last two dimensions)—complexity and uncertainty)—with examples of three research areas for other researchers to consider.

1) Race and ethnicity usually entail the categorization of individuals and groups (i.e., ancestry, national origin, phenotypes, attributes, etc.) as well as overlapping connections (i.e., gender, sexual orientations, class, legal status, etc.) and aggregations beyond specific national groups (i.e., pan-ethnicity, communities of color, racial-ethnic combinations, multi-racialness, etc.). Besides serving as a product of the conglomeration of social identities, attitudes, political behaviors, and other relationships, complexities are evident through the evolution of labels, their meanings, attachments, and linkages to a range of attitudes and behaviors. Dimensions of salience for each category utilized, situational influences, changes of categories over time and circumstances, and interactions of the components of multiple labels/identities are among the critical areas of sorting and explaining not only what race and ethnicity are (i.e., origins, influences, context, etc.), but also how they “works” among individuals, groups, institutions, and public policies, in addition to well-being, self-esteem, and other personality aspects.

The second research area focuses on the significant utilization of skin color/tone as a marker of race and ethnicity with major use of the Massey-Martin skin color scale. This scale was originally created with the Mexican Migration Project. ^{Footnote 24} The display of “shaded” hands serves to differentiate persons along variations of skin color. It is now applied to most racial/ethnic groups to explore their distribution and the consequences of “falling” into the darker ranges. To date, evidence of reliability and validity of this scale for all racial/ethnic groups has not been conducted. Each group has its origins of meaning, interpretation, and cultural “roots” that are associated with skin color and other phenotypical features. While the use of hands isolates attention on skin tones, respondents react to skin tones primarily on one’s face, so that other phenotypical features can interact with assessment of skin tones and other “racial markers.” Currently, the distribution within specific racial/ethnic groups is clustered within a limited range of scales. In addition, skin tone has become the surrogate for race, while colorism extends beyond skin tone to include other phenotypical features, as well as how different features interact to influence racial assessment and categorization. The use of the concept street race, moves in the direction of clarity, interdependence, and tested measures.

The last comment on the extant research is the clustering of “traditional” racial/ethnic categories into larger, broader categorizations. Delineation of pan-ethnic terms or categorizing “people of color” is the result of cross-cutting threads of connections between traditional categories, which posits that marginalization, experiences of discrimination, common status, class, labor market segmentation, and the like link across racial/ethnic group boundaries. These common circumstances are the unifying bases for similar views and assessments of society, institutions, and other groups and subsequent collective actions. At the same time, internal variations within each group (i.e., multiple labels, varying salience of group attachment, situational factors, institutional relationships, etc.) make analytical approaches, interpretation of broader group aggregation, and assessment of the impacts of the relative components of commonalities more challenging to deal with these co-existences. Larger aggregations of racial/ethnic groups involve greater complexities and uncertainty about the processes, and minimizing complexity can inhibit learning and increase resistance when there are new findings/developments that can appear inconsistent with a simplified message. There is little place for simplification, as race and ethnicity are highly politicized. Splitting complexity or focus into a small number of processes can help tease apart these sets of complex processes. Race/ethnicity includes a wide range of systems/phenomena, which requires well-defined terms, concepts, means, measures, and analytical techniques. Research usually engages in multiple definitions, exploring overlaps and distinctiveness. Embracing complexity and uncertainty is both part of the future directions and challenges for the study of race/ethnicity to deepen our understanding and explanations of a myriad of multifaceted relationships. Breaking into expanded ground in more established fields represents challenges for all researchers, at whatever stage of their career. Race/ethnicity scholars are more “plentiful” than in the earlier period of my career, and the range of approaches, analytical and methodological techniques, and conceptual sophistication seems like a conducive environment to “push” our understanding of race and ethnicity to deeper depths.

When I first entered the field, in the late 1900s, as the kids say these days, the study of race and ethnic politics (REP) was still on the margins of political science. Work centering racialized communities was often framed as niche, overly “activist,” or insufficiently generalizable. That marginalization showed up in many forms: on conference programs, in the peer-review process (pinch reviewer #2), and in hiring and tenure decisions. Scholars—especially scholars of color—were often made to defend the legitimacy of our research questions before we could even engage with others in the field about our methods or findings.

The founding of the REP section within APSA provided una chispa for a crucial corrective. It carved out space within the discipline for our scholarship, our epistemologies, and our experiences. More than a formal organizational structure, REP quickly became an intellectual and affective home—a place where the rigor of our research was assumed rather than questioned, and where our lived experiences and the questions that were formed as a result of them were understood as strengths. When I attended my first APSA in Washington, DC, as a first-year graduate student in 1997, I remember feeling overwhelmed and lonely in the expanse of the conference. Then I found those REP panels where I met scholars bearing light into the deep and where the conversations reflected the questions I have long carried: How do systems of racial and ethnic power shape political life? How do communities resist? How do we theorize from lived experience? These questions are more relevant today than ever.

Over the course of my career, I’ve watched REP evolve—both as a scholarly field and as an institutional community. In its early years, REP was working to establish legitimacy in the face of exclusion. Today, the field is confident, capacious, and indispensable. The REP scholarship is now driving some of the most important debates in political science. It engages questions of state violence, identity formation, immigration, inequality, intersectionality, belonging, and exclusion. It incorporates an increasingly diverse methodological toolkit—quantitative, qualitative, archival, community-based, experimental, and computational. The field has grown in depth and reach, and with it, the section has grown in stature and responsibility.

This growth has been mirrored in the evolution of the REP section itself. From its founding mission to its current role in APSA governance, the section has become a force for institutional transformation. We’ve seen REP scholars take on leadership roles across APSA—as council members, editors, and committee chairs—and help push the organization toward greater inclusivity and transparency. The creation of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (JREP) marked another major milestone. For years, REP work struggled to find a consistent home in top journals, especially work that was community-centered or methodologically non-traditional. JREP changed that. It provided a dedicated platform where our scholarship could be evaluated on its own terms and with the seriousness it deserves. It also helped further legitimize REP within the broader discipline, challenging what counts as central to political science.

At the same time, the section has been a space of contestation. We have not been immune to the reproduction of hierarchy or to tensions around inclusion, recognition, and generational change. There have been hard but necessary conversations—about mentorship, power, gatekeeping, and accountability. These tensions reflect a healthy community, one that is growing, self-critical, and committed to doing better. The willingness of junior scholars to speak up—and the responsibility of senior scholars to listen—has helped sustain the section’s integrity and relevance.

Personally, REP has been foundational to my scholarly trajectory. It was within this community that I received early guidance, often in informal but deeply meaningful ways. It was through REP that I began my service to the discipline and connected with collaborators who shared my research interests. The section has been central to my academic development because it offered me an opportunity to build my scholarly network, and through that network I’ve learned to move through the academy with purpose.

Today, the stakes of REP work are higher than ever. We are witnessing an intensification of racialized state violence, the retrenchment of civil rights, open attacks on academic freedom, and a political discourse increasingly hostile to the very communities REP scholars study. Our scholarship must respond to this moment with urgency and clarity—but also with imagination. It’s not enough to analyze systems of domination; we must also continue to build scholarly practices and institutional spaces that point toward something better.

Looking forward, I see three critical paths for REP’s future. First, we must continue to broaden definitions of scholarly value. That means recognizing the importance of publicly engaged work, of knowledge rooted in community, and of research that speaks across disciplines. Second, we must recommit to mentorship and sponsorship—not just as individual guidance, but as a collective responsibility to nurture scholars at all levels. That includes students, contingent faculty, and scholars at under-resourced institutions. Third, we must think expansively about power. As more REP scholars enter roles as department chairs, deans, and university leaders, we have an opportunity—and an obligation—to reshape the structures of the academy. We must leverage our positions to reimagine hiring, curricula, and evaluation standards in ways that reflect the values of equity and justice.

We also need to preserve space for each other. The labor of REP work—research centered on communities of color, which means naming injustice and contesting systems while staying grounded in community—is often isolating and emotionally taxing. It is also deeply necessary. And so we must invest not only in scholarship but in the scholars themselves as higher ed struggles more broadly. We need to create spaces of joy, solidarity, disagreement, and renewal. Throughout the years REP has been that space for me, and I hope we continue to cultivate it for future generations.

To early-career scholars reading this: your work matters. The questions you are asking about identity, power, resistance, and survival are central, not peripheral, to the study of politics. This field is what it is because of the work of our professional ancestors and you. To those of us further along: we must acknowledge what it must feel like to be entering the profession during these unprecedented times and remember how it felt to be told our work was “too niche,” “too personal,” or “not political science.”

The section turns 30 at a moment of profound political and disciplinary challenge. But also one of opportunity. Let us move forward with rigor, with resolve, and with care—for the work and for each other.

The future of REP depends on it.

When I started graduate school in 2004, there were serious debates about whether race was still an important factor in American politics 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. While REP scholars demonstrated the significance of race for our understanding of American politics, these discussions were seen as niche given the perception that race-based politics was or would decline in importance over time. However, over the past 20 years, we have seen dramatic changes and key events that would lead few to question whether race was a central feature in American politics.

In this essay, I will discuss this transformation from the perception of racial and ethnic politics as a niche field to its becoming a mainstream component of political science research. I will also speak to how the persistence of REP scholars to study marginalized groups, despite questioning around the significance of this work, provides key insights into American politics during critical periods. I will conclude by arguing that REP research is more important now than ever in the face of threats to scholarship centered on people of color.

While many argue that race is the dominant social cleavage in American politics, I entered graduate school during a period where it was not uncommon for people to perceive race as declining in significance. While REP scholars continued to demonstrate that race still played a significant role in predicting political behavior and political attitudes, the expectation among many was that as time progressed and we moved further past the legislative successes of the 1960s, racial divisions would recede. As this occurred, so would the importance of the REP field.

Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House hastened the perspective that race was no longer a dominant cleavage in American politics. In fact, following Obama’s election, there were numerous popular articles and non-academic books that argued that America was entering a post-racial society. Obama’s election served as confirmation to some that race was no longer a major component of American politics.

However, just a few years after Obama won the presidency, I witnessed a complete reversal of this trend. Instead of moving toward a color-blind era, the analysis of race and racial attitudes became essential to anyone trying to understand American politics. Not only did race and ethnicity help define the attitudes of people of color, but more research also recognized that race and ethnicity played a central role in all aspects of American life. As had long been argued by REP scholars, understanding racial attitudes provided important insights into the most pressing political problems of the last two decades, such as growing political polarization, acceptance of extreme political candidates, and attitudes about non-racial issues like health care and gun control.

REP’s scholars’ unwavering commitment to understanding how race shaped American politics provided an important perspective into explaining the events of the 2010s, which showed in real time that racial divisions were not simply an artifact of the past. As a reaction to Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party, a conservative movement that had significant electoral and legislative success, arose. The research of REP scholars helped us understand how racial progress is often met with a countermovement and why the Tea Party movement happened when it did. This now decades-old research continues to be pertinent today in a period where the progress made in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement is met with calls to curtail the teaching of race in universities and colleges across the United States.

In 2014, the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and others gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. The work of REP scholars provided important insights to activists who were hoping to translate their activity in the streets into tangible legislative successes. REP scholars also played a large role in helping the public situate Black Lives Matter against other consequential social movements.

During my term as co-president of the REP section in 2020, Americans were horrified by the murder of George Floyd. Floyd’s death set off the largest collection of protests in American history and led more Americans to seek out information about how such events could occur in a supposedly post-racial society. In one Pew Poll, for example, almost 7 in 10 Americans had conversations about race or racial inequality in the wake of Floyd’s murder. REP scholars’ research on this topic provided critical information about this moment as Americans and journalists sought out information about these topics. In the same year, Asian Americans experienced a significant rise in hate crimes following the COVID-19 pandemic. While the media largely overlooks Asian Americans in the political process, the work of REP scholars helped shape the conversation about anti-Asian bias during this critical juncture.

While no longer perceived as niche, REP research faces a new threat to the study of marginalized groups. As is true throughout American history, progress for people of color is met with backlash. Most recently, this backlash has taken the form of attacks on scholarship that shines a light on how race shapes the social, political, and economic outcomes of Americans. The erasure of our research and the pressure on REP scholars to ignore widening racial disparities does harm for everyone. It leaves people less informed about key moments in history and leaves policymakers and activists less able to create tangible changes that address the problem. As it was important to continue researching racial and ethnic politics during a post-racial period, it is equally important to continue this research in a period of hostility toward our work. Without our scholarship, society risks facing forthcoming challenges blindly. If this were to occur, we will all be less able to meaningfully respond to these pressing concerns.

As a young political scientist, the Race and Ethnic Politics (REP) reception quickly became my home at many annual meetings. It was the place where I made some of my deepest connections, honed my elevator pitch, and received a gentle nudge to say the audacious thing. The reception and business meeting demonstrated the importance of the REP section and its leadership. The intellectual forces in that room were not content with simply being allowed into the conversation; they forged their own intellectual commitments and insisted political science speak to the realities of the lives of minoritized people. The ultimate expression of this trailblazing spirit is the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, where often overlooked and ignored communities would be central to the theorizing and research that would move our discipline forward. Because of the insistence of REP scholars to “focus on race,” as well as ethnicity and indigeneity, we have a more robust, relevant, and comprehensive discipline.

Therefore, when I was asked to co-chair the section, I was unsure I was prepared. All the scholars I idolized had been in this position, and I felt unworthy. Moreover, I was asked at a very tumultuous time in our country. We were dealing with the global pandemic created by the coronavirus and endemic police violence that left so many Black and brown bodies broken and battered. The constant barrage of death on the news and social media left me bewildered. I really did not have a sense of what I could offer the section. Despite my misgivings or a lapse in judgment, I eagerly accepted. Even with a lot of assistance from my co-chairs and APSA staff, I felt overwhelmed for the duration of my tenure. The enormity of the task is only heightened by our national politics and disciplinary challenges.

Almost immediately, there were questions about where, when, and what the section should release public statements about. Given the urgency of the moment, it was difficult to not write a public statement about most things. The pressures felt heightened as our discipline remained largely silent about societal racism, marginalization, and inequality.^{Footnote 25} For 30 years, REP has earned a reputation for its willingness to speak early and often on societal injustice. And it was like something new and awful was happening on a weekly basis. It would have been impossible to navigate these difficulties without the REP board offering essential guidance in this extraordinary time.

Yet, the difficulties we encountered were not only “out there”; there was a lot of introspection about the state of political science and how we, as a discipline, perpetuate inequality. While we were critical of the way power was circulating in the broader public, we also had to confront parallel patterns of abuse, exclusion, and weathering that result from the hierarchies of discrimination that exist within political science, in particular, and academia, more generally.^{Footnote 26} While there were good faith attempts to name these problems, for many of the issues we confronted, there were no mechanisms to address them.

For example, during my penultimate year as co-chair, a junior faculty member sought our assistance for how to address plagiarism by a senior colleague. While the ethical issue was one issue, their core problem was they had no recourse that would not leave them vulnerable to workplace retaliation; this person would be able to vote on their tenure case and/or could create difficulty for their tenure case. And while there was a senior member of their department who was supportive, they had to thread a fine needle to not “out” this junior person and derail their chances of success. This person was unable to advocate on their own behalf and looked to me and my co-chair for assistance. Of course, there is no mechanism for the section to intervene in the inner workings of a department despite our desire to assist. This situation resulted in lots of conversations and brainstorming because there was no policy on how to do this in a way that insulated the victim. I felt impotent because there was little I could do to change this person’s immediate circumstances. There were no options that would leave this person better off. In this case, because of the insularity of the academy and the capriciousness of the tenure process, it would have been easier for the junior person to be penalized rather than hold their senior colleague accountable for stealing their ideas. That I was unable to do anything in this instance, and things remain unchanged, unnerves me.

In time, however, I have come to realize this person was not asking me, or us, to solve their problem; they were aware of our limitations. What they were seeking was our confirmation their experiences were valid and legitimate. It was then I understood that REP’s power is not solely, or primarily, scholarship, though it is the vanguard of research in our discipline. The power of REP comes from its humanity and empathy in a discipline that far too often feels inhospitable to our wholeness. The willingness of the REP section to challenge structures of exclusion and have consistently high expectations of political science has earned the section the trust of its members. Lots of people work on race; not everyone is REP. That I was able to serve the section and its members is one of my greatest honors as a political scientist. I was unable to do as much as I wanted, but the fact that my peers thought enough of me to act as a steward of the section remains a great source of professional pride. The REP section is more necessary than ever and represents what is possible as a discipline. I am certain the section will continue to grow for another 30 years.

The APSA Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) Section was a game changer for me and for many other junior scholars in political science. I did not truly feel at home in the discipline until I attended my first APSA meeting in 2000, where I met many junior and senior members of the REP section, the Latino/a Caucus, and the Asian Pacific American Caucus. At the time, my PhD program only had one other graduate student focusing on race and immigration in the United States. He was several years my senior, and we barely had a chance to meet because he was away doing fieldwork. My faculty advisors had diverse interests in the fields of political behavior, political theory, and demography, but none had specialized expertise in race and political behavior.

Prior to APSA and REP, I felt that my only scholarly homes were among immigration scholars in sociology and demography. I had met a few scholars one-on-one in the course of my dissertation fieldwork across various cities, but it was not until APSA that I met an entire community of researchers who were long-standing experts in the fields of Latino politics and Asian American politics. Importantly, the vibe within the REP section was warm and welcoming: we could check our impostor syndromes at the door and find community among newbies and old-timers alike. After attending several REP sessions in 2000, by presenting on a panel alongside senior scholars, and by making new acquaintances at Section receptions and Caucus receptions, I felt very much at home. I knew that my research mattered and that I could count on a sizable community of scholars for inspiration, collaboration, and support.

When something reaches double digits in age—children, wedding anniversaries, years tenured—a common reaction is to think that it can’t possibly have been a decade since the beginning, while simultaneously feeling that something has been there forever. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics (JREP) is like this for me, now a decade into its existence as the official scholarly publication of the Race, Ethnicity and Politics (REP) section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

But prior to 2015, the American Political Science Association did not publish a journal under its auspices dedicated to the study of race and politics. In some ways, it is hard to reconcile this fact within the context of the many developments in race and politics within and outside of the United States. That the establishment of an APSA section journal dedicated to academic scholarship on race and politics was long overdue even a decade ago is an indicator of the resistance within the discipline to innovation and an indifference to encouraging scholarly attention to the dynamics of race and politics beyond majority-population-centered dynamics.

I have counted myself as an REP scholar since the early 1990s, specializing in U.S. political behavior and attitudes of people of color, the politics of immigration, and the intersection of gender and race in politics. This coincides with the timing of the formation of the REP section in the APSA. Prior to then, if one wanted to present a research paper on political partisanship and voting in the United States comparing Blacks, Latinos, and whites, that proposal would have led to it being submitted to a division dedicated to elections and voting behavior. Constrained as conference section leaders are in selecting papers for a conference, it would almost invariably be the case that the line-up of panels in this broader section might include one or two dedicated to the dynamics of race and politics. As a result, the lion’s share of research papers and organized panels represented a continuation of traditional questions and analytical techniques, such as marking voters of color with ‘dummy variable’ status and in so doing effectively holding Black and Latinx voters off to the side, marking them only as different from whites. As a result, these traditional fields of study left little room for innovation, for developing new theories, and for testing these propositions. This was true despite the growing presence and significance of voters of color in the United States. Similar examples could be given for areas of study outside of my own specialization in U.S. political behavior, but suffice it to say that studying politics without considering the dynamics of race and ethnicity provides an incomplete picture at best.

The great flourishing of scholarship on race and ethnicity across all subfields in political science and the depth of the research are testimony to how vital understanding these dynamics is to politics and governance today. That the APSA has a section journal devoted to scholarship in race and ethnicity, however, happened only because of the efforts of members in the REP section. The leadership of the REP selection created a committee several years prior to the founding of JREP to assess how to best go about creating a section journal. I chaired that committee, and our work took a couple of years to complete and yield a contract with Cambridge University Press to publish the journal. Others who served with me on this committee may have different recollections, but in my memory, it was actually quite easy to accomplish. There were multiple presses—university and otherwise—that expressed interest in publishing JREP, which resulted in competition and required the section to decide on which press to choose. Our concept for the journal was strong, and our rationale was supported by the presence of more excellent scholarship on the politics of race and ethnicity than could be published in existing political science journals. The presses all recognized that race and politics was an enormous growth area in political science and were eager to sign up JREP. We chose Cambridge University Press, and the journal continues to flourish.

JREP has been important in many ways for members of the REP section as well as those who publish in its pages but do not belong to the section. I see the influence of the journal perhaps most vividly in the CVs accompanying many of the dossiers I review every year for scholars standing for tenure and promotion (mostly in the U.S. politics field, given my area of specialization). After only 10 volumes, JREP is recognized by research as well as teaching departments of political science as a strong subfield journal for publication.

Outstanding as the achievements have been in the expansion and professionalization of the REP field, its section journal, and its scholarship overall, there is still much more to achieve. In these politically polarized times and in the wake of the retrenchment in higher education, I remain optimistic about the quantity and the quality of scholarship that REP scholars—comparativists, immigration scholars, U.S. politics experts, theorists, and authors specializing in international relations—will continue to bring to JREP. No political party or set of leaders can stop the momentum in research that began decades ago and that continues to thrive. That said, it is more precarious for scholars to specialize in REP and REP-adjacent areas, particularly at universities where any attention to race or gender is considered ideologically threatening. Nevertheless, the continued scholarly efforts of our section and the courage of faculty to continue to publish in JREP will keep the journal on a strong path in the future.