Since Key and Allport, scholars have argued that racial context affects political behavior, with some finding out-group contact increases intergroup hostility and others showing the opposite. We argue that Americans exist in multiple racial contexts simultaneously that may overlap or conflict, helping to explain past discord. Using novel data, we document in-group embeddedness among the four largest U.S. ethnoracial groups for three kinds of racial context: geographic, social, and psychological. These three contexts are only weakly correlated, we find, with social ties exhibiting distinctly high rates of in-group segregation. We next examine the relationship between racial contexts and political attitudes, showing that individuals who are highly embedded across contexts express notably different views than those who experience cross-cutting pressures. Our results underscore a need for greater care and specificity when examining the relationship between “racial context” and political phenomena.

Classic political behavior studies assert that childhood socialization can contribute to later political orientations. But, as adults consider how to introduce children to politics, what shapes their decisions? We argue socialization is itself political with adults changing their socialization priorities in response to salient political events including social movements. Using Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and race socialization as a case, we show the summer 2020 information environment coupled movement-consistent concepts of race with child-rearing guidance. A survey of white parents after the summer activism suggests that many—but especially Democrats and those near peaceful protest epicenters—prioritized new forms of race socialization. Further, nearly 2 years after the protests’ height, priming BLM changes support for race-related curricular materials among white Americans. Our work casts political socialization in a new light, reviving an old literature, and has implications for when today’s children become tomorrow’s voters.

That black and white Americans disagree about the carceral state is well established; why this is the case is much less clear. Drawing on group hierarchy theory and the state's role in perpetuating group subordination/domination, we theorize that differences in socialization and contact during emergent adulthood produce divergent priors for racial groups and gender subgroups within race. These different starting points shape how people integrate new information from recent contact into their belief systems. Using a survey of over 11,000 respondents, we find that, instead of all groups integrating information the same way, recent direct contact contributes most to negative attitudes among groups whose contact with government agents is least negatively valenced. While interactions with the American carceral state divide opinions considerably among white Americans and women, adulthood contact for black Americans, especially black men, appears to be but ‘a drop in the ocean’ of political life.

Summer 2020 saw widespread protests under the banner Black Lives Matter. Coupled with the global pandemic that kept America’s children in the predominant care of their parents, we argue that the latter half of 2020 offers a unique moment to consider whites’ race-focused parenting practices. We use Google Trends data and posts on public parenting Facebook pages to show that the remarkable levels of protest activity in summer 2020 served as a focusing event that not only directed Americans’ attention to racial concepts but connected those concepts to parenting. Using a national survey of non-Hispanic white parents with white school-age children, we show that most white parents spoke with their children about race during this period and nearly three-quarters took actions to increase racial diversity in their children’s environment or introduce them to racial politics. But the data also show parenting practices to be rife with uncertainty and deep partisan, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. Drawing upon our findings, we call for a renewed focus on political socialization that considers how parenting choices are shaped by political events—including Black Lives Matter—and the possible long-term consequences of racial parenting practices on politics.

Social norms are thought to motivate behaviors like political participation, but context should influence both the content and activation of these norms. I show that both race and neighborhood context moderate the social value of political participation in the United States. Using original survey data and a survey experiment, I find that Whites, Blacks, and Latinos not only conceptualize participation differently, but also asymmetrically reward those who are politically active, with minority Americans often providing more social incentives for participation than Whites. I combine this survey data with geographic demography from the American Community Survey and find that neighborhood characteristics outpace individual-level indicators in predicting the social value of political participation. The findings suggest that scholars of political behavior should consider race, place, and social norms when seeking to understand participation in an increasingly diverse America.