BUZZ
Says it’s a bad thing when black people start to vote Republican
Black people should mainly attend churches with just other black people so that they keep voting Democrat, according to a Rutgers University professor.
Professor Ryon Cobb argues “while 84% of Black adults identify as Democrat or lean Democratic, that number hides what congregational diversity costs Black politics.”
“Among Black nondenominational Protestants, that figure drops to nearly 60%, with one in three calling themselves independents,” Cobb wrote in an essay for the Brookings Institution.
Cobb, an “inclusive excellence in research” scholar considers it a “loss” when black people vote Republican.
He wrote:
Where Black Americans worship shapes their politics, and the data show the cost. The losses run in two directions: White congregations convert Black members to Republicanism, while multiracial congregations pull them out of partisan politics altogether. The mechanism is not diversity itself—it is who holds power inside those congregations.
He adds in the requisite warning about “white Christian nationalism” and also points out that some black people are less likely to identify with either political party when they attend multiracial congregations.
Professor Cobb does not provide any data to show these people are less likely to vote, follow the news, or attend local city council meetings, but simply asserts they are less politically engaged.
The data show a slight increase in Republican identification when black people attend a multiracial church, and a larger increase when they attend a church considered “white.”
A multiracial church, according to Cobb’s research paper, refers to a church “where no single racial group constituted a majority in leadership or membership.”
Cobb also criticizes black people who adopt “white cultural norms.”
“Multiracial congregations don’t convert—they drain Black members of the political identity Black-majority congregations build,” he writes. “They hold together not by centering integration but by defaulting to white cultural norms.”
Cobbs does not define what “white cultural norms” are in either this essay or the full academic paper.
The professor conducted research for this academic paper with assistance from the federal government.
He disclosed funding from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health through a grant which funds a University of Michigan urban issues research center.
“Integration and political power are not the same force, and right now they move in opposite directions,” Cobb concludes. “The question is not whether to integrate. The question is who gets to lead when you do, and whose vote still counts when you get there.”
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