Battered Citizen Syndrome: Trauma and Black Political Behavior

• In Event: To Save the Soul of America: Black Politics and the State of American Democracy

Abstract

The Democratic Party has long positioned itself as the American political party of racial equality, equity, and tolerance. Yet, in the more than 50 years since the conclusion of the modern civil rights era, the Democratic Party has yet to deliver on its explicit promises of substantial socioeconomic progress in terms of the lived material conditions of African Americans. What I find puzzling here is that, despite the limited success the Democrats have achieved on behalf of Blacks in the post-civil rights era, this group has nevertheless consistently provided near unanimous support for the Democratic Party. No ethno-racial group in American history has displayed such remarkably high levels of loyalty for a single political party. How do we account for this unprecedented level of support juxtaposed with a persistent lack of substantive policy success? In this paper I propose the conceptual framework of Battered Citizen Syndrome to explain why Black Americans consistently support the Democratic Party despite the party’s inability and/or unwillingness to fulfill the political promises made to this community over the last few generations. This framework contends that Black support for the Democratic Party is akin to the experience many victims of intimate partner violence (e.g., battered wives) face in terms of their relationship with their abusive partners. That is, Battered Citizen Syndrome is a trauma response Black Americans experience due to navigating a socio-cultural political system and or political party which persistently neglects their interests, gaslights them upon confrontation, and exploits their unique positionality in America. This trauma-informed explanation allows future research to focus on institutional and socio-cultural drivers of Black political behavior instead of solely individual-based factors.

Author

• Kamri Hudgins, University of Michigan