ABSTRACT
As an organized subfield of political studies, racial politics is a relatively recent arrival on the scholarly scene. It was not until 1995 that an Organized Section on Racial and Ethnic Politics was launched in the American Political Science Association. Moreover, most of the works generated by members of this section operate within a scientistic or positivist research paradigm, rather than a self-consciously interpretive approach. There is not, in fact, a self-defined group of political scientists in the United States that term themselves “interpretive analysts of racial politics.” Accordingly, readers scanning through political science conference programs over the past several decades would have difficulty finding panel titles that signify sets of papers on racial politics grouped together because they have employed interpretive methods of analysis.
