ABSTRACT
The book makes two primary arguments: first, that racial politics is an understudied fault line in US political life deserving more attention by scholars of US politics; and second, that racial politics cannot be fully understood without self-aware and purposeful interpretive political analysis. After introducing US racial politics and racialization as the primary political subject matter of the book, this chapter provides an overview of the methodological claims on which the book is based. The chapter argues that because all political life is socially constructed and not created in “nature,” all social scientific efforts to understand politics are inescapably interpretive. After sketching out why behavioral social science is necessarily interpretive, the chapter claims that efforts to avoid subjective interpretation of political reality through rigorous methods aiming to replicate those of the natural sciences are misguided and lead to narrow and incomplete political understanding. After sketching out the assumptions and practices that underlie self-aware and purposeful interpretive political analysis, the chapter articulates criteria by which the quality of interpretive work can be judged, and concludes with an overview of the central political questions to be taken up and the interpretive methods to be illustrated in the remaining chapters of the book.
