ABSTRACT
The central political question asked in this chapter is what is entailed in the empowerment of people of color in the USA? The question is politically important because throughout the country's history racial hierarchy has undermined and obstructed efforts to realize greater racial democracy in the US. In approaching this important question, the chapter argues that conventional behavioral political science approaches to addressing the question – exemplified here by the “political incorporation model” of empowerment – fails because it frames the question as though it can be answered through a liberal separation of public and private spheres of power, and because it approaches the study of political power as though the existing US political system can be studied from the outside, as though it is composed of “natural” phenomena and not contingent and socially constructed political formations. Seeking to demonstrate what is required to more fully address the question of empowerment, the chapter argues the need for a deeper understanding of the meaning of democratic empowerment, and a broader framing of how power works to continue racial hierarchy in the US, thereby informing what is entailed in reaching a more racially democratic polity. Interpretive analysis is illustrated in this chapter, then, in the forms of critical conceptual analysis and critical frame analysis.
