Melanin and Curls: Evaluation of Black Women Candidates

Abstract

Research on candidate evaluation has delved into questions of how voters evaluate women candidates, Black male candidates, as well as how candidates’ appearances may condition electoral opportunities. Combined, this scholarship has tended to focus on how race, gender, and skin tone privilege or undermine evaluations of Black male or White women candidates. We intervene to study Black women candidates and draw on research on colorism and Black women's hairstyles and ask: How does variation in skin tone and hairstyle affect Black voter evaluations of Black women candidates? We develop and test two hypotheses: the empowerment hypothesis and the internal discrimination hypothesis. We mostly find support for the latter. Importantly, we find that the interaction of dark skin and non-straight hair has mostly negative effects on Black men and women's trait evaluations, but a positive effect on Black women's willingness to vote for the candidate. Furthermore, this research shows that hair texture is an important aspect of responses to Black women candidates—hair is not just hair for Black women candidates. This research shows that understanding the effects of candidate appearance on voter behavior necessitates considering the intersection of racial and gender phenotypes.

The Political Implications of Colorism Are Gendered

“…Lighter skin may result in a Black woman being perceived as in multiple non-Black categories (Brown 2014), and darker skin may result in a Black woman being perceived as solely Black (Sims 2016a). Skin tone may combine with other features, such as hairstyle, to alter the racial experiences of Black women (Brown 2014;Lemi and Brown 2019;Sims, Pirtle, and Johnson-Arnold 2019) in ways that are not perceived by CMPS survey respondents as discriminatory. Another possibility is that lighter skin may be associated with a higher social status in the mind of survey respondents (Hunter 2007); thus, selecting a lighter shade on a skin-tone question reflects how people think of themselves socially.…”

On the Ballot in 2020: Will the United States (finally) embrace civil rights?

“…The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) subfield has long argued that race is central to understanding American politics and that it is critical that we conceptualize these issues intersectionally, both at the individual and institutional levels (Strolovitch 2007;Novkov 2009;Beltrán 2011;Frances 2015;Hancock 2016;Hanchard 2019;Lemi and Brown 2019). Conceptualizations of race as an object of study has advanced in important ways since the mid-20th century but more needs to be done (Garcia 2017).…”

“Glass half full: cautious optimism and the future of Black women political elites in America”

“…They are often told to straighten their hair, tone down racial identifiers or to wear more feminine attire to appeal to more voters (Brown, 2014; Brown and Lemi, forthcoming). Additionally, racial and gender phenotypes of Black women candidates are assessed in some voters’ evaluations of this group in ways that disadvantage darker skin and women without straight hair (Lemi and Brown, 2019). In sum, Black women do not lack political ambition.…”