Category: Politics

Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of raids throughout Los Angeles and Southern California in early June 2025, sparking protests in downtown Los Angeles and other cities, including New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas.

Some demonstrators expressed growing frustration with ICE by showcasing the Mexican flag, which has become the defining symbol of the protests in Los Angeles.

The use of the flag has also become the subject of intense debate in the media.

Some outlets have depicted the flag as symbolizing ethnic pride, solidarity with immigrants and opposition to the Trump administration.

Others have called it the “perfect propaganda” tool for Republicans and conservatives, some of whom have referred to the Mexican flag as the “confederate banner of the L.A. riots.” They point to its use as evidence of anarchy and a city taken over by immigrants.

But what do Americans think about protesters waving the Mexican flag, and why?

Much of our knowledge surrounding this question is based on the 2006 immigrant rights protests across the United States, which occurred in a much less politically polarized era. Additionally, a vast majority of protesters then brought U.S. flags compared with other national flags, including the Mexican flag.

Research published in 2010 found that even though the public was more likely to be bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag than the U.S. flag, that difference was largely absent once you divided the public into subgroups, including white people, Latinos and immigrants.

To reexamine public attitudes toward protesters waving the Mexican flag, we conducted an online survey experiment among 10,145 U.S. adults in 2016.

As political scientists who specialize in Latino politics and immigration-related issues, we tested how exposure to the Mexican flag versus the American flag shaped opinion about protests during Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016.

We found that even though much of the public continued to be less bothered by the American flag than the Mexican flag, there were also important and perhaps surprising differences in protest attitudes between white Americans and other racial and ethnic groups.

More or less bothered

In the study, we randomly divided respondents into two groups: a treatment group and a control group. Respondents in the treatment group were shown an image of protesters waving a Mexican flag. Respondents in the control group were shown an image of protesters waving the U.S. flag. After viewing the image, respondents were then asked about the extent to which they supported or were bothered by the protests.

Overall, 41% of the respondents said they were bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag, and 28% said protesters waving the U.S. flag bothered them.

Our results show important differences in opinion between racial and ethnic groups.

White respondents were more likely than any other racial and ethnic group to say they were bothered by protesters waving Mexican flags. Sixty-nine percent of white respondents said they were bothered, 31 percentage points more than the average of nonwhite respondents.

However, 51% of white respondents were also bothered by the image of protesters waving U.S. flags. By contrast, just 20% of Latinos, 33% of Black Americans and 34% of Asian Americans said they were bothered by protesters waving U.S. flags.

Put differently, large majorities of nonwhite respondents were supportive of showing U.S. flags at protests despite their more positive views toward Mexican flags.

What explains racial differences?

When taking a deeper look at what causes Americans to feel bothered about protesters waving Mexican flags, some clear patterns emerge.

On average, older Americans were more likely to be bothered relative to younger Americans. This was particularly true for Americans over 40 years of age compared with millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z respondents, born between 1997 and 2012.

However, there are some nuances when examining age groups and whether they had attended a protest, march or rally in the previous year.

Our findings suggest that older Americans who had not engaged in protests were most likely to be bothered when they saw images of protesters waving Mexican flags. Millennials and Gen Z respondents who participated in a protest were least likely to be bothered.

Given that this issue intersects nationality, race, ethnicity, gender and citizenship status, it’s logical that these factors explained why Americans supported or opposed the use of Mexican flags at immigration protests.

For example, racial minorities who have a stronger sense of ethnic or racial identity were more likely to be supportive of protesters waving Mexican and U.S. flags. In other words, group identity is a strong predictor of support for protests in general, regardless of what flag is being flown.

However, minorities who lack a sense of ethnic pride and identity were most likely to be upset when they saw others expressing their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

The reality is that recent immigration protests across the country are the first time many of the Latino youth who are citizens have participated in these types of protests. Anyone under age 22 would not have memory of, or been alive during, the last large pro-immigrant protests in 2006.

The Mexican flag represents more than nationalistic pride. It represents their parents’ heritage, hard work and their binational experience as Americans engaged in politics.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

“Bill Moyers? He’s spectacular!” George Clooney said – and no wonder.

I mentioned this legendary television journalist to the actor and filmmaker after Clooney emerged from the Broadway theater where he just had been portraying another news icon: Edward R. Murrow. Or as the Museum of Broadcast Communications put it in a tribute to Moyers, he was “one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Edward R. Murrow. If Murrow founded broadcast journalism, Moyers significantly extended its traditions.”

Moyers, who died at 91 on June 26, 2025, was among the most acclaimed broadcast journalists of the 20th century. He’s known for TV news shows that exposed the role of big money in politics and episodes that drew attention to unsung defenders of democracy, such as community organizer Ernesto Cortés Jr..

Earlier in his life, Moyers served in significant roles in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but his fame comes from his journalism.

Making a connection

Despite his prominence, Moyers was the same down-to-earth guy in person as he seemed to be on the screen. In 1986, he was commanding a television audience of millions, and I was a historian at home with a preschooler, teaching the occasional college course in a dismal job market. Seeing that Moyers would be speaking at the conference on President Lyndon B. Johnson where I would be giving a paper, I wrote to him.

To my utter amazement, he replied and then showed up to hear my paper, on Johnson’s experiences as a young principal of the “Mexican” school in Cotulla, Texas, where he championed his students but also forged links to segregationists. Cotulla was “seminal” to LBJ’s development, Moyers said. In 1993, he recommended me for a grant that helped me finish a book: “LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power.

A few years later, he asked me to head up a project researching the documents related to his time in Johnson’s administration. His memoir of the Johnson years never materialized. Instead, I edited the bestselling ”Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.“

Part of what always impressed me about Moyers was his belief that what matters is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality.

‘Amazing Grace’

Moyers didn’t just dwell on politics and policy as a journalist. He also delved into the meaning of creativity and the life of the mind. Many of his most moving interviews spotlighted scientists, novelists and other exceptional people.

He was also arguably among the best reporters on the religion beat. Even if it wasn’t always the main focus of his work or what comes to mind for those familiar with his legacy, still, he was a lifelong spiritual seeker.

This is hardly surprising: Moyers had degrees in both divinity and journalism. As a young man, he briefly served as a Baptist minister.

He once told me that his favorite of the many programs that he produced was the PBS documentary ”Amazing Grace.“ It featured inspiring renditions of this popular Christian hymn as performed by country legend Johnny Cash, folk icon Judy Collins, opera diva Jessye Norman and other musical geniuses. As they share with Moyers their personal connections to this song of redemption, he draws viewers into the stirring saga of its creator, John Newton: a slave trader who became an abolitionist through “amazing grace.”

Life’s ultimate questions

This appreciation of the ineffable clearly informed Moyers’ blockbuster TV series exploring life’s ultimate questions, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.”

His interviews with Campbell, a comparative mythologist, evoked moments that made time stand still, and this reminded me of Thomas Merton, the American monk and poet, writing, “Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion” on beholding the immense Polonnaruwa Buddhas of Sri Lanka.

To my surprise, Moyers knew about this Trappist monk, telling me, “I always wished that I could have interviewed Merton,” who died in 1968.

It turned out that Moyers had been introduced to Merton by Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, where Moyers was a founding organizer and the deputy director.

Mentored by LBJ

Moyers characterized his Peace Corps years as the most rewarding of his life. When Johnson, his mentor, became president, he asked Moyers to join the White House staff. Moyers turned down the offer, so Johnson made it a presidential command.

The wunderkind – Moyers was 29 years old in 1963, when Johnson was sworn in after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination – coordinated the White House task forces that created the largest number of legislative proposals in American history. Among the programs and landmark reforms established and passed during the Johnson administration were Medicare and Medicaid, a landmark immigration law, the Freedom of Information Act, the Public Broadcasting Act and two historic civil rights laws.

Johnson’s war on poverty, in addition, introduced several path-breaking programs, such as Head Start.

Moyers served as one of Johnson’s speechwriters and was a top official in Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. The following year, the Johnson administration began escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Johnson named a new press secretary: Bill Moyers. Again, the young man tried to decline, but the president prevailed.

As Moyers had feared, he could not serve two masters – journalists and his boss – especially as the administration’s Vietnam War policies became increasingly unpopular.

Appreciating the world around you

Moyers left the Johnson administration in 1967, turning to journalism. He became the publisher of Newsday, a Long Island, New York, newspaper, before becoming a producer and commentator at CBS News. His commentaries reached tens of millions of viewers, but the network refused to provide a regular time slot for his documentaries. He had previously worked at PBS. In 1987, he decamped there for good.

Moyers’ programs won many journalism awards, including over 30 Emmys, along with the Lifetime Emmy for news and documentary productions.

He helped millions of Americans appreciate the world around them. As he reflected in 2023, in one of the last interviews he gave, to PBS journalist Judy Woodruff at the Library of Congress: “Everything is linked, and if you can find that nerve that connects us to other things and other places and other ideas – and television should be doing it all the time – we’d be a better democracy.”

Today, with disinformation metastasizing, professional journalists losing their jobs by the thousands and some newspaper owners muzzling their editorial staff, thoughtful explanations can lose out. That means Americans can lose out.

“It takes time, commitment” to dig below the surface and discover the deeper meaning of people’s lives, Moyers noted. He sought to understand, for example, why so many folks in his own hometown of Marshall, Texas, have become much more suspicious – resentful, even – of outsiders than when he gave these folks voice in his poignant, prize-winning 1984 program Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas.

In this era of growing threats to democracy, what can a young person do who aspires to follow in Bill Moyers’ footsteps – whether in journalism or public life?

Woodruff asked Moyers that question, to which he responded: “You can’t quit. You can’t get out of the boat! Find a place that gives you a sense of being, gives you a sense of mission, gives you a sense of participation.”

Today, with the future of journalism – and of democracy itself – at stake, I think it would help everyone to take to heart the insights of this late, great American journalist.

Julie Leininger Pycior edited the book “Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.” She also was hired by Moyers to direct the 18-month “LBJ Years” research project.

In addtion, she served as an unpaid, informal historical adviser for some of his public television programs.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In 1971, the president of Mississippi State University, Dr. William L. Giles, invited President Richard Nixon to attend the dedication of U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis’ papers to the university library’s archives.

Nixon declined, but the Republican president sent a generous note in support of the veteran Democrat Stennis.

“Future students and scholars who study there will … familiarize themselves with the outstanding record of a U.S. Senator whose … judgment in complex areas of national security have been a source of strength and comfort to those who have led this Nation and to all who are concerned in preserving the freedom we cherish.”

Nixon’s prediction came true, perhaps ironically, considering the legal troubles over his own papers during the Watergate crisis. Congress passed the Presidential Records Act of 1978 after Nixon resigned.

Stennis’ gift to his alma mater caused a windfall of subsequent congressional donations to what is now the Mississippi Political Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries.

Now, 55 years later, Mississippi State University holds a body of records from a bipartisan group of officials that has positioned it to tell a major part of the state’s story in national and global politics. That story is told to over 100 patrons and dozens of college and K-12 classes each year.

The papers are fertile ground for scholarly research into Congress’ role in shaping U.S. history, with its extraordinary powers over lawmaking, the economy and one of the world’s largest militaries.

Mississippi State University, where I work as an assistant professor and director of the Mississippi Political Collections, is not alone in providing such a rich source of history. It is part of a national network of universities that hold and steward congressional papers.

But support for this stewardship is in jeopardy. With the White House’s proposed elimination of independent granting agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, it is unclear what money will be available for this work in the future.

From research to public service

Mississippi State University’s building of an expansive political archive is neither unique nor a break from practices by our national peers:

• The Richard Russell Library for Political Research and Studies at the University of Georgia – named after the U.S. senator from Georgia from 1933 to 1971 – has grown since its founding in 1974 into one of America’s premier research libraries of political history, with more than 600 manuscript collections and an extensive oral history collection.

• Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin donated his papers to Drake University to form The Harkin Institute, which memorializes Harkin’s role as chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act through disability policy research and education.

• Sens. Robert and Elizabeth Dole’s papers are the bedrock of the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University.

• In 2023, retiring Sens. Richard Shelby and Patrick Leahy donated their archives – Shelby to the University of Alabama and Leahy to the University of Vermont.

By lending their papers and relative political celebrity, members of Congress have laid the groundwork for repositories like these to promote policy research to enable local and state governments to shape legislation on issues central to their states.

More complete history

When the repositories are at universities, they also provide educational programming that encourages public service for the next generations.

At Mississippi State University, the John C. Stennis Institute for Government and Community Development sponsors an organization that allows students to learn about government, voting, organizing and potential careers on Capitol Hill with trips to Washington, D.C.

Depositing congressional papers in states and districts, to be cared for by professional archivists and librarians, extends the life of the records and expands their utility.

When elected officials give their papers to their constituents, they ensure the public can see and use the papers. This is a way of returning their history to them, while giving them the power to assemble a more complete, independent version of their political history. While members of Congress are not required by law to donate their papers, they passed a bipartisan concurrent resolution in 2008 encouraging the practice.

Users of congressional archives range from historians to college students, local investigative journalists, political memoirists and documentary filmmakers. In advance of the 2020 election, we contributed historical materials to CNN’s reporting on Joe Biden’s controversial relationship with the Southern bloc of segregationist senators in his early Senate years.

Preserving the archives

While the results contribute to the humanities, the process of archival preservation and management is as complex a science as any other.

“Congressional records” is a broad term that encompasses many formats such as letters, diaries, notes, meeting minutes, speech transcripts, guestbooks and schedules.

They also include ephemera such as campaign bumper stickers, military medals and even ceremonial pieces of the original U.S. Capitol flooring. They contain rare photographs of everything from natural disaster damage to state dinners and legacy audiovisual materials such as 8 mm film, cassette tapes and vinyl records. Members of Congress also have donated their libraries of hundreds of books.

Archival preservation is a constantly evolving science. Only in the mid-20th century was the acid-free box developed to arrest the deterioration of paper records. After the advent of film-based photographs, archivists later learned to keep them away from light and heat, and they observed that audiovisual materials such as 8mm tape decompose from acid decay quickly if not stored in proper conditions.

Alongside preservation work comes the task of inventorying the records for public use. Archivists write finding aids – itemized, searchable catalogs of the records – and create metadata, which describes items in terms of size, creation date and location.

Future congressional papers will include born-digital content such as email and social media. This means traditional archiving will give way to digital preservation and data management. Federal law mandates that digital records have alt-text and transcription, and they need specialized expertise in file storage and data security because congressional papers often contain case files with sensitive personal data.

With congressional materials often clocking in at hundreds or thousands of linear feet, emerging artificial intelligence and automation technologies will usher this field into a new era, with AI speeding metadata and cataloging work to deliver usable records for researchers faster than ever.

No more funding?

All of this work takes money; most of it takes staff time. Institutions meet these needs through federal grants – the very grants at risk from the Trump administration’s proposed elimination of the agencies that administer them.

For example, West Virginia University has been awarded over $400,000 since 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the American Congress Digital Archives Portal project, a website that centralizes digitized congressional records at the university and a growing list of partners such as the University of Hawaii and the University of Oklahoma.

Past federal grants have funded other congressional papers projects, from basic supply needs such as folders to more complex repair of film and tape.

The Howard Baker Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee used National Endowment for the Humanities funds to purchase specialized supplies needed to store the papers of its namesake, the Republican senator who also served as chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan.

National Endowment for the Humanities funds helped process U.S. Rep. Pat Williams’ papers at the University of Montana, resulting in a searchable finding aid for the 87 boxes of records documenting the Montana Democrat’s 18 years in Congress.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.”

With the current threat to federal grants – and agencies – that pay for the crucial work of stewarding these congressional papers, it appears that these records of democracy may no longer play their role in supporting that democracy.

Katherine Gregory received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a member of the Society of American Archivists.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The largest tract of public land in the United States is a wild expanse of tundra and wetlands stretching across nearly 23 million acres of northern Alaska. It’s called the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, but despite its industrial-sounding name, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or NPR-A, is much more than a fuel depot.

Tens of thousands of caribou feed and breed in this area, which is the size of Maine. Migratory birds flock to its lakes in summer, and fish rely on the many rivers that crisscross the region.

The area is also vital for the health of the planet. However, its future is at risk.

The Trump administration announced a plan on June 17, 2025, to open nearly 82% of this fragile landscape to oil and gas development, including some of its most ecologically sensitive areas. The government is accepting public comments on the plan through July 1.

I am an ecologist, and I have been studying sensitive ecosystems and the species that depend on them for over 20 years. Disturbing this landscape and its wildlife could lead to consequences that are difficult – if not impossible – to reverse.

What is the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska?

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska was originally designated in 1923 by President Warren Harding as an emergency oil supply for the U.S. Navy.

In the 1970s, its management was transferred to the Department of Interior under the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act. This congressional act requires that, in addition to managing the area for energy development, the secretary of the interior must ensure the “maximum protection” of “any significant subsistence, recreational, fish and wildlife, or historical or scenic value.”

The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for overseeing the reserve and identifying and protecting areas with important ecological or cultural values – aptly named “special areas.”

The Trump administration now plans to expand the amount of land available for drilling in the NPR-A from about 11.7 million acres to more than 18.5 million acres – including parts of those “special areas” – as part of its effort to increase U.S. oil drilling and reduce regulations on the industry.

I recently worked with scientists and scholars at The Wilderness Society to write a detailed report outlining many of the ecological and cultural values found across the reserve.

A refuge for wildlife

The reserve is a sanctuary for many Arctic wildlife, including caribou populations that have experienced sharp global declines in recent years.

The reserve’s open tundra provides critical calving, foraging, migratory and winter habitat for three of the four caribou herds on Alaska’s North Slope. These herds undertake some of the longest overland migrations on Earth. Infrastructure such as roads and industrial activity can disrupt their movement, further harming the populations’ health.

The NPR-A is also globally significant for migratory birds. Situated at the northern end of five major flyways, birds come here from all corners of the Earth, including all 50 states. It hosts some of the highest densities of breeding shorebirds anywhere on the planet.

An estimated 72% of Arctic Coastal Plain shorebirds – over 4.5 million birds – nest in the reserve. This includes the yellow-billed loon, the largest loon species in the world, with most of its U.S. breeding population concentrated in the reserve.

Expanding oil and gas development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska could threaten these birds by disrupting their habitat and adding noise to the landscape.

Many other species also depend on intact ecosystems there.

Polar bears build dens in the area, making it critical for cub survival. Wolverines, which follow caribou herds, also rely on large, connected expanses of undisturbed habitat for their dens and food. Moose browse along the Colville River, the largest river on the North Slope, while peregrine falcons, gyrfalcons and rough-legged hawks nest on the cliffs above.

A large stretch of the Colville River is currently protected as a special area, but the Trump administration’s proposed plan will remove those protections. The Teshekpuk Lake special area, critical habitat for caribou and migrating birds, would also lose protection.

Indigenous communities in the Arctic, particularly the Iñupiat people, also depend on these lands, waters and wildlife for subsistence hunting and fishing. Their livelihoods, food security, cultural identity and spiritual practices are deeply intertwined with the health of this ecosystem.

Oil and gas drilling’s impact

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is vast, and drilling won’t occur across all of it. But oil and gas operations pose far-reaching risks that extend well beyond the drill sites.

Infrastructure like roads, pipelines, airstrips and gravel pads fragment and degrade the landscape. That can alter water flow and the timing of ice melt. It can also disrupt reproduction and migration routes for wildlife that rely on large, connected habitats.

Networks of winter ice roads and the way exploration equipment compacts the land can delay spring and early summer thawing patterns on the landscape. That can upset the normal pattern of meltwater, making it harder for shore birds to nest.

ConocoPhillips’ Willow drilling project, approved by the Biden administration in 2023 on the eastern side of the reserve, provides some insight into the potential impact: An initial project plan, later scaled back, included up to 575 miles (925 kilometers) of ice roads for construction, an air strip, more than 300 miles (nearly 485 kilometers) of new pipeline, a processing facility, a gravel mine and barge transportation, in addition to five drilling sites.

Many animals will try to steer clear of noise, light and human activity. Roads and industrial operations can force them to alter their behavior, which can affect their health and how well they can reproduce. Research has shown that caribou mothers with new calves avoid infrastructure and that this impact does not lessen over time of exposure.

At Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the largest oilfield in the U.S., decades of oil development have led to pollution, including hundreds of oil spills and leaks, and habitat loss, such as flooding and shoreline erosion, extensive permafrost thaw and damage from roads, construction and gravel mining. In short, the footprint of drilling is not confined to isolated locations — it radiates outward, undermining the ecological integrity of the region. Permafrost thaw now even threatens the stability of the oil industry’s own infrastructure.

Consequences for the climate

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the surrounding Arctic ecosystem also play an outsized role in regulating the global climate.

Vast amounts of climate-warming carbon is currently locked away in the wetlands and permafrost of the tundra, but the Arctic is warming close to three times faster than the global average.

Roads, drilling and development can increase permafrost thaw and cause coastlines to erode, releasing carbon long locked in the soil. In addition, these operations will ultimately add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further warming the planet.

The public comment period on the White House’s plan to open more of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil and gas drilling closes at the end of the day on July 1.

The decisions made today will shape the future of the Arctic – and one of the last wild ecosystems in the United States – for generations to come.

Mariah Meek has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several state agencies. In addition to being a professor, she is also the director of research for The Wilderness Society, where she supervises a team of scientists doing research to understand ecological interactions in the Alaskan Arctic.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the U.S. and elsewhere, nationality tends to be defined by a set of legal parameters. This may involve birthplace, parental citizenship or procedures for naturalization.

Yet in many Americans’ minds these objective notions of citizenship are a little fuzzy, as social and developmental psychologists like me have documented. Psychologically, some people may just seem a little more American than others, based on factors such as race, ethnicity or language.

Reinforced by identity politics, this results in different ideas about who is welcome, who is tolerated and who is made to not feel welcome at all.

How race affects who belongs

Many people who explicitly endorse egalitarian ideals, such as the notion that all Americans are deserving of the rights of citizenship regardless of race, still implicitly harbor prejudices over who’s “really” American.

In a classic 2005 study, American adults across racial groups were fastest to associate the concept of “American” with white people. White, Black and Asian American adults were asked whether they endorse equality for all citizens. They were then presented with an implicit association test in which participants matched different faces with the categories “American” or “foreign.” They were told that every face was a U.S. citizen.

White and Asian participants responded most quickly in matching the white faces with “American,” even when they initially expressed egalitarian values. Black Americans implicitly saw Black and white faces as equally American – though they too implicitly viewed Asian faces as being less American.

Similarly, in a 2010 study, several groups of American adults implicitly considered British actress Kate Winslet to be more American than U.S.-born Lucy Liu – even though they were aware of their actual nationalities.

Importantly, the development of prejudice can even include feelings that disadvantage one’s own group. This can be seen when Asian Americans who took part in the studies found white faces to be more American than Asian faces. A related 2010 study found that Hispanic participants were also more likely to associate whiteness with “Americanness.”

Language and nationality

These biased views of nationality begin at a young age – and spoken language can often be a primary identifier of who is in which group, as I show in my book “How You Say It.”

Although the U.S. traditionally has not had a national language, many Americans feel that English is critical to being a “true American.” And the president recently released an executive order claiming to designate English as the official language.

In a 2017 study conducted by my research team and led by psychologist Jasmine DeJesus, we gave children a simple task: After viewing a series of faces that varied in skin color and listening to those people speak, children were asked to guess their nationality. The faces were either white- or Asian-looking and spoke either English or Korean. “Is this person American or Korean?” we asked.

We recruited three groups of children for the study: white American children who spoke only English, children in South Korea who spoke only Korean, and Korean American children who spoke both languages. The ages of the children were either 5-6 or 9-10.

The vast majority of the younger monolingual children identified nationality with language, describing English speakers as American and Korean speakers as Korean – even though both groups were divided equally between people who looked white or Asian.

As for the younger bilingual children, they had parents whose first language was Korean, not English, and who lived in the United States. Yet, just like the monolingual children, they thought that the English speakers, and not the Korean speakers, were the Americans.

As they age, however, children increasingly view racial characteristics as an integral part of nationality. By the age of 9, we found that children were considering the white English speakers to be the most American, compared with Korean speakers who looked white or English speakers who looked Asian.

Interestingly, this impact was more pronounced in the older children we recruited in South Korea.

Deep roots

So it seems that for children and adults alike, assessments of what it means to be American hinge on certain traits that have nothing to do with the actual legal requirements for citizenship. Neither whiteness nor fluency in English is a requirement to become American.

And this bias has consequences. Research has found that the degree to which people link whiteness with Americanness is related to their discriminatory behaviors in hiring or questioning others’ loyalty.

That we find these biases in children does not mean they are in any way absolute. We know that children begin to pick up on these types of biased cultural cues and values at a young age. It does mean, however, that these biases have deep roots in our psychology.

Understanding that biases exist may make it easier to correct them. So Americans celebrating the Fourth of July perhaps should ponder what it means to be an American – and whether social biases distort your beliefs about who belongs.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 2, 2020.

Katherine Kinzler receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Former Rep. Colin Allred is jumping back into the Texas Senate race, after losing to Ted Cruz eight months ago.

In a video released Tuesday, Allred, who flipped a red-leaning district in 2018, pledged to take on “politicians like [Texas Sen.] John Cornyn and [Attorney General] Ken Paxton,” who “are too corrupt to care about us and too weak to fight for us,” while pledging to run on an “anti-corruption plan.”

Democrats are hopeful that a messy Republican primary — pitting Cornyn against Paxton, who has weathered multiple scandals in office and leads in current polling — could yield an opening for a party in search of offensive opportunities. But unlike in 2024, when Allred ran largely unopposed in the Senate Democratic primary, Democrats are poised to have a more serious and crowded primary field, which could complicate their shot at flipping the reliably red state.

Former astronaut Terry Virts announced his bid last week, when he took a swing at both parties in his announcement video. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) has voiced interest, while former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and 2022, has been headlining packed town halls. State Rep. James Talarico told POLITICO he’s “having conversations about how I can best serve Texas.”

Allred, a former NFL player turned congressman, leaned heavily into his biography for his launch video. He retold the story of buying his mom a house once he turned pro, but said, “you shouldn’t have to have a son in the NFL to own a home.”

“Folks who play by the rules and keep the faith just can’t seem to get ahead. But the folks who cut corners and cut deals — well, they’re doing just fine,” Allred continued. “I know Washington is broken. The system is rigged. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In six years in Congress, I never took a dime of corporate PAC money, never traded a single stock.”

Turning Texas blue has long been a dream for Democrats, who argued the state’s increasing diversity will help them eventually flip it. But Trump’s significant inroads with Latino voters in Texas, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, may impede those hopes. Of the 10 counties that shifted the farthest right from the 2012 to 2024 presidential elections, seven are in Texas, according to a New York Times analysis, including double-digit improvements in seven heavily Latino districts.

Early polling has found Allred leading Paxton by one percentage point in a head-to-head contest — though he trailed Cornyn by six points. The polling, commissioned by Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP leadership-aligned super PAC that supports Cornyn, underscored Paxton’s general election weakness while showing Cornyn losing to Paxton in the GOP primary.

​Politics