Black and Blue: How African Americans Judge the U.S. Legal System. By James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 196 pp., $29.95, paper.

Abstract

It is rare to read a book in the main of political science that considers African American political psychology, namely, how race intersects with evaluations about law and legal institutions-historically and racially fraught systems that remain so despite critical attention to their racially imbalanced processes and outcomes. In Black and Blue: How African Americans Judge the U.S. Legal System, James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson provide a wide-ranging but critical empirical assessment of what shapes African Americans' support for the judiciary. Although the authors focus on the U.S. Supreme Court, the findings do much more. In the simplest terms, the book asks how Black people's experiences with law enforcement, their attachment to group-based politics, and their reaction to legal symbology bend or bind the Court's legitimacy. The answers are not always obvious. Black and Blue may well be "one of the most comprehensive analyses of African Americans" support for the legal system.. ." (p. 6). The chief claim animating the book's pages is that African Americans vary in their evaluation of legal institutions. The core evidence is drawn from the (1) Freedom and Tolerance Surveys (FATS), (2) a survey of Black Americans (n = 1,676), and (3) a randomized experiment of the same. Black and Blue is methodical and organized to be attendant to different variables that explain various legal attitudes among Black Americans. Notwithstanding its interest in one racial group, Chapter 2 presents data on interracial attitudes related to the courts to provide context for the remainder of the book. Gibson and Nelson find that Black and Latino respondents, for example, are generally less supportive