Investment and Invisibility

Abstract

Does political distrust generate a desire to engage in the political process or does it foster demobilization? Utilizing a theoretical framework rooted in government experiences and a mixed-methods research design, this article highlights the racially contingent meaning of political distrust to show that both relationships exist. For Whites, distrust is tied to a perception of tax dollars being poorly spent, leading to increased political involvement as Whites to try to gain control over “their” investment in government. For People of Color, distrust of government is grounded in a fear of the criminal justice system, and thus drives disengagement by motivating a desire for invisibility in relation to the state. Ultimately, this finding highlights a previously unseen racial heterogeneity in the political consequences of distrust. Further, it demonstrates how the state perpetuates racially patterned political inequality in a time when many of the formal laws engendering this dynamic have fallen away.

Performing Social Control: Poverty Governance, Public Finance, and the Politics of Visibility

“…It is upwardly redistributive, anti-democratic, exclusionary, and generally bolsters a winner-take-all status quo in political and economic life (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Radford 2013). It reflects the experiences of many in the largely White and affluent mainstream (Callaghan and Olson 2017; Jenkins 2021; Michener 2019; Michener et al 2022; Rosenthal 2019, 2021; Thurston 2018a). The façade of invisibility masks stark disparities along race and class lines in access to public resources, and it naturalizes specific understandings of which citizens can lay claim to them (see Geertz 1980; Reed 2019).…”

“…The invisible state drives race and class disparities and erodes democracy by masking and obscuring unequal public provision (Brown 2015; Callaghan and Olson 2017; Hacker and Pierson 2010; Jenkins 2021; Michener 2019; Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston 2022; Thurston 2018a, 2018b). Simultaneously, race and class stratification produces a very different visibility-related harm: Stigmatizing policies, practices, and discourses render marginalized populations hyper-visible in the public sphere (Gilens 1999; Rosenthal 2019, 2021, 2023; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Soss and Weaver 2017; Wacquant 2009). That hyper-visibility, according to Browne (2015:16), operates as a “technology of social control” where, through their “practices, policies, and performances,” state actors “exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place.’” These two dimensions of political visibility—the relative invisibility of some policies and the hyper-visibility of marginalized populations—interact in the domain of poverty governance, including housing and carceral policies.…”