Dr. Rachel Lienesch Spotlight

We recently interviewed CRRES Affiliate Dr. Rachel Lienesch, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, to discuss her new book project, Identities in Conflict: Racial Politics of the White Left.

Jeffery Giddings: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? How did you get to IU? What’s your academic journey?

Dr. Lienesch: I went to college in Virginia, which is where I grew up, and majored in political science. Everyone who studies political science, especially near D.C., thinks they're going to work on the Hill. By the end of college, after working on a ton of campaigns, I thought, this is not the life for me. I was very lucky to go to a state school with a liberal arts focus, so we didn’t have grad students; faculty did research with undergrads. I got a ton of experience researching with a couple of faculty members, something I had not ever thought [I would be able to do], and that made me interested in doing something more research-oriented. I came to grad school knowing I was broadly interested in race and politics, especially the complicated feelings white people have about race in an era when they're supposed to be more progressive. Over time, I became more interested in how white people on the left deal with the fact that their party is supposed to be progressive on racial issues, but they’re still white, and that creates tensions and triggers for them.

Jeff: Could you tell me more about what you’re currently working on?

Dr. Lienesch: My book project looks at how white Democrats deal with the conflicts that come from being white and a Democrat when talking about racial issues. On racial issues framed broadly, like “we all need to fight inequality”, they're totally on board, because they're more racially liberal than white Republicans according to survey data. But when it starts to become about policies that are completely targeted at other groups that white people won’t benefit from, or when the language becomes more explicit about the role white people play in systemic oppression, even though they’re more racially liberal, they still have that gut instinct of feeling attacked as a white person.

Jeff: What are some of the methodological approaches you’re using within your work?

Dr. Lienesch: My work primarily relies on surveys and experiments. I use survey data to get a lay of the land of how different types of attitudes are correlated with each other. But I also do a lot of experiments because it’s easier to get people to react honestly when you’re running an experiment than when you’re asking them directly, “How does this make you feel?”

... I’m hoping for the book to also do some focus groups among white Democrats and white liberals. It’s important to hear how people talk about these issues in their own language. I suspect

that in a group setting, if one person breaks the wall and says, “Actually, I didn’t love that,” it might give others permission to say, “Oh yeah, I don’t totally feel comfortable with how the party handles this.”

Jeff: That would be interesting, especially in a focus group setting and observing some of these in-group and out-group dynamics. If someone speaks up first, does that cause others to shut down and not say anything? A lot of people are conflict-avoidant now.

Dr. Lienesch: My hope is that if I give them a little permission structure, they might overcome some of that avoidance. If someone says, “actually this is kind of too much for me,” others might say, “oh actually, yeah that’s true for me too.”

Jeff: I’m fascinated with how people come to their ideological positions and how these ideas are expressed in social settings.

Dr. Lienesch: We’re in an era where people are more polarized, so they try to adopt their party’s views. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still experience identity conflict. This would also be true for Republican women when talking about abortion or traditional gender roles. There can be moments where, even if you support your party, something still triggers you because of another identity you hold.

Jeff: What are some outcomes or theories you expect to emerge?

Dr. Lienesch: Part of what I’m finding, and what I’m trying to show, is that we need more nuance when we think about ideology and attitudes. Part of the impetus for this project was there were a lot of articles claiming white Democrats have become extremely liberal on racial issues, that they’re on the left and Republicans are on the right. I grew up in a white Democratic neighborhood and if you talk to these people, it’s a lot more complicated than that. You can be broadly in favor of equality and still have identity concerns where you don’t want your group to feel like it's losing something or being attacked, even if the critique is fair.

Jeff: It feels like these concerns are rooted in the idea that when you’re addressing interests or needs of certain groups, that it is a zero-sum game. If this group is getting “special benefits,” that means it’s a detriment that is pulling resources from your own benefits.

Dr. Lienesch: One hundred percent. One of my experiments looks at it from a policy perspective. I give people a scenario about a local politician proposing a local stimulus payment like universal basic income and I change who is eligible for payments. When eligibility is determined with a baseline of “everyone would get it” and by class, white Democrats are still totally onboard. Once eligibility is based on race, support drops hugely.

Jeff: That's phenomenal, like that’s some really cool work.

Dr. Lienesch: Thank you. It took a long time to convince people this was worth studying... I got a lot of questions about why I wasn't studying white conservatives. And my answer was, because everyone else is. There’s a lot of work on that already. I think we need to stop having totally simplistic stories about “this side believes this, and this side believes this.” If that were true, the Democratic Party would probably have much more progressive views about racial policy than they actually do.

Jeff: We need to be able to look at these multifaceted, multidimensional strings that pull at people's lives and people's identities and how they react to this.

Dr. Lienesch: Yeah, totally. And I think in political science, work about race has been less central than in places like sociology. But there has been that problem, and now I think there's also this problem of trying to flatten people by partisan identity, so all Republicans are the same, all Democrats are the same in a way that erases important nuance that explains why the parties are not landing where you would think they would on certain issues. Partisan identity has become this central focus in American politics research, which is fair and makes sense. But the case I'm trying to make is, when we only focus on partisan identity, we overlook that other things matter at the same time, and those other things pull people apart.

Jeff: Absolutely, I'm excited for when the book comes out! When people engage with your work, what do you hope they are learning or gaining from it?

Dr. Lienesch: A big thing that I want people to engage with [is] that the way that the Democratic Party navigates racial issues is a lot more delicate than what people were thinking in 2020 because in 2020, it was “this is the end of the conservative racial policy in the party.” And there's a huge backlash to that. And that's because you can be broadly in support of equality and egalitarianism and still feel like “I'm part of the group that has the highest status in the hierarchy and I like that.”