Democracy in Troubled Times | When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America by Dara Strolovitch
When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America
From climate change to opioids to COVID-19, the language of crisis is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, as are assertions by scholars, activists, and policymakers that crises are forces for change. Using a range of data, I show that whether or not a problem is treated as an intervention-worthy crisis is not a reflection of its severity but is instead partly endogenous to politics, and that for every problem labeled a crisis resolvable through government action, myriad others affecting marginalized groups are normalized as non-crises -- ongoing hard times that are treated by dominant political actors as natural, inevitable, immune to, and not warranting state intervention. Through a set of matched cases, I show that these dynamics of “crisis politics” were borne out, with devastating consequences, for Black, Latino, Indigenous, and sole-borrower-women homeowners in the American “foreclosure crisis” of the early twenty-first century and the unacknowledged foreclosure non-crisis that preceded it. Crisis politics, I conclude, have become a mode of governance, a mechanism for justifying the use of state power to protect privileged groups and for justifying its retrenchment or redirection when it comes to marginalized groups. Understanding crisis politics and the twinned lenses of crisis and non-crisis are therefore key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the US and to understanding competing ideas about the role of the state more generally.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Institute for Social Science Research, SBS Research Council, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Sociology Department, and the School of Public Policy.
This is an event series designed to create intellectual conversation and community support for students, staff, faculty, and community members during what is sure to be an exciting, yet nerve-racking, election cycle. We envision that each speaker’s visit and related activities will generate opportunities for our community to come together to process and engage deeply with one another over the elections and what they mean for the fundamental concept of Democracy. Visit Democracy in Troubled Times.
Dr. Strolovitch will be discussing funding through the Russell Sage Foundation in an ISSR panel discussion on Friday, April 11. RSVP to secure your spot!
About

Dara Strolovitch (Ph.D., Yale University) is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, and taught previously at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University. She is also co-director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies and recent co-editor of the American Political Science Review. Her research and teaching focus on inequality and representation in American politics and public policy, which she has explored using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods in dozens of articles, chapters, and award-winning books, including When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America and Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics. When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People was awarded the 2024 Best Book Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and a 2024 Choice Award from the American Library Association. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Irving Louis Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Brookings Institution, the World Health Organization, the American Political Science Association, Georgetown University, Stanford University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as by internal grants from Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and Princeton University, and her research and graduate mentorship were recognized in 2018 by the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus’s Outstanding Career Award.