2018-19 CASBS fellow and political scientist Kim Williams sat down to discuss Black Lives Matter, social movements, the census, and the contentious political landscape of the last decade.
Kim's book "Mark One Or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America" tells the story of the struggle to include a multiracial category on the U.S. census.
States Parties and Social Movements Cambridge University Press
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. I sat down with political scientist Kim Williams to discuss Black Lives Matter, social movements, and the political landscape of the last decade. She shared her history with the pioneers of the study of social movements, Sid Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and Doug McAdam, all former CASBS fellows, and her contribution to their book, Dynamics of Contention. In 2013, people took to the streets to protest the disproportionate police violence faced by Black citizens in the United States. A social movement, Black Lives Matter, emerged. It was seen as a wake-up call to a country that thought it had dealt with racism decades ago. Kim's current work is focused on situating Black Lives Matter within the theory of social movements and the politics of contention. Let me ask first about your first tour of duty here. What is it, 20 years ago? When were you here first? How did you get here? What did you do?
Kim Williams: Yeah, 20 years ago I was in graduate school at Cornell, and I had just started grad school. I only was in for a couple years, and so I didn't know anything about the cushy lives of academics and what was even possible. And my dissertation advisor said, hey Kim, you know, you wanna come to California? I was always happy to come to California. I grew up here. He said, you wanna go to Stanford? There's this fellowship in contentious politics and a bunch of his friends, his name's Sid Tarrow, and a bunch of his friends, Doug McAdam, who's a former director of the center, Charles Tilly, a number of other people were all getting together and bringing their graduate students here. And so we got to come maybe 3 times, 3 visits, and hang out, have lunch, you know, chill with everybody that was here. It was just amazing.
John Markoff: One of the things that occurred to me when you talked about coming here as a graduate student with other graduate students and being participating, I was thinking about building cultures. I mean, the parallel for me in terms of other similar institutional things is DARPA—it was ARPA at the point in the '60s—used to have these meetings, and they were famously at Snowbird in Alta, where the project investigators would come together, but then they would bring their graduate students, and the graduate students would literally sit in a circle outside of the, you know, the big heavyweight guys. But they would participate, and it built this culture and a community, a research community.
Kim Williams: Did it have that kind of effect? It did. I mean, we all got to sit at the grown-ups' table. But yeah, it did have that effect. I mean, I'm still friends with many of those people that were here back then. And Sid was very good at— he was an excellent mentor. He still is. But it also gave me access to all these other people who now I can call anytime and they know me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I couldn't believe it. I could not believe that it could be this good. And I thought, if I can ever get back here, and I never even said it out loud. 'cause I thought, what are the odds? So I just kept it to myself and I never said anything. And then I knew that you had to have tenure to get here, and then I couldn't get tenure at Harvard 'cause everybody gets fired. So it took a long time, but I held onto the dream. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know. That's one of the old CASBS where you had to have tenure.
John Markoff: Now we have a great mix of early stage academics who don't have tenure yet.
Kim Williams: I know, I didn't know that. I just thought— sort of mid-career and then, yeah. It's okay, it's better this way.
John Markoff: So the other thing, I think maybe you mentioned it first about sort of disciplinary viewpoints, I mean political scientists and sociologists historically at CASBS, you know, one of the driving forces in the '50s was they had this notion that there was singular behavioral science was going to emerge that would actually cross discipline boundaries. What's it like now between disciplines and how do you interact with sociologists and other kinds of, I mean, either now or just generally in your intellectual life?
Kim Williams: I think of myself almost as much as a sociologist as I do a political scientist. But as a scholar, I mean, I read mostly— I read sociologists more than political scientists in many ways. So I, at first, when I first got in this business, I thought— I felt like maybe I picked the wrong discipline. Maybe I shouldn't have been a political scientist. Ah, this is what these people are doing? I don't know. Is this gonna work? And then I realized that I didn't have to stick to just this narrow conception, that in fact I could create space for myself within this discipline to do the kinds of work that I wanted to do as long as other people found it interesting and I did. So, and I was fortunate to have a model in Sid who also, who was a joint, I mean, he's emeritus now, but he was joint sociology and political scientist in political science at Cornell and other people who just said, look, it's about the question, it's not about, whatever disciplinary label.
John Markoff: And the project that they were working on that you got involved in, what was the focus?
Kim Williams: Well, we ended up writing a book. It's called States, Parties, and Social Movements. And essentially, it's about the idea of contentious politics. And what you have is a real disciplinary divide between sociologists and political scientists. So political scientists tend to study elections—surprise. Sociologists tend to study social movements. And it's as if they're these silos. And so the work of my advisor, his mentor, Tilly, and a bunch of other people has been over the past, you know, 40 years or something to try to move us toward an understanding of contentious politics where it's about institutional politics are infused with social movements and vice versa. So they had been working on that for years and years. And then when we, the younger people at that time came along, we started working on this project that's again about fusing these kind of concepts that are generally thought of as separate. So my chapter in this book, it's a part of my dissertation, which was about state-level legislation and the social movement that was trying to get the states to act. You know, nowadays there's no way to study social movements without paying attention to the connections to electoral politics. You can't get around that book, "Dynamics of Connection." It's a big, big book in the field. I think a lot of people ought to be paying attention to it. I think that it really could upend the field of political science if political scientists paid more attention because we have this tendency as political science, which is why I didn't feel like I fit in this discipline until I, fortunately, I ended up with Sid Tarrow as my advisor because he helped me to see that, yeah, I'm interested in elections, but I'm interested in how people, just people power. What does it mean when people are able to get together ragtag groups of people, small. Sometimes, you know, you end up with— they— this book, you know, The Dynamics of Contention, and all the other books that are in the series, it forces you to think about institutional politics differently. If you really take it seriously, what you have to acknowledge is that time and time and time again, what we have is social movements that are interjecting themselves into the political process to the point where they're a part of the political process. And it keeps bearing itself out. That book was written way before the Tea Party, but it applies very well to that scenario. It also applies in many ways to my work. So it's durable because they were pulling together something that was already clearly true but hadn't really been articulated. And it's also, as time moves on, because of the social movementization of politics we were talking about, I think that's accelerating over time. The extent to which people will say, well, I want, you know, what kind of president do you want? Guy I can have a beer with. Something about what are we basing our our judgments on. And I think that it becomes more and more of this kind of personal sort of preferences and sort of kind of social movement-like motivations. I, in a way, think of Trump as kind of— is he the leader of a social movement? I kind of think maybe, because he's not really trying to be the president of the United States. Where did Trump come from in terms of—
John Markoff: if you look at it from the prism of race, does that explain Trump, or does Trump get explained by immigration, or is it, you know, economic decline, or some mix of the above?
Kim Williams: It's a number of things that come together to create this situation. You think about a decline of trust in government over a very long period of time. You think about the fact that our elections are so, so racialized. But we don't often think of it like that. Mitt Romney, something like— and all of them before, um, something like 94% of all— 93, 94% of all the votes that Mitt Romney got were from white people, you know. And so the GOP is essentially a party of white people, and that's just what it is. Call it— but, but yet that's not what it's called. We talk, we talk about it in all these other ways. And that's why I'm glad I'm not a journalist, because I want to be able to say, here we are.
John Markoff: Well, there are different forms of journalism in America. I mean, I'm wed to this tradition of sort of nonpartisan journalism as much as it's possible.
Kim Williams: So it's that, but it's also, it's other things. So you think about, there's this, Sid and other people that are my mentors have talked about the movementization of American politics. And so How do we end up with somebody who has no qualifications for the job? Again, it goes back to a decline of trust in government. So, you know, how do you get elected? You can't get elected by saying you're from within the Beltway. You have to say, I don't know these people, who are these people? I don't have anything to do with it, but I can fix it, you know. Um, so there's no other business in the world that's like that. I mean, would you want to get on an airplane and say, well, you know, just because Mick Jagger is gonna fly this plane, but he can sing. But can he really fly a plane? No, he has no idea how to do that. So I expect that we will see more of that moving forward. There's gonna be all kinds of people— I don't know, Oprah says she's not running— but all these people who have nothing, you know, never been involved in politics, who I believe will be candidates, right?
John Markoff: Wouldn't you say that that social movement is in fact the Tea Party? I mean, I often feel that that he is the result of, the net result of the rise of the Tea Party.
Kim Williams: I think that's probably true, but I also think that here we are now with the alt-right, which is a totally different beast. I mean, it's related, but these, but the alt-right, at least the Tea Party, they were trying to talk about couch it in a patriotic kind of, they had on the, you know, the revolutionary outfits and stuff. The alt-right, they're not interested, they're not trying to promote democracy, but they set the stage for where we are now. I think that also, if you look at the fact that he was able to use the media so much, 'cause we'd never seen it before. He kept saying outrageous thing after outrageous thing, and of course it's gonna be covered, right? What else can you do when he says Mexicans are rapists or all of it? So I think that he also, in a way, becomes president because You know, I teach a Women in Politics class, and I think about the gender dynamics of this, right? You have a majority of white women that are voting for Trump. You have an even bigger majority of white men who are voting for Trump. And, you know, how is it that that happened? I mean, I look at this story, and I have to say, I am so glad it wasn't my people. You can't blame my people for what happened, 'cause we were all for Hillary, okay? That was just, at the end of the day, when it came down to it, you know, something like 96% of all black women voted for Hillary Clinton. 51% of white women vote for her?
John Markoff: There is this argument that the Russian bots suppressed in a meaningful way the black vote.
Kim Williams: Yeah, that may well be true, and in fact that's part of what I think I'm getting into that with this Twitter, because this piece I'm working on right now is about Twitter, and you've got to deal with the bots. I do think though that, here's the thing, you know, so much of the time when you look at the election and it's election night and John King is up there with all of the, you know, his stuff, okay, I love that. He's great at that, you know, but you look at it and it's just the questions always come down to race, even though we don't, it's not, it's not phrased in that way, but it's kind of like, okay, everybody, all the results are in from Pennsylvania except for Philadelphia. And it's kind of like the Black people in Philadelphia have to hold it down. They've got to be the ones, you know, to show up in droves. Otherwise we're doomed, you know, and that whole setup, I don't know, it's not right.
John Markoff: So one of the implications, I mean, one of the greatest fears of the Republican Party is greater participation of non-whites in American politics. Now, in my own world where I was looking at technology and the Silicon Valley view that technology is like the most important force in the world, at a certain point because of something that Danny Kahneman said to me, I had this come-to-Jesus moment when I realized that demography is more important than technology. The aging of the world's population except for Africa and the Middle East means that what we really have to think about is a very different demographic structure than we have right now in the world. It's going to just change dramatically. It's going to be an old world at the end of the century. It also, in America, is going to be a less white world. And how, you know, that's the common wisdom. How will that play out in the political process?
Kim Williams: Yeah, I think that we're going to see a lot of white backlash. I think that what we've seen, and we've seen it historically, If you look at every single moment, big moments in American history like Reconstruction or the civil rights era, what we have is you have moments where, where we start off. Let's start from the beginning. Okay. We start from the founding of the nation when only 6% of the people that are living here can actually vote. Because what you have is none of the slaves, none of the women, if you're under 16 or 18 or something. And if you, if you don't own property, even if you're white, but you know, a man and you don't own property, then you can't vote. So that narrows it to 6%. So, but then over time we've expanded the electorate, things have gotten better. But what happened, the problem is, is that if we as Americans want to— many Americans want to believe we're on this track that's just inevitably going up, and that's called liberalism. The idea that we are expanding the electorate, we're making things better for people. Yeah, we started off with all the slaves and the women were subjugated and everything, but look at us now. Okay, but really it's better to think of it as a roller coaster. That's what we are on, because you think about the end of slavery and then you think about the rise of the KKK. You think about the finally the end of Jim Crow segregation, but you know, but you have people standing in the schoolhouse door, segregation today and forever. You know, you have third parties that come along to try to capture that type of sentiment. Then you fast forward to now Or let's go to the Obama era. All this time, did you see that? I can't remember that fascinating article in the New York Times, which was about all of the hate speech and, and, um, the rise of hate groups and these efforts that Obama's people had to make to try to make it so that the white supremacy was on the rise. Okay. And, and then it continued that, that process accelerated as Trump becomes president. And so what we end up with is, is this white backlash that doesn't go away. And so what I think is that as we move into a situation where whites are the minority, even with the Census Bureau, I've talked to Ken Pruitt when he comes next week, 'cause he told me that the Census Bureau is trying to find some euphemisms to make it so it's not so scary for white people so that they can put it, I don't know how they're gonna put it. Whatever they're gonna say. Because it freaks people out. It freaks people out. They don't, they want, There's a hierarchy here in this country, and white people want to stay on top. And some of them are people who are the white supremacy types who are ready to go to the mat for it. But a lot of them are people who just say, "I don't see race. I don't see a problem here.
John Markoff: All lives matter." Let me ask you about the Census Bureau and this issue of citizenship question and how it might play out in 2020. The political process, do you have—
Kim Williams: are you following it? I'm following it, and I'm going to be following it even more coming up because I have to go to University of Washington right after I leave here. As soon as I get home, I'm just home for 2 days, and then I got to go up there to talk about— to do a panel on the census. So I'm going to have to spend a little bit of time reacquainting myself with things. But the general story is kind of familiar. To people who study the census. What you have with the Census Bureau is a structural problem. So the Census Bureau is desperately trying to maintain a sense of objectivity. They have to. They're the fact finder for the nation. They don't want to be caught up in a situation where, you know, like the FBI right now, where people are questioning, is it partisan? Is it not? So even when their budget is cut, even when people diss them, even when members of Congress say, Don't fill out the— like Michelle Bachmann, don't, don't fill it out. Okay. They have to just sit there and take it. They can't say a thing. They can't even advocate for themselves. Really. Their liaison to Congress. It's a joke. All that person did when I was— I was on the Census Advisory Committee, which Census Advisory Committees were formed because in the '80s to try to mitigate some of the anger that many minority communities had about the undercount. And so they really can't, they can't say much without jeopardizing their sense of impartiality and objectivity. So they're in a bad spot.
John Markoff: What's the current state of race-related questions on the upcoming census?
Kim Williams: My understanding is that all of the categories that were there before will still be there. That's my understanding.
John Markoff: Okay, and so political consequences to that, I mean, is that something that we already sort of fought and won? That the count is more representative now than it was, or the ability to get these multiracial kinds of things has made a difference? Did that have a political impact?
Kim Williams: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's having a big impact. So in 2000, for the first time ever, Census Bureau says people can mark as many races as they want. So before that, people had to mark one race and one race only. Now, people oftentimes, sometimes they wouldn't even follow those instructions, and so people would mark more than one race, even before they were allowed to. So what is the census? What do they do with that? And I will say that Ken Pruitt told me, he was the director at the time of the Census Bureau. And he said that people who would mark just a little bit harder with the pencil or something, that they'd mark black and white, say, and if you press a little harder on black, then they count you as black. Yeah. And so that's unsustainable, you know? At any kind of level. And so the Bureau found themselves in a situation where racial demographics were changing more rapidly than they were able to keep up with all of the shifts, right? Because we had 5 major categories and that was it, Mark I, only one. And so finally, after a long protracted discussion, and the part of the battle was between civil rights organizations wanted to keep it like it is because they were concerned that if we added a multiracial category that it was going to dilute the numbers of people who currently identify as minorities. Okay. So you have a couple of different actors. You have the social movement, then you have the civil rights activists or establishment essentially. And then you have Democrats and Republicans. Okay. So at the time Clinton is the president. And so in a way, both Democrats and Republicans wanted recognition of multiracial people, but they wanted it for different reasons. Okay. So the Democrats wanted it because they felt that it was important to allow people to identify with their full selves. And also it's really hard to tell people that you've got to— there's just some logistical problems. If you talk about allowing people to self-identify, then you're gonna narrow their choices so much that they, how is that even self-identification, right? So the Democrats had a kind of imperative on the basis of allowing people to express themselves. Republicans were trying to undermine civil rights laws because all of our civil rights laws are set up with the idea that we have racial categories that allow us to implement the civil rights laws. If you have increasing numbers of people who are counted as multiracial or some other something, then that can complicate that process.
John Markoff: You're studying the Black Lives Matter movement this year, is that correct?
Kim Williams: I'm at the beginning of a new, of a new project. I had finished everything else before I got here, so that's why I didn't present until very late, because I was still trying to get my thoughts together. But yes, I'm working on Black Lives.
John Markoff: And how is the way you approached Black Lives Matter as a political scientist different than you would have done if you had been a journalist? How do you collect data about Black Lives Matter?
Kim Williams: Well, you know, the first thing you gotta do is you gotta look and read everything everybody's written and figure out where do I, where can I contribute, you know, to this literature. That's the first thing. And so I think that my contribution is going to be in the ability to talk about Black lives in the context of this current election, and none of the prior research has done that. So I'm interested in the evolution of opposition to Black Lives Matter over time. And what we had at the very beginning in 2000— so we could say the beginning is 2014 when Mike Brown is shot and there's all of this upheaval around that, right? And almost right after that, what you have is a counter movement that forms, All Lives Matter, #AllLivesMatter. And these people are saying, listen, we care about Black lives, but it's not just Black lives, it's all these other people's lives too, okay? And of course, and Black Lives Matter is not saying that other people's lives don't matter. They're just saying when it comes to the police, we are getting shot disproportionately, okay, at higher rates. And that there's a kind of margin-to-center politics that I really find so appealing. So bell hooks, who's a feminist scholar, right, wrote a bunch of books in the '90s, and she talks about how, how do we think about trying to achieve social justice, right? And her argument is that we start with the people at the margins of society, the people who are trans, the people who are the people who are women, people who are Black, people who are, you know, and that we make sure that those people are in a good space. If we can make sure that those people at the margins of society are better off, then, you know, we're getting to better, more equality as opposed to just, well, there's other ways to do it where you would end up with pretty much status quo.
John Markoff: I just wanted to ask you sort of a current affairs question about Black Lives Matter because I feel like the media has decided at least for the moment, to move on on Black Lives Matter. I mean, you know, there was a time when it was obsessed with the movement and now it's not. And do you have a sense of what's going on and am I right about that and sort of why there's been that shift in the way it's covered?
Kim Williams: I haven't spent much time yet thinking about the media coverage, although I feel like that has to be a big part of my project. I can talk about that momentarily. But I think that what has happened is that Black Lives Matter is manifesting itself in other contexts outside of protest. So it's not just about political protests on the ground, people that are out there with signs, right? It's also about the ways in which, just like we started off talking about the connections between electoral politics and movement politics. So you can think about, for example, all these people who have run for office on essentially a Black Lives Matter platform. You think about Lucy McBath, who's a representative in Georgia. She ran talking about— I have her right here— so that this club of heartbroken mothers stops growing. Her son was shot dead. And so she ran for office. And we're seeing that right now. Michael Brown's mother is running for city council in St. Louis. So, you know, there's ways in which social movements ebb and flow. And they ebb and flow in ways that are not always captured by the mainstream media, in part because mainstream media is, generally speaking, looking for protests and numbers of people at rallies and everything, but you have to think about all of the different ways in which movements manifest themselves. Think about Beyoncé at the Super Bowl with the Black Panther setup. All of these different manifestations that are not necessarily captured as momentum in a journalistic sense, but from an academic perspective, that we would see it that way.
John Markoff: What was your path to studying social movements?
Kim Williams: Well, I grew up in Oakland, and then I went to college at Berkeley, and I was a history major at Berkeley, and so I didn't take any political science courses back then. And then after I graduated from college, I started traveling. I just— I went to West Africa, and I went to Europe, and I went a lot of places, and I was working as a bartender and as an au pair, and I had all these odd jobs. And I was traveling around and then it got to where I started thinking about, you know, why is it that some people have so much in this world and some people have so little? And then who's running this stuff? Who's controlling? What may— who's making these decisions? And so that's how I got into studying politics because I was just interested in inequities and in the arrangements that are underpinning them.
John Markoff: Were you an activist at any point in your college career around locally in Oakland?
Kim Williams: Yeah, I was an activist and went to a lot of protests as a kid. As a young person, I was, you know, anti-apartheid back in the '80s, so I went to a lot of anti-apartheid protests and women's marches.
John Markoff: Yeah. So let me ask about activism and objectivity and your career. Personally, I was very politically active in the anti-war movement through college and then afterwards while I was starting as a journalist. And then there was this moment— this is the late '70s— where I sort of picked my head up and I realized that there was no anti-war movement anymore. You know, I hadn't gotten the memo and I had to get on with my life. And so I made the transition to journalism, not activist journalism. I really sort of had to put down my political point of view, and I did. But I mean, how does it work in academic circles?
Kim Williams: You know, I wanted to be a journalist for a long time, but then I thought, ah, this objectivity thing, it's going to be a little tough to do that. I used to be much more concerned about that than I am now. I would say, like in my first book, Mark One or More, which is about these people who are trying to get a multiracial category added to the census, I felt like what I had to do is tell everybody's side of it. And then leave my own, essentially leave my own. What I ended up doing was kind of leave, I left everybody hanging at the end and people wanted to know what happened next. And I said, well, you know, there is, this is the end of the story up to this date. That's all there is, right? And I was able to kind of punt on that, on giving a normative kind of story about what I thought. But nowadays I'm less concerned about that. I think that, for example, I would find it hard to be a journalist at this point and have to sit up and cover Trump and not actually talk about, this is racism. You know, call it something else. You got to come up with euphemisms and all that. No. So I'm happy because I can say that in my job. So, you know, I have my views and everything, but then at the end of the day, I have to go gather evidence. And if it doesn't pan out, then I can't tell that story.
John Markoff: In your current project at CASBS, have you been able to interact much with people? Are there people who are close enough to your interests that it's been valuable to be here?
Kim Williams: I have had the best time, and there's no one that's working on, you know, anything related to Black Lives Matter, but I've— at lunches, so, you know, I would sit down at lunch. It took me a long time to get to where— to this point of feeling like I have a plan, you know, for how to operate. And I'd go to lunch and I'd sit down and talk to somebody and say, "Hey, what do you think of this?" And they'd say, "Yeah, have you thought about that?" And I'd say, "Uh, no, no I haven't." And then I have to go back and, you know, rework it and think about some other way. So really, the people here have helped me to move this forward to a point where I feel like I have a research question that is worth pursuing. Thank you for this. Sure, thank you. Thanks. Happy to do it.
John Markoff: To learn more about the topics in this episode, check out the show notes. There you'll find links to works by our guests and relevant articles. Thanks for listening.