ABOUT NIAMBI M. CARTER, PH.D.
An Academic’s Story
Learning and teaching are not only important, but defining aspects in my life. Growing up in PG County, Maryland I was always curious about the ways that racial identities mapped onto loci of power. As an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland I focus on race and ethnic politics and social policy. It is my sincere hope to be able to educate and inspire others inside and outside of the classroom.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
September 12, 2019
Oxford University Press
At the same time that the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, the United States liberalized its immigration policy. While the broadening of the United States's borders to non-European immigrants fits with a black political agenda of social justice, recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, prompting ambivalent or even negative attitudes toward migrants. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment?
PERCEPTUAL KNOTS AND BLACK IDENTITY POLITICS: LINKED FATE, AMERICAN HERITAGE, AND SUPPORT FOR TRUMP ERA IMMIGRATION POLICY WITH TYSON KING-MEADOWS
January 29, 2019
Societies 9(1)
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much ado has been made about how racial anxiety fueled White vote choice for Donald Trump. Far less empirical attention has been paid to whether the 2016 election cycle triggered black anxieties and if those anxieties led blacks to reevaluate their communities’ standing relative to Latinos and immigrants. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we examine the extent to which race consciousness both coexists with black perceptions of Latinos and shapes black support for anti-immigrant legislation. Our results address how the conflation of Latino with undocumented immigrant may have activated a perceptional and policy backlash amongst black voters.
"A SANCTUARY FOR WHOM? RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE" IN BLACK POLITICS IN TRANSITION
October 26, 2018
So called "sanctuary" cities, localities that through formal or informal means decide not to enforce immigration law, are becoming more prevalent and highly charged sites of political contestation. The ethical rationales for devising these spaces is often lost in discourse around national security and safety. What is more, these conversations often elide the racial context in which localities adopt "sanctuary" status. In this paper, I examine the meaning of "sanctuary city" for Black residents of Washington, DC. I seek to understand if and how Blacks have become stakeholders in this ongoing debate around immigration.
August 2015-present
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Howard University
Department of Political Science
Ongoing
RESEARCH PROJECTS
Race and Reparations in the U.S. and abroad (with Powers)
Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey (2016)
Black Conservatism in America (with Gillespie, King-Meadows, and Nunnally)
Race and Nation
OVERVIEW OF COURSES
Graduate Level
This course explores the importance of media and culture designed to influence public opinion and produce specific political outcomes. It looks at how media, broadly considered, creates opportunities for combining classic propaganda techniques for a range of political uses in order to communicate effective political messages.
Undergraduate Level
This course will introduce students to the practice and basic methodologies of Political Science. This course will emphasize quantitative methodologies. This course will cover research design as well as understanding analysis, such as correlation and regression. Additionally, this course emphasizes the everyday ways in which we use research methods and their uses not only in the political realm but their importance for addressing and redressing important social issues.
Graduate Level
This course is a general survey course that examines the ways in which race and ethnicity structures the opportunities of racialized political actors. This course will examine in-group agency, the limits of electoral politics, as well as the import of nontraditional political action. Moreover, the course will examine the tensions that exist within and among minority groups, particularly around policy areas like immigration as well as the inherently competitive nature of zero-sum political competition. Further, we examine the geography of citizenship status, history, and how these forces influence the similarities and differences in political agendas and strategies adopted by different racial/ethnic groups.
Undergraduate Level
The central theme of the course is how Blacks have traditionally been understood in relation to the American state and how this situation has changed over time and continues to evolve. We will interrogate the mechanisms of federal intervention that made the franchise available to the majority of Black people for the first time, strategies to achieve Black officeholding at the federal and state levels, particularly the historic election of Barack Obama, and the limits of and return to states’ rights for the enforcement of Black voting rights in a post-Shelby v. Holder world.