Michael Rosino, "Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing" (UNC Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimper, host of the Public Policy Channel. And we are joined today by Michael Rosino, who is the author of Democracy is Awkward, Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing. New out from University of North Carolina Press. Michael, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. So I wonder if we might start off by asking you to tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what brought you to this book.

Absolutely. So I am an assistant professor of sociology at Malawi University. My research focuses broadly on racial politics, how it intersects with media policy areas. My previous work has focused on things like drug policy.

how people discuss policy and politics in the media, as well as some overlap with things like social movements and collective action. And actually, the project I'm working on next is really looking at a broad sociological framework for racial politics. What really brought me to this book, Democracy is Awkward, this was my dissertation on

My dissertation back in about 2015, as you can see when you read the book, it's like a case study that I didn't realize how relevant it would be today when I was doing it. You know, I didn't even realize how tumultuous the 2015-2016 time span would be in terms of politics. But really a question that was really driving my foray into this kind of research was,

was just thinking about, you know, I've learned so much as a sociologist about political inequality, how various policies and practices disenfranchise people of color, particularly Black and Hispanic people, from accessing political influence. And that has really taken me down sort of a deep dive. I've looked in historical records. I've looked at all kinds of data,

But what I was curious about is, you know, we have these spaces that we tend to think of as these very robust democratic ideals, grassroots organizing, local politics. These tend to be spaces where we kind of imagine anything is possible.

But as I was sitting, you know, thinking about these two kind of contrasting political worlds, I was wondering how they kind of collide in the everyday experiences of particularly grassroots progressive organizing, where people, at least on paper and their agendas, are trying to work towards racial equality in politics. They're trying to empower disempowered groups.

And so I just really wanted to understand, you know, more on the local micro level, you know, how do these challenges present themselves and what are people doing at that level to to challenge them or to navigate them? And so that's really what what what motivated me. That's kind of the big question that I didn't see other people addressing in really clear ways.

Yeah, that's what brought me to this. Terrific. So before I ask you to tell us about what you learned, I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about methods, talk about process. What did you do? Who did you talk to over what period of time? Those sorts of things. Absolutely. This was my first real ethnographic study. My previous research, and I actually did a New Books Networks podcast on my previous book on ethnography.

the drug policies in the United States, how people talk about it. I did more of like a content analysis. So this was an amazing opportunity for me to really do some on the ground observation, talk to real flesh and blood people, not just reading internet comments. So my research was about, I would say about 15, 16 months of field work and,

ethnographic analysis, I basically participated with and observed mainly around three different local chapters of a progressive grassroots organization. My research is really centered on the Northeastern United States. And so I'll be curious to hear as people read it, to what extent they can see glimmers of that in their own region. But yeah, essentially what I did was kind of classic,

Multi-site ethnography. I showed up to every single possible event I could. I took tons of notes on my iPhone that made it really convenient. I...

Basically collected all the materials I could, any kind of document, any kind of agendas, any kind of notes. And I also did about, I think, about 45, 46 interviews with participants. And so I really tried to triangulate my observations in the field, the questions I asked in interviews and those answers and the documents that I had. So that really was a rich data source. Yeah.

And I really started paying attention to a few different things as I was spending time in the field. The first one was this overall theme of like tension and discomfort that would come up around certain topics.

things that people tended to avoid. And then also just what are some of the habits and routines? Like I know habits is a really big focal concept in my book. So like what were those kind of habits and routines that kind of took over that maybe participants weren't aware of, but that I noticed. And then I also did some participation myself. I wanted to get a kind of a feeling for what it's like to actually, you know, not just observe these spaces, but to actively be a part of it. So I went to

I went to campaign events where people were standing outside with placards. I went to big, like organizational meetings of the party on a larger scale. Also just would hang out with people in very informal settings in their homes, casually talking, talking.

And stuff like that. So I just tried to get as much possible data as I could possibly collect over that period of just what was going on in these spaces. So one of the conundrums that drives the book, it seems to me, is that we've got these

Putatively progressive organizations, right, that have often very good rhetoric about racial inclusion, among other things. But they tend to be members tend to be disproportionately white and leadership is overwhelmingly white.

So walk us through how we understand that or how they understand that. Yeah, absolutely. That was definitely kind of, you know, I wasn't completely gobsmacked by that when I started noticing it, but it wasn't like something I totally had in mind when I started this project. It was like a further, well, there's this whole other paradox. I would say that

This is kind of where I get at this whole idea that kind of undergirds the book about awkwardness and what I'm calling racial awkwardness. Essentially, what I noticed is that, yeah, these platforms are very progressive. They're very much focused on racial justice.

The participants have a very strong anti-racist identity. They think of themselves as being advocates of racial justice in various ways, their affiliations, the things they advocate for at certain points. But what I really noticed was driving a lot of the kind of implicit exclusion and the concentration of power, what I call the white consensus in the book, where

The decision making agenda setting is all according to a consensus about what sort of normal, familiar, comfortable with the white participants in particular. So much of that was driven by sort of a need to make sure that they had a sense of authority and control.

It was very much driven by a sense of familiarity and comfort. So the people we have in our organization, these are the people that are like us. These are the people we like. Or these are the particular communities we do outreach to, not because of any kind of strategic reason or whatever.

necessarily because it advances our values, but because, hey, we know the people here. We're familiar with them. They're like us. There are kind of people. And I think a lot of those kinds of assumptions just implicitly tend to build up over time. And I noticed that that became kind of an increasingly common

tense topic then for me to bring up, you know, as, as a researcher, it's natural to want to ask, okay, I'm observing this. How do you account for it? So as you mentioned, how they accounted for it was a whole number of different discursive strategies, everything from over, uh, emphasizing the whiteness of their own communities. You know, we just live in a very white place. So it just reflects the natural, uh,

demographics of our community to kind of just becoming very uncomfortable with the topic and trying to push me away from it. So I talk about how incoherent a lot of times the participants would be when I'd ask them to account for that. Hey, your agenda is very pro inclusion, empowerment of people of color. I've noticed that your practices, your demographics don't comport with that.

And what was, I think, especially difficult for these participants because they had been lulled into this kind of pattern of of comfort is for them to imagine alternatives.

So one thing that I saw was really difficult is that their political or democratic imaginations about how they could shift this had really kind of shrunk. So in the book, I think I referred to it as like a constrained consciousness. They are constrained consciousness. They really struggled to imagine genuine good faith, solidarity based ways to engage

engage and collaborate with any type of marginalized community who wasn't already present, maybe in a tokenized fashion. And I think part of that is because of how difficult it was for them to imagine giving up control of the organization, potentially dealing with the conflict or difficulty of encountering people with different perspectives and

different goals. And also because I think because there was already this sense of this is our organization, this is what we want, this is how things are going, that I think those ideas were very, not only frightening, but I think there was definitely something about feeling like they're losing the organization. Like this isn't ours anymore. And

So I think one of the major tensions that I saw is there is definitely a part of how we think about collective action, how we think about politics that isn't strictly strategic. Like we focus so much on rational action. You know, people have these goals. They're going to do these very concrete strategic things. And what I noticed is like cultural norms, assumptions, the

the routines that maybe are energizing people, but at the same time, we're making them a little stuck in, you know, whatever kind of trajectory they're on. All of those things are just as powerful and just as profound. And if they're not putting their habits and aware of their habits in conversation with ideal strategies and the outcomes that they're saying they want and having that really uncomfortable conversation, having that productive conflict, then,

that kind of inertia can really just take over, be a source of cognitive dissonance, and then it's something that's completely silenced or avoided. So that's kind of what I tended to see in terms of explaining those outcomes. So while these are disproportionately white spaces, they are not entirely white spaces. And you did also talk to members who are people of color of one category or another.

How are they making sense of these institutions and their place in them? Yeah, I mean, that was probably one of my most important sources of analysis was just the juxtaposition. I kind of thought of it in the tradition of critical race theory, where people talk about like a counter narrative. They were making similar observations, but they just had very in-depth

answers. They had analysis. They had an understanding of the why. If I were to ask, if I asked them, hey, why do you think it is that this organization is disproportionately or predominantly white? Why do you think they struggle with outreach? Why do you think they struggle with inclusion? They had very pragmatic, very clear eyed,

uh, perspectives on what was going on. They understood that the, uh, assumptions and habits of their white compatriots were oftentimes a barrier. They recognized how uncomfortable the, their white, uh,

colleagues tended to be in terms of imagining ways of engaging in solidarity or power sharing, maybe working as a collaborator or a partner with a certain community, not taking the lead or not trying to kind of extract some big electoral gains out of it, but just doing it out of an extension of values and improving your standing and the respect in that community.

They recognized all of those things. Many of them grappled with whether or not this organization was even the place for them, whether they would be better served in a different progressive organization. Many of them expressed frustration. Many of them expressed a need to maybe overhaul the organization or plan some type of very intentional either internal education plan.

like saying, hey, this is something that needs to be brought to the fore. We need to have extended conversations about this. Or just saying, you know, we need to get in the driver's seat. We need to basically have an insurgency within the party to kind of force their hand to have the walk and the talk meet together to actually say, you know, we are saying all these things on paper, but

let's actually push in that direction and let's actually have people of color lead the way. And I think all of those things really reflected not only the critiques that I had made and noticed just from being someone who is ensconced in this world and just aware of these things, but also demonstrated a very strong sort of counter-reaction

perspective. This almost gave me like a sense of like, OK, this is a thwarted potential, their perspective, their their way of thinking about how to organize in a spontaneous way when something arises or here's how you organize in solidarity with the community without being paternalistic.

Or here's how you navigate these kind of productive conflicts that come from people having different perspectives and come out with a better consensus that's more mutually inclusive and maybe more grounded in a better strategy. They had...

You know, it was almost like they had dealt with these tensions, this kind of awkwardness their whole lives. That was just a fact of their experience as marginalized people. So they didn't have the privilege of avoiding these kind of dicey conversations, these kind of dicey issues. So, yeah, what I really found was how much.

They had so much to offer that was basically being ignored by this white consensus in the organization. So it also kind of demonstrated, like I said, this thwarted potential for how organizations like this could potentially be.

If there was more power sharing, if there was more openness.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. And you didn't see a whole lot of opportunity for that, did you? From the existing leadership, they did not.

Is it fair to say that they did not seem as a practical matter open, even if rhetorically they were open? I don't think so at the time that I did the study. You know, there were definitely glimmers towards the end that things were happening. You know, in the book, I talk about how there were some efforts that were spearheaded by participants of color of trying to have these conversations going. There was an intense

An instance of a protest that took place at a regional convention that I wasn't at, but a lot of people talked about it being a big watershed moment where some of the participants of color actually tried to push back.

So things I think we're coming to a head in an interesting way. You know, I do think that I don't know how much of this is like my observer effect. Maybe I went in there. I was poking around asking these questions and it just made that I'm kind of go. I guess we do have to confront this.

Um, you know, I also think maybe this would be a very different kind of thing if I had been in there like four years later, you know, let's say the racial reckoning period of 2020. Maybe there would have been a little bit more of an impetus to reconcile some of these things, even if it still maybe would have been very unwieldy and potentially unsuccessful. But during the time I was there, it was something that would come up in conversations, but I

it kind of just always was shoved to the side as either impractical, unimaginable, or just kind of discomforting in terms of like, yeah, but that would mean we have to give up X, Y, Z. That would mean we have to let these people in. That would mean that we have to, you know, have some really difficult and awkward conversations or, you know,

you know, maybe we go into a community and try to connect with people and they don't like us or, you know, all these kinds of things. So yeah, at least the time I was there, I did not see much of that. And whatever efforts I did see still kind of fell under the umbrella of things, maybe being pretty extractive, awkward and not in the good sense of like, I'm going to do this, even though it's awkward, but like people being so uncomfortable and,

in certain settings with the novelty or with being in certain certain spaces that they kind of botched the situation or just really, really wanting to be the authority in the room, really wanting to be in control of the situation. Yeah. So all of those things remain barriers, especially, you know, in the overall patterns for sure. Yeah.

always ironic to see organizations that theoretically exist to fight for progressive change resist any effort at organizational or internal change. Yeah, absolutely. I've

I thought it was interesting. As you mentioned, the field work you did for this is going on a decade or so. I wonder, have you kept up with the organization? Are there people you're still in touch with? Do you have any sense that things have changed in the intervening period? I think that there have been... I don't know how substantive the changes have been. And I haven't been super in touch with my participants. I think...

In particular, I think that I've noticed that at least like a lot of these conversations were beginning to come to fruition. I think that also there have maybe been efforts to I know one of one of the chapters actually now has a person of color in charge of it, where previously it was predominantly white. So things like that, I don't know from the outside how cosmetic any of that is and how substantive it is.

I think that, you know, like any other academic, you know, you finish your dissertation, immediately you're moved on to different things. But I have really been paying attention, maybe less so to the organization itself, because that's just a case study and paying attention to just the overall situation that I was studying. And I would say in terms of that, I do feel like I've uncovered some

contradictions that remain unsolved. I mean, even just observing like the hands off rallies and those protests, I did notice most of the participants were white. Most of them were older. In some ways, I think we can see that's like a good thing because this is this is a cohort of people who maybe

Maybe they're worried about, you know, their future, they're on a fixed income or they have kind of the the social capital. They have the ability to come to to go to protests easily.

But I do think that I noticed the lack of focus on the role of things like racial oppression that are going on right now, issues around immigration and citizenship, issues around the racial politics of the administration not being highlighted a lot, and also just kind of a lack of

this kind of multiracial coalition that we've seen in the past. That's been extremely effective. One of the things that I always think about is like the civil rights movement, various rainbow coalition, the freedom movement in Mississippi. Some of these, these multiracial coalitions that we are now just kind of uncovering the history of have been so successful that

At making big advancements, you know, these kind of coalitions are fraught, they're fragile, but they are necessary for actually creating widespread change. And so I think that's a conversation we're going to need to continue to have as we think about grassroots movements right now.

is how can they be wide ranging? How can they cross social barriers? How can they engage people that usually don't collaborate? Because I think that's what actually creates effective and durable organizations. So

Yeah, I think that situation is still highly relevant and viable. And I am I'm I'm hopeful that some of these insights from the book can translate to that. You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network. And we have been speaking with Michael L. Rosino, who is the author of Democracy is All.

Awkward, Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing from the University of North Carolina Press. Michael, thank you for joining us today. Much appreciated. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.