About Riptides…

Peay’s first book project, Riptides (under contract with Oxford University Press), expands our understanding of how state-level policymaking contributes to the perpetual state of racial volatility in America by offering a framework to examine racialized policy diffusion. This framework – the “Three Cs” – captures the underlying dynamics that motivate the speed and spread of racially progressive and regressive policies. It argues, first, that nation is locked in a constant competition between racial factions seeking to either preserve or dismantle racial hierarchies. Next, states have, over time, developed and maintained policy cultures that reflect their commitment to and alignment in that competition over racial progress. The most innovative and influential states in racialized policy diffusion processes are typically among those that have had a broader influence over the state policy landscape. States with a history of innovation have chosen sides in the policy conflict between white supremacists and transformative egalitarians. They parlay their broader influence into efforts to shape and reshape the racial policy condition in their states and beyond. Convicted states also work from a space of relative security – they have captured their legislative institutions and rely upon established norms to justify their behaviors.

Once racialized policies are innovated, they become extremely contagious. They routinely spread from a select group of convicted states to a conflicted crowd through a network of persistent, yet fragile, state-to-state relationships. This simultaneous diffusion of progressive and regressive policies creates a push-and-pull dynamic that results in forms of volatility that manifest differently depending on the cultures that each state has adopted over time. This book uses a novel social network analysis approach to map and analyze the spread of racially progressive and regressive policies from state to state to capture the political, social, and racial dynamics that inform and motivate racialized policy innovation and diffusion processes since the Civil Rights Movement. In this process, it sheds light on how policy diffusion is a racialized process, how racialized policies diffuse, and how states use policy innovation and diffusion as a means to shape and reshape the racial condition in America.