Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines how intersectional ideologies and experiences of marginalization affect the extent to which African Americans support or oppose the marginalization of LGBTQ communities. We posit that awareness of the race-gender positionality of African American women, as well as the unique positionalities of other marginalized African American subgroups, is critical to understanding the conditions under which Black Americans embrace LGBTQ rights and communities. Using the Black respondent subsample of the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study, we test the extent to which intersectional theories explain African American cross-group consciousness with LGBTQ persons and support for LGBTQ rights and communities. In doing so, we distinguish multiple mechanisms through which identity intersections affect African American1 political attitudes, and we find that, though intersecting marginalized identities can be critical to fomenting African Americans’ support for the rights and concerns of LGBTQ communities, not all intersections lead to a more inclusive Black politics.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2026, pages 1-28.
Rights
©The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
APA Citation
Lyle, M. L., & Shaw, T. C. (2026). “When and Where [We] Enter…”? Intersectional Ideologies and Experiences in African American Support for LGBTQ+ Communities. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 1–28.https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2025.10044