The Knowledge Within: Conceptualizing African American Political Knowledge

 This project contends that the current conceptualizations of political knowledge as either general and domain-specific categories of knowledge, as well as the measurement of general political knowledge cannot capture knowledge relevant to the African American political experience. This project makes methodological and theoretical innovations using focus groups and survey data to develop two new categories of knowledge: Black political knowledge and concurrent knowledge. I center the voices and experiences of African Americans to showcase how the Black public sphere is instrumental in shaping the information that African Americans learn and retain about politics. In turn, this dissertation shows that the current racial “gap” is not due to African Americans’ lack of political knowledge but the parochial knowledge battery that excludes information relevant to the African American experience.