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In this chapter, I examine a key step of heuristic theory. That step is the perception in a person’s mind that her fate is linked to that of a larger group. I review some previous work on linked fate, and argue that it is a useful concept for understanding a wide range of countries and groups. I report results from a survey of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Ethnic inequality and regional inequality provide good reason for believing that group members’ interests are tied together, and I show that many individual demographics do not do a good job of predicting who feels linked fate, while group-level variation, especially past experiences of discrimination, do shape linked fate. One key individual level variable that does predict linked fate is regional identity, which raises the salience of the regional cleavage.

This chapter argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbormirrors post-Black art’s emphasis on simultaneously rejecting and embracing the racial categorization of African American art. In doing so, Whitehead’s novel represents a qualified liberation for African American artists that optimistically imagines a freedom from racial categorizations that is still rooted in them. This chapter analyzes Whitehead’s novel in the context of the competing definitions of post-Blackness offered by Touré in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? as well as in the original formulation by Thelma Golden. Employing a framework of “racial individualism,” the chapter argues that a loosening sense of linked fate has led to the privileging of individual agency over Black identity. In doing so, post-Blackness serves to discursively liberate African American artists from any prescriptive ideal of what constitutes black art without implying either a desire or intent to not address issues of race.

The movement in southern cities is the subject of chapter 5. It explores black worker-consumer alliances (built on “linked fate”) in sit-in demonstrations and their utility in helping black southerners claim middle-class citizenship during the civil rights movement. From Washington, D.C., to Charlotte to Nashville, African Americans organized widely publicized sit-ins and picket lines to force the desegregation of public accommodations and democratization of the transitional nature of customer-business interactions. But African Americans had other goals. What began as protests aimed at restructuring the physical space of the public sphere and procuring the right to experience the indulgences of customer service often grew into organized endeavors to dismantle the formidable barriers to black economic emancipation. These endeavors maintained a broad understanding of the black community’s shared interests and involved challenging segregation and discrimination in the marketplace on behalf of black customers and workers.

In this chapter, I examine the effect of uncertainty on the relationship between ethnic and regional incomes, linked fate, and attitudes toward redistribution. Uncertainty is a key ingredient in heuristic theory, as heuristics for learning about future interests are unnecessary where future interests are certain. I test the argument using data from a survey of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Slovak data from the European Social Survey, and the British Household Panel Survey.

Chapter 5 discusses the endpoints of the ethnic identification journey of the Nigerian second generation. A key endpoint is that they are integrating into the black middle class. The chapter utilizes the minority culture of mobility framework to examine how respondents’ middle class status affects how they interact with their proximal hosts and how their experiences in and interactions with white people in professional settings affect their identity. The chapter uses respondents’ experiences of racial discrimination, exhibitions of racial solidarity, voting patterns, use of class as a sorting mechanism to order interactions with proximal hosts and develop middle-class identities, and in the United States, their views on whether black immigrants and their children should benefit from affirmative action policies, to illustrate how the Nigerian second generation balance race and ethnicity and how race intersects with ethnicity and class in British and American societies. The chapter discusses how in the extremely important arena of the workplace, the experiences of British respondents differ from those of their American counterparts. They have experienced more racism and discrimination living in Britain, racism that is more often covert than overt. This chapter tells their stories of growing up different from Caribbeans and their experiences of discrimination, which has engendered feelings of not belonging to Britain.

In this chapter, I lay out a heuristic theory of group membership and attitudes toward redistribution. I argue that the impact of ethnic and regional incomes on attitudes is mediated by a sense of linked fate, and that this relationship is stronger when levels of within-group inequality are lower, when economic uncertainty is higher, and when politicians raise the salience of the relevant cleavage. I also argue that federalism can, depending on the form it takes, increase or decrease the relevance of group incomes for redistributive attitudes.