About Hakeem Jefferson
I am an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, where I serve as Faculty Director of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. I am also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and, during the 2025–2026 academic year, I was a Faculty Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. During the 2021-2022 academic year, I was the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
I received my PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a BA in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina. I am a proud product of underresourced public schools in Sumter, South Carolina, and grew up in Gable, South Carolina, an experience that taught me more about power and privilege than any college course ever could.
As a social scientist, I study identity and the many ways it structures our social and political lives. I am particularly interested in the politics of stigmatized groups, and much of my work focuses on explaining diversity in Black public opinion.
The politics of respectability names a belief held by some Black Americans, that the race’s fortunes rise or fall with the behavior of its members, and that policing that behavior is a path to collective progress. At the heart of this politics is what I call collective costs, the perception that one group member’s actions can impose consequences on the group as a whole. My research offers a careful theoretical framework and the first validated measure of respectability attitudes, published in the American Political Science Review, showing that these beliefs help explain Black Americans’ support for tough-on-crime laws and punitive social welfare policies. This work is the basis for my book, Respectability Politics, now in production with the University of Chicago Press.
In work published in Public Opinion Quarterly [pdf], I answer a question that has long puzzled observers of American politics. Why do so many Black Americans call themselves conservative on surveys while voting overwhelmingly for Democrats? I show that the 7-point liberal-conservative scale cannot be used to understand the politics of Black Americans, who are far less familiar with the terms “liberal” and “conservative” than their White counterparts. What looks like ideological mismatch is, in large part, a measurement problem.
Other projects examine how Americans construct the category “Black,” with Lauren Davenport and Hunter Rendleman, forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics [preprint]; the persistent racial divide in reactions to officer-involved shootings, with Fabian Neuner and Josh Pasek, supported by the Russell Sage Foundation; and White Americans’ avoidance of information about race and racism, with Koji Takahashi and Allison Earl, forthcoming at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. My CV, linked below, has more on these and other on-going projects.
Though I approach my research with the rigor of a well-trained scholar, I am also a Black man in America, keenly aware of the history of racism and racial violence that are core features of the American project. Both as a teacher and as a citizen deeply unsettled by injustice, I see my job as helping to clarify and contextualize these problems that bear on matters of life and death and threaten to further undermine the health of our democracy, particularly for those who live at the margins of our society.
Following George Floyd’s murder at the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, I convened a group of leading scholars of race, policing, punishment, and the criminal justice system to consider the problem of race and policing in America and to consider where we go from here, a conversation I continued with Cathy Cohen, Yanilda González, Rebecca Thorpe, Vesla Weaver, and José Luis Gandara in a commissioned piece for the Annual Review of Political Science on democracy and policing in the United States. You can watch that conversation or engage the transcript at the journal’s site. I continue this work today through public programming at the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice.
If you are interested in learning more about race and racism in the United States, I also encourage you to check out another event I convened with Steven Moore, while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, “The Other America: Still Separate. Still Unequal.” You can find a playlist of speakers from that event here.
Conversations
#RaceAndJusticeConvo
A video of a conversation with leading scholars of race, policing, punishment, & the American criminal justice system
The Other America
Hakeem Jefferson and Steven Moore welcome attendees to "The Other America: Still Separate. Still Unequal."
Contact Hakeem
I welcome invitations to present at workshops and panels, to speak at events on race and politics or on justice and equity, and to give feedback on the work of students and colleagues. Journalists are welcome to reach out for background conversations or on-the-record commentary, particularly on the politics of Black Americans. Use the form below and include the relevant details, whether that is a date and topic, an audience, or a deadline. For other areas of expertise, see People of Color Also Know Stuff, as well as Women Also Know Stuff.