Last Thursday, Stanford Prof. Doug McAdam spoke in Rapaporte Treasure Hall about the role of race in contemporary and historical American politics and how it will factor into the future of the Republican Party as he accepted the fourth annual Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.

McAdam is a sociology professor and the director of the program on urban studies at Stanford University. He is the author of two books, and his research has delved into civil rights with his examination of the 1964 Freedom Summer-a campaign in which approximately 1,000 volunteers registered black voters in Mississippi-and civic engagement with his study of Teach for America graduates.

The prize is designed "to recognize outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations" and includes a cash prize of $25,000 and a medal.

Joseph B. Gittler, who created the award, was a sociologist and taught at many universities over a span of 60 years, the prize's website states. According to Provost Steve Goldstein '78, who introduced the presentation, Gittler did not teach at or have an official affiliation with Brandeis but selected the University to host the award in recognition of "the distinctive character of this institution."

Prof. Chad Williams (AAAS) then introduced McAdam and said that he himself had benefited from McAdam's work in his own research. He cited McAdam's "fundamentally different vantage point" in viewing the role of race in politics and his ability to "transgress disciplinary boundaries and illuminate issues across time and space" as placing McAdam "ahead of the curve" in his field.

After being awarded the medal by Goldstein and Williams, McAdam gave his presentation, titled "The Continuing Significance of Race in America's Politics of Inequality." He said that he had known Gittler personally when he was in the "first two years of [his] academic career" at George Mason University when Gittler was a visiting professor in sociology there.

Based upon this interaction, McAdam said that "[Gittler's] values were exactly what is reflected in this prize."

Race in American politics is the "thread that runs through all my works," said McAdam. Despite rhetoric that we are in a post-racial society, which he "desperately wanted to believe ... was true," "we continue to wrestle, deeply wrestle, with this deeply American issue" of race, he said.

According to McAdam, the United States today displays extreme racial inequality, with the widest gap in income and access to education and health care since the Great Depression, and the greatest political polarization since the 10-year lead-up to the Civil War.

The post-World War II period until the 1970s displayed the most equality, McAdam said. This period boasted an ideological overlap between the two political parties, while the ideological gap has been widened in recent times by the entrance of "extreme right Tea Party members" into the political sphere in 2010, he continued.

McAdam stated that the main three factors that determine Tea Party adherence, sympathy and "hard-core" dedication are antipathy toward President Barack Obama, "racial resentment" and lack of support for an egalitarian social order.

In the 1950s, McAdam said, the Republican Party was moderate-centrist and was more liberal in racial and civil rights voting than the Democratic Party, a holdover from its history as an abolitionist party and as the party of President Abraham Lincoln. Today, the GOP displays "exclusionary politics of all manner of 'others'," including racial minorities and immigrants, he continued.

McAdam cited six historical moments that contributed to the ideological shift in the two parties, the first of which was the renationalization of race during the Cold War, during which the United States' racism was viewed as a political and foreign policy liability as they aimed to model other countries' governments after their own.

According to McAdam, subsequent significant historical moments include the historically blue-state South beginning to vote Republican around 1964; Republican President Richard Nixon's focus on the Southern vote and attempts to institute segregationist policies, the efforts for which were interrupted by the Watergate scandal and his resignation; and Republican President Ronald Reagan's "full realization of Nixon's vision," which included "tax policies that fueled a lot of the [racial] inequality" and an "attack on welfare."

These factors in part contributed to Obama capturing 75 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008 and 71 percent in 2012, said McAdam.

Due to the United States' projected demographics, in which whites will be in the minority by 2050, a party as "racially exclusive" as the Republican Party is doomed to fail, said McAdam. However, "there may be hope that we can put this dilemma behind us, but we're not quite there yet," he concluded.