The State You See examines how the American state shapes the development of political attitudes and behavior. The conventional wisdom holds that the popularity of policy’s utilizing indirect mechanisms, such as tax breaks, has obscured the role of government by creating a submerged state, leading to historically low levels of political trust. Recent events, however, have highlighted how visible the state can be, particularly in the form of the criminal justice system. In resolving the tension created by this contrast, I show that a more complete understanding of antipathy towards government is found not by considering how the state is hidden, but rather how it is made differently visible to different populations. Through this approach, I uncover a racial split in government visibility that shifts scholarly conceptions of public policy’s role in the decline of government trust and the perpetuation of political inequality.
I utilize both an historical perspective to chart the rise of this racial divergence in government visibility, as well as over 100 hours of ethnographic work, 58 in-depth interviews, and statistical analysis to explore its contemporary political function. I argue that, for whites, the growth of submerged state policies contrasted with the racialization of poverty policies to make government most evident in its provision of benefits to others. For people of color, the decline of federal civil rights legislation conflicted with the surge of mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics to make the state particularly visible in the form of the criminal justice system. As a result, this dual visibility has fostered low trust across races, but the political effects of this cynicism differ. Where white distrust is rooted in a sense of misspent tax dollars that leads to increased political participation, low trust among people of color stems from a fear of government as a controlling force, generating disengagement. Thus, even as formal laws designed to create racially patterned political inequality have declined, the state remains a key actor in maintaining the same disparity.