Published in 2020
247 pages
Tiffany D. Cross is the author of Say It Louder! Black Voters, WhiteNarratives and the Saving of Our Democracy. She is a 2020 ResidentFellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. As anon-air political analyst, she is a longtime cable news veteran having previously served as the D.C. Bureau Chief for BET Networks, anAssociate Producer for CNN, and a freelance Field Producer. Tiffany also spent time on the campaign trail having both covered and worked on numerous local, state, and federal campaigns. She moved from the control room to the greenroom when she co-founded The Beat DC, a national platform that intersected politics, policy, business, media, and people of color that was widely read by elected officials, CEOs and C-Suite executives, opinion leaders, and media influencers. Tiffany appears frequently on MSNBC, CNN, and SiriusXM. She attended Clark AtlantaUniversity and lives in Washington, D.C.
What is this book about?
A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American Democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country’s rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to subvert and suppress Black voters.
Black voters were critical to the Democrats’ 2018 blue wave. In fact, 90 percent of Black voters supported Democratic House candidates, compared to just 53 percent of all voters. Despite media narratives, this was not a fluke. Throughout U.S. history, Black people have played a crucial role in the shaping of the American experiment. Yet still, this powerful voting bloc is often dismissed as some “amorphous” deviation, argues Tiffany Cross.
Black Voters, Black Voices is her explosive examination of how America’s composition was designed to exclude Black voters, but paradoxically would likely cease to exist without them. With multiple tentacles stretching into the cable news echo chamber, campaign leadership, and Black voter data, Cross creates a wrinkle in time with a reflective look at the timeless efforts endlessly attempting to deny people of color the right to vote—a basic tenet of American democracy.
And yet as the demographics of the country are changing, so too is the electoral power construct—by evolution and by force, Cross declares. Grounded in the most-up-to-date research, Black Voters, Black Voices is a vital tool for a wide swath of constituencies.
