The Relevant History
It’s been more than 150 years since slave-holding states in the American south seceded from the United States to form the Confederate States of America and waged war to establish their legitimacy as a sovereign nation independent of the Union, or what remained of the US in the north.
Despite claims that the conflict was about protecting states’ rights and state sovereignty from federal overreach, the Civil War was the attempt of the southern states to protect the economic interests of the Confederacy’s wealthy landowners—especially those families operating plantations—by defending the institution of slavery as well as the right of southerners to own slaves.
The Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 ended centuries of chattel slavery in North America, freed more than 4 million people from bondage, and set Americans on the slow and treacherous, frustratingly twisted path toward racial equality and justice in the modern era.
Ten years of Radical Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War (1865-1874)
The US Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that established “separate but equal” as doctrine, and thus made racial segregation legal. Segregation would remain legal until Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned by the SCOTUS in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
Arguably, because of that ruling, the separate-but-equal ideology of Jim Crow segregation existed alongside 80 years of exploitation of African Americans by corporations and local officials in the south who would deny people of color the rights and protections guaranteed to all by the US Constitution.
“The problem of the 20th century,” wrote sociologist WEB Dubois in 1904, “will be the problem of the color line.” Dubois was among the first American sociologists whose work would have a significant and lasting impact on American culture and the discipline worldwide. The 20th century saw more than the struggle to keep slavery and inequality alive in some way. The 1900s included the activist years, when the norms and practices of the pre-modern world were to be challenged, changed or rejected entirely.
The Harlem Renaissance
The 1955 murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, as well as the brave sorrow of his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whose decision to allow the nation to see her son’s mutilated body put her child’s face on the victim of a deeply violent and unforgiving Southern racism, and awakened people across the country to the dangerously cruel acts of racially motivated violence and ultimately helped energize the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s;
We celebrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), as well as the achievements of civil rights activists like Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks and mourned the deaths of leaders like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King.
While we celebrated, we forget our society was ignoring the government-sponsored syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama. The experiment operated from 1932 until 1972, killing nearly 400 people and affecting countless families before it was finally shut down 8 years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.
For the past 50 years, the war on drugs has decimated urban black populations and quite possibly has been the engine behind the mass incarceration of African Americans. Between roughly 1983 and 2023, the US prison system—including state and federal facilities, government-run or for-profit prisons—has absorbed a dramatic, almost unbelievable 700 percent increase in the prison population. Minority men, including black men, are disproportionately overrepresented in prison populations.
Scholars and activists argue that the drug war provides cover for the systematic disenfranchisement of the poor and minorities and people of color through mass incarceration. Mass incarceration threatens to create a bureaucratized caste system in the United States by stigmatizing African American identities as inherently criminal and irredeemable. One scholar calls this race based caste system “the new Jim Crow.”
From the beginning of modernity, even before the Civil War and until the present day, the politics of race have been woven into the fabric of US cultural memory via unflattering, politically-charged racial images or ethnic caricatures in art, television news and entertainment, film, and more recently social media. These images affirm stereotypes and perpetuate prejudices toward people of color, and they exist alongside equally exaggerated representations of white people that cast whites as good-natured, benevolent, tolerant and fair in their dealings with minority members. Indeed, the inclusion of or reference to this image of the “good guy/white guy” has been said to be symptomatic of what some scholars have called the “white savior complex.”
In February 2012, in Sanford, Florida, local neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman reported a “suspicious person” in the neighborhood to Sanford police, then accosted, shot and killed 17 year old Trayvon Martin, an African American and son of a neighbor, allegedly in self-defense. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder and was acquitted at a trial that was nothing if not suspect.
In August 2014, in Ferguson, MO, Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old African American Michael Brown, triggering what has come to be known as the Ferguson Unrest and Ferguson Riots, which forced “officer involved shootings” of African Americans into American public consciousness.
What seemed isolate incidents became a litany of names with a deeper history: the stories of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddy Gray, Alton Sterling, Philandro Castile, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Manuel Ellis, Andre Hill, and Daunte Wright began to be seen as familiar, like the stories of Emmett Till or James Byrd, for example. Thus began a new wave of resistance, of social movements around and about race and racism, including the Black Lives Matter movement, and recently, people have begun to speak of being “woke,” or socially conscious, aware of and concerned about the need for social justice for everyone.
That brings us to today. Last weekend, masked members of the white supremacist group, Patriot Front, marched through downtown Charleston, West Virginia, handing out propaganda that tells a white nationalist story. proclaiming that their white ancestors were conquerors who had taken this land by force, Patriot Front asserts that “America is not for sale,” because they believe that America belongs to them. This land is supposedly the legacy of those “conquerors,” meant for their white descendants only. This group and others like it are increasingly active and increasingly visible, and historically, these groups have been associated with violence and lawlessness. That they are openly marching in the streets of American cities is just one indicator of the racial tension that is part of American daily life now.
The Prompt for your final project
Consider how the institution of racism (yes, it is an institution) manifests itself in your personal lifeworld. How has racism and/or racist culture influenced your identity, shaped your relationships, or impacted your life in other ways. Were these other ways positive? negative? I want to challenge your understanding of the sociology of race and ethnicity, and inequality. Your goal is to explain sociologically how the “criminalization of black life” described across our documentary sources has helped to create and sustain racism and inequality from the 19th to the 21st century. How does that meme figure into understanding privilege as well as the experience of discrimination? Include brief descriptions of how racism, prejudice and discrimination are explained from the three paradigmatic theoretical perspectives in sociology (functionalist, conflict, symbolic interactionist).
