De-Centring the South: America's Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction

King, Desmond; Tuck, Stephen

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtl023

Cited by 29 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The characterization of the American state as weak in regards to racial violence is illusory; recent research has focused on the federal government's collusion in the maintenance of racism.~Belknap 1987; Kaczorowski 1985;Katznelson 2005;King 1995;King and Tuck, 2007;King et al, 2009;Massey and Denton, 1993;Patler 2004;Weiss 1969!. 5 But it is important to distinguish the various facets of racism.…”

Section: Weak State and Racial Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The national state withdrew from prosecuting lynch mobs not because it did not have the wherewithal; rather, it withdrew in order to pursue other political ends. As Desmond King and Stephen Tuck (2007) argue, through deliberate inaction “federal officials did not just acquiesce in the Southern counter-revolution but promoted a nationwide order of white supremacy” (p. 214).…”

Section: Conclusion: Distinguishing Weakness As Autonomy From Weaknesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Picking up on Marx's concept of acting by withdrawal, Desmond King and Stephen Tuck (2007) specifically point out the “deliberate inaction” of Congress and the Republican Party: Congressional behavior was marked by several decades of deliberate action and deliberate inaction—in response to the rising tide of white supremacy across the country… By choosing not to act, the [Republican] party fanned Southern exclusions and gave added legitimacy to mistreatment and racism in the North and West(pp. 240, 244).…”

Section: Weak State and Racial Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This essay seeks to examine how the federal government manipulated different aspects of the state to embed and obscure its complicity with White supremacy. In so doing, it attempts to intervene more broadly in the debates about American state development and weak state theory (Johnson 2007; King 1995; King and Tuck, 2007; King and Lieberman, 2009a; King and Lieberman, 2009b; Novak 2008). First, I sketch the basics of weak state theory, considering how it has been applied to the development of the postbellum American state in general and to the historical problem of racial violence specifically.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strengthening the Weak State

Kato

2012

Du Bois Rev.

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This essay charts the development of the American state during the era when Southern lynchings prevailed. Contrary to the standard interpretation that depicts the American state as having lacked the administrative and legal capacity to protect the lives of Southern Blacks, it is a more pluralist conception of state weakness for which I argue, one that characterizes the American state's behavior regarding racial violence as the deliberate, calculated act of an active state choosing not to act. The state had always possessed legal authority to prosecute lynch mobs, but the key determinant was garnering the political will to enforce the law. Examples gleaned from the Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) administrations illustrate the American government's political vacillation between acting and not acting. Examinations of two Supreme Court cases in 1966 highlight the political nature of federal rights enforcement. In light of the 1966 Supreme Court decisions inUnited States v. PriceandUnited States v. Guest, the Court appears never to have repudiated or stripped the federal government of all of its authority to engage in combating racial violence. Even though the Court clearly signaled during Reconstruction that it was not going to uphold claims of rights violations of Blacks in the South, it did so without ever making a substantive decision on whether it could. Sections 241 and 242 of Title 18 of the United States Code were, in effect, placed into suspended animation; it was only when there was a political will to reengage with federal rights enforcement that the Court resuscitated these laws. In the parlance of the weak state thesis, the American state did not lose its capacity to combat racial violence; rather it simply chose not to engage.

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Section: Weak State and Racial Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Distinguishing Weakness As Autonomy From Weaknesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Weak State and Racial Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Strengthening the Weak State

Kato

2012

Du Bois Rev.

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“…Throughout the United States African-American citizens could not look to the national government to act impartially on their behalf, but instead watched it reproducing and on occasions promoting racist interests from society. 35 The white supremacist racial order was maintained at key points by Southern political control of Congress, a control complemented by American state policies that ensured the endurance of segregationist racism. Here it was precisely the ''statelessness'' of the national state that ensured the continuation of state repression at lower levels.…”

Section: Approaching the American State: The Distorted Inheritancementioning

confidence: 99%