Response to Michael Javen Fortner’s review of <i>Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State</i>

Kato, Daniel

doi:10.1017/s1537592716002735

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Previous scholarship into lynching has looked exclusively at the motivations of individuals to lynch, primarily seeking answers in interracial economic competition Snedker 2011 andSmångs 2016 are notable exceptions). More recent research suggests that political factors are crucial, especially the reaction of the state to the threat of mob violence (Hagen et al 2013;Kato 2015;Beck et al 2016). In this article we have attempted to connect "the local and the national, the view from below with the perspective above" (Kalyvas 2006:48).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

Makovi¹,

Hagen²,

Bearman³

2016

SocScience

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Collective violence when framed by its perpetrators as "citizen" justice is inherently a challenge to state legitimacy. To properly account for such violence, it is necessary to consider an opportunity structure incorporating the actions of both vigilantes and agents of the state. The motivation and lethality of lynch mobs in the South cannot be understood without considering how the state reacted to the legitimacy challenges posed by lynching. We trace the shifting orientation of state agents to lynching attempts between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events in three Southern states, we model geographic and temporal patterns in the determinants of mob formation, state intervention, and intervention success. Opponents of lynching often pled with mobs to "let the law take its course. " This article examines the course followed by the law itself, as state actors moved between encouraging, accommodating, and in many instances averting mob violence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the question of the federal government's handling of lynch mob violence, a line of new work byKato (2012Kato ( , 2015 argues that Federal passivity regarding Southern sociological science | www.sociologicalscience.com…”

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confidence: 99%

The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

Makovi¹,

Hagen²,

Bearman³

2016

SocScience

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“…[it] reveals how the separation of power not only divides responsibility but can also obscure it." (Kato 2015, 2) 10 My use of the language of retribution consciously departs from the standard philosophical conception of "retributive justice," which always includes proportionality as a requirement; Walen 2016. As I have argued earlier, lynching did not primarily aim at establishing justice, even in a retributive sense.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

Gorup¹

2020

Perspect. polit.

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Lynch mobs regularly called on the language of popular sovereignty in their efforts to authorize lynchings, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against persons they deemed beyond the protections of due process. Despite political theorists’ renewed interest in popular sovereignty, scholars have not accounted for this sordid history in their genealogies of modern democracy and popular constituent power. I remedy this omission, arguing that spectacle lynchings—ones that occurred in front of large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands—operated as public rituals of racialized people-making. In the wake of Reconstruction, when the boundaries of the polity were deeply contested, spectacle lynchings played a constitutive role in affirming and circulating the notion that the sovereign people were white, and that African Americans were their social subordinates.

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“…In the lived experience of black Americans, the state and its agents have been a perpetual and oppressive (rather than a protective) presence. "In America," Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, 103) has written, "it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage," and the state has been often been at least complicit, if not a deliberate partner, in that legacy (see Francis 2014;Harris and Lieberman 2013;Kato 2015;Katznelson 2005;Rothstein 2017). Criminal justice trends reinforce this pattern (Alexander 2010;Goffman 2009).…”

Section: Forceful Federalism and The Multidimensional American Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

King

Lieberman

2020

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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Progress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal authority. These four processes rise and fall over time, each charting its own history and unfolding according to its own logic. These processes usually work against each other. But occasionally they align with each other so that the state can pursue and achieve even difficult and challenging policy aims in a focused way. We sketch the outlines of Forceful Federalism and demonstrate its explanatory power with a case study of Forceful Federalism in action: James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Meredith case exemplifies the convergence of the four dimensions of Forceful Federalism and marks the first time the modern American state was thus mobilized on behalf of civil rights. The case offers suggestive evidence that Forceful Federalism was a necessary condition for the emergence of the Civil Rights State.

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Response to Michael Javen Fortner’s review of Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

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