The Transmission of Historical Racial Violence

Abstract

Research finds that historic racial violence helps predict spatial distributions of contemporary outcomes, including homicide. These findings underscore the continued need to historicize modern race relations, yet intervening processes linking past violence with present events remain unclear. This study examines these intermediary mechanisms by reducing the century-long time-lapse common to legacy of racial violence research. We use mid-century measures of violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement to bridge the historical gap between lynchings and later homicide, thus clarifying the dynamic and contingent nature of the legacy of racial violence. Structural equation models indicate that incidents of anti-civil rights enforcement and contemporary homicides are more likely to occur in areas with pronounced histories of lynching. Civil rights era assaults mediate the relationship between lynchings and contemporary homicide generally, but not White-on-Black homicide, signaling a need for further research documenting events of mid-century racial violence and clarifying these and other sources of historical transmission. Implications for future research and public policy are considered.

“That’s My Number One Fear in Life. It’s the Police”: Examining Young Black Men’s Exposures to Trauma and Loss Resulting From Police Violence and Police Killings

“…For Black males, the chronic risk of exposure to police violence and police killings is situated in a long history of racial violence perpetrated and permitted by law enforcement (Alexander, 2010; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017; Gilbert & Ray, 2015; Petersen & Ward, 2015). Policing in the United States evolved from violent southern slave patrols that were instituted to manage the activity of enslaved Africans, prevent revolts, and capture enslaved Africans who escaped (Durr, 2015).…”

“…Referred to as racial terror (Petersen & Ward, 2015), the lynching of Blacks by Whites was committed in the presence of large crowds, photographers, and police officers; and, their dead bodies were often left hanging or paraded through Black neighborhoods to terrorize the community and reinforce racial subjugation (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). These killings were rationalized through White supremacist narratives (Daniels, 1997; Grills, Aird, & Rowe, 2016) of Black criminality and bestiality that dehumanized Black people and offered impunity to White perpetrators of racial terror and violence, including members of law enforcement (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008; Goff, Jackson, Lewis Di Leone, Culotta, & DiTomasso, 2014; Haslam, 2006).…”

Anti-Blackness is the American Way: Assessing the Relationship Between Chattel Slavery, Lynchings, & Police Violence During the Civil Rights Movement

“…As Acharya et al (2016) note, while it is the case that better estimates of the underlying rates of various sub-population typically may be generated with population-weighted interpolation areal weighting, areal weighting is used here because I am interested in interpolating both proportions (enslaved, free, etc) and levels (total population, improve farming acreage, etc), and areal interpolation allows me to use a consistent set of interpolation weights across these disparate measures (Acharya et al, 2016). Tolnay and Beck's (1995) lynching data was employed, and the lynchings included in the present study span 1882 to 1930, as this encompasses the majority of all 19 th and 20 th century lynchings that occurred (Petersen & Ward, 2015). However, lynchings considered here are restricted to those of Black individuals since this study is focused on the (dis)continuity of anti-Black violence perpetrated against Black people.…”

“…These critiques insist that in order to fully understand and eradicate such violence, we must understand how it is intricately intertwined with and shaped by our history, and scholarship on historical anti-Black violence and its legacies further bolsters this contention. Numerous studies have demonstrated, for example, that histories of chattel slavery, lynchings, and other racialized terror now helps to explain the spatial distribution of contemporary racial stratification and oppressive conditions in the U.S. (Acharya et al, 2016; Defina & Hannon, 2011; Durso & Jacobs, 2013; Jacobs et al, 2012; King et al, 2009; Kramer et al, 2017; Messner et al, 2006; Petersen & Ward, 2015; O’Connell, 2012). UN leaders and human rights organizations alike have also pointed to the relationship between racially violent histories and contemporary police killings of Black individuals, illuminating for example how the latter invokes the former (UNHRC, 2017).…”

You Have the Right to Exclaim Your Pain: Honoring Black Familial Voices Impacted by Police Induced Trauma in the United States

“…It is a historical fact that African Americans have experienced oppression and subjugation from enslavement era to the Jim Crow era to the civil rights movement, and now mass incarceration of Black males. African American men, women, and children have suffered physical, psychological, sexual, and emotional trauma throughout each oppressive period (Aymer, 2016;Petersen & Ward, 2015). A review of the literature suggests that police induced trauma results from racism, racial profiling and officers own unconscious racial biases (Chaney & Robertson, 2013;Chaney & Robertson, 2015).…”