A Case for Naming Racial Violence

Abstract

In the United States, scholarship concerning race has been the target of politicized criticism. This derision lacks concern for the matters of life and death at the center of racial scholarship, which necessarily includes histories of massacres, lynching, genocide, and extrajudicial killings in the young story of the United States alone. This article centers on the matter of trauma and presents it as an influential aspect of Black life in the United States. A principal aim is foregrounding the testimony of men who survived a 1947 massacre of imprisoned Black men near Brunswick, Georgia. The writing also makes a case for valuing studies that consider lived experiences of acute racial violence and the traumas that unstably emanate from it.