A Relationship Between Collective Racial Violence and War

Abstract

Racism is a necessary condition for the outbreak of interracial violence. Racism has been with us from the beginning of our experience with slavery and is present today, but collective racial violence fluctuates so as to indicate time-related patterns of high and low intensity and frequency during the twentieth century. Racism has been a constant for over 300 years and cannot of itself explain the fluctuations of racial violence. Collective black-white violence has erupted during the 1960s for the third time this century. In both world wars and in the Vietnam War corresponding outbreaks of racial violence have occurred. The significance of an association between the external violence of war and the collective racial violence is that war may be a factor which precipitates racial violence. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that the high frequency of collective racial violence during both world wars and the Vietnam War and the low frequency of