Race and the Politics of Institutional Violence

Abstract

During Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of low-lying neighborhoods flooded by failing dykes struggled to survive, we were regularly offered news reports in which white residents entering stores were presented as marshaling resources in that difficult moment, while similar acts by black residents were presented in the newspapers as looters or worse. The print media and 24-hr news networks were consistent in presenting the dangers of the moment, discussing lawlessness even as they glossed over the images of desperate people on rooftops or crammed into the stadium (and reports of violence and assault inside the stadium ended up not being supported by facts). Your favorite team lost an important game, or even if it won (Madison, WI or Lexington, KY), what do you do? According to newspapers you ‘let off some steam’ or engaged in understandable rowdy and destructive behavior as cars were burned, windows smashed, and crowds of young mainly white men roamed with little police action other than to contain the direction and scope of the mayhem. And when it does get totally out of control – say after a surfing contest in California, yet another momentous social calamity – the police are called in to calm things down, but the language used in reports, if these events are even covered by the news media, refrains from any sort of socio-pathological explanations of these participants, or discussions about broken homes, missing parents, or cultures of poverty and despair. The same cannot be said when the demonstrations start out peacefully by outraged citizens protesting police brutality, as was the case of the fatal shooting of a young black man in Ferguson, MO, or the escalating reaction to the killing in custody of another young black man, this time in Baltimore, a reaction fueled by decades of neglect and systematic destruction of that community and the residential housing. We were not given explanations of enthusiastic reactions gone awry. Rather, words like ‘thug’ and worse were used to describe a community rife with all the worst ills generated by decades of single parenthood, of mothers with many illegitimate children, of residents that pathologically did not respect the places where they lived or the businesses in their own communities. One might be tempted to say Malcolm X was prophetic in his pronouncements above half a century earlier. But that would ignore the almost 300-year history of representation that preceded his comments, a history in which blacks, first as slaves then as sharecroppers indentured to a postCivil War plantation system, through Jim Crow and post-Reconstruction imagery in the South, and finally during the migrations out of the South to cities in the west and north, were routinely vilified. Young and old, black men were presented as predators assaulting the honor of white women, of challenging property, or otherwise as less-than-human, ending up victims of the ‘understandable’ 594764 CRS0010.1177/0896920515594764Critical SociologyEditorial research-article2015