'The Silent Majority' in Black and White: Invisibility and Imprecision in the Historiography of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

Over the past decade, mass incarceration has received much scholarly attention from historians, social scientists, and legal scholars. Still, despite the substantive contributions of this research, the over reliance on racial explanations have undermined its descriptive force and explanatory power. Many accounts fold the peculiarities and nuances of the “law and order” discourse of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the period during which the seeds of mass incarceration were sown — into neat, imprecise narratives that render black politics invisible and relegate white politics to the stifling abyss of whiteness. Consequently, in order to understand the miscellany of “law and order” concerns and identify the role African Americans played in the construction of this discourse, this essay returns to the social and cultural context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It situates the cultural concepts of “law and order” — “silent majority,” “minority rights,” “militants,” and “police” — within local contexts in order to excavate their meanings, relative importance, and relationships.