Theorizing Racial Violence in American History

Abstract

In Chapter 3 González-Tennant explores ways intersectionality helps explain the deep connections between past and present forms of racial violence. Intersectionality frames social inequality as the result of intersecting and uneven power relations. While intersectionality is central to critical race theory and Black feminism, its adoption by historical archaeologists remains limited. Intersectionality is useful for an archaeology of race riots because it provides a different lens for examining race and society. The perspective of intersectionality also speaks directly to more than a century of scholarship examining lynchings and race riots. A brief introduction to the literature demonstrates two alarming trends: the treatment of lynchings and race riots as separate phenomena and the inability or disinterest of previous research to satisfactorily connect past racial violence to modern social inequality. González-Tennant’s approach to researching the connections between past violence and modern inequality draws on works from a range of closely related disciplines to illuminate these connections.