Black Violence Research Articles

Violence and counterviolence: the need for a children's domestic exchange.

What is commonly talked about as black violence in this country might more accurately be described as the black's counterviolent response to white violence done to him. This paper analyzes the many forms of white violence, uses the suicide analogy to understand the current stage of black counterviolence, and proposes a remedy that conforms to the “living law'' habits of the American people.

Violence, law, and the informal polity

It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate a conceptual framework which views the social process, its institutions, prevailing norms, and the circumstances of social disorder as related phenomena. Violence is not usefully viewed as strictly pathological, exceptional, and spasmodic. To look for its sources and to seek its forms apart from normative social processes is to ignore the intrinsic continuum between peaceable and disruptive behavior; it is to deny the role of violence in creating and testing political legitimacy and conditioning the terms of all social bargaining and adjustments. The function of the police power of the state is to maintain a threshold of force to deter and/or contain the ever-present margin of anti-social acts by individuals and groups. Some element of personal dislocation and anomie exists in the best managed and most equitable societies. Even when isolated outbreaks contain germs of larger social issues (they usually do), they may be contained at acceptable costs by the appropriate and measured application of police power. This constitutes the normal function of the state in dealing with private violence. So long as this task is managed at acceptable risk and cost, police power protects most of the members of the community and enjoys general support. This kind of violence may be termed fractionall. To minimize and control it is the legitimate purpose of the police power. Political grievances are forced into peaceable channels and eventual adjustment through debate, legislation, public policy, and private contract. However, the characteristic pattern of contemporary riots has shown a tendency toward violent counter-escalation against police action by elements of both black and white communities. While the white violence has been limited, the black violence escalates in response to police action, often with general support from the black community and with enhanced responsiveness, organization, and danger of future out.breaks. This phenomenon is different in kind from frictional violence. The capability of infinite escalation heightens the risk and increases the cost to society beyond acceptable levels; most important, it destroys the efficacy of normal methods of police power. This kind of violence must be termed political. It addresses itself to changing the very system of social norms which police power is designed to protect. It focuses grievances in recurring, deliberate, or spontaneous acts of violence, even at great risk and cost to the actors. The peaceable procedures of political adjustment fail to divert the escalation, whether because they are closed, discredited, halting, or simply untried. The peculiar pattern of major social upheaval and political confrontation arises from the fact that the normal police security methods become counter-productive; they merely solidify the capability and likelihood

Justifying violence‐the rhetoric of militant black power

Black Power is an ambiguous but powerful symbol in the crisis of racial relations. Since the interpretations of reality it entails cannot be avoided and since violent suppression of violent Black Power is possible only at the cost of a police state, we must seek to encourage a constructive working out of Black Power pressures which may allow a symbolic release of violence. Understanding the rhetoric that justifies Black violence will make a constructive conclusion more hopeful. The point of view taken here is that rhetoric becomes a part of whatever facts are relevant to human concerns.