Interracial Violence Research Articles

Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret

Reviewed by: Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret Dea H. Boster (bio) Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 530. $65.00. cloth) In his second monograph, Jeff Forret analyzes instances of violence between slaves, primarily on plantations, in the American South from the 1790s to the 1860s, making a compelling case that violence—in a variety of forms and encounters—was both destructive and constructive within southern slave neighborhoods. Slave against Slave presents an amazing collection of qualitative and quantitative data on conflicts between bondspeople and argues that violence “afforded slaves an avenue through which to uphold cultural expectations, police themselves internally without interference from whites, and impose a moral and ethical code of their own creation” (p. 25). More [End Page 94] important, Forret’s research problematizes prevalent assumptions about slave community cohesion and the “celebratory tone” of slave agency that has dominated scholarship since John Blassingame’s The Slave Community was published in 1972. While Forret acknowledges that interracial violence was likely more common in the antebellum South (with slaves as both perpetrators and victims) than between the enslaved, he nonetheless points out that violent encounters between slaves have received scant scholarly attention. He believes this inattention “is not only misleading historically but also wrongly elevates all slaves to virtual sainthood” (p. 7). His research places the context of slave violence within a “violent” southern slaveholding culture, which provides a fascinating lens on the complexities of slave agency as well as nineteenth-century society more generally. Such a project would be a daunting task for any scholar, and the author readily admits the limitations inherent in the primary record; cases of aggression between slaves were likely to go unrecorded, particularly when masters did not face a loss of property or liability. The book also relies heavily on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives in certain instances, which, as the author notes, can lead to contradictions and distortions. However, Forret makes up for these limitations by presenting an amazing array of documents and demonstrating a meticulous reading of his sources. County and state court transcripts, state auditors’ records, plantation journals and correspondence, ex-slave testimonies, and even church records contain many examples of violent encounters between slaves. The early chapters of the book quantify cases of slave violence considering a number of variables—including physical size, age, region, occupation and skills, choice of weapons, and even the time of the week or year that incidents occurred—to present some fascinating correlations and trends. The role of southern evangelical churches, particularly Baptist congregations, in monitoring and policing slave violence (especially when it was associated with drinking or gambling) is particularly intriguing. Some southern churches had a significant number of enslaved [End Page 95] congregants and even “colored committees” to lead disciplinary proceedings against black members; for slave women who were sexually assaulted, the church might have been the only institution that could offer any kind of protection or recourse. The author’s major focus is not on the circumstances of slave violence but on the motivations for such encounters, which often involved dishonesty, disputes over property, threats to family or romantic ties, and, most important, “gendered performances of honor” (p. 36). Men and women fought and abused one another in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons, and the author makes a compelling case that violence was important for the construction of both masculine and feminine identities. The author concludes with an epilogue about the modern discourses of “black” violence and the historical fallacies or “metaphorical ghosts” that have shaped those discourses (p. 385). Overall, the book is a fascinating read, and Forret’s exhaustive attention to detail is truly staggering, but he writes in an eloquent and effective style that maintains a very clear focus on his key narrative arguments. Moreover, he emphasizes aspects of slave life and culture that are often overlooked, including examples of property ownership and the slave “internal economy,” continuities between work and leisure activities, competition, disloyalty, sexual double standards, and domestic violence. For its complex, “deromanticized” depiction of lives and...

Race Making in a Penal Institution.

This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal institution. Drawing on 135 days of ethnographic data collected as an inmate in a Southern California county jail system, the author argues that inmates are subjected to two mutually constitutive racial projects--one institutional and the other microinteractional. Operating in symbiosis within a narrative of risk management, these racial projects increase (rather than decrease) incidents of intraracial violence and the potential for interracial violence. These findings have implications for understanding the process of racialization and evaluating the effectiveness of penal management strategies.

Visions of violence in the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACTThe images of the Haitian Revolution attributed to French painter Jean-Louis Boquet and British soldier Marcus Rainsford have been widely used by museums and historians as eyewitness depictions of key atrocities. Exploring the images and texts produced by these two artists reveals that it is highly unlikely that either was produced in situ in Saint Domingue. Both Boquet and Rainsford drew heavily on a pre-revolutionary visual corpus of landscapes and adventurer's narratives as they experimented with differing visions of slave rebellion and military invasion. This article emphasises the extent to which their finished works were commercial objects, produced at specific political conjunctures in France and Britain, and in response to public opinion and market calculation. Recognising the dynamics of reproduction and omission that shaped their representations of inter-racial violence in Haiti reveals how knowledge of the revolution was constructed as legitimate. Their evasion of slave violence was not simply because black agency was unthinkable, but rather that visual evidence was not seen as necessary to authenticate the savagery of the enslaved.

Arguing with a Monument: Frederick Douglass’ Resolution of the ‘White Man Problem’ in his ‘Oration in Memory of Lincoln’

This revisionist view applies an ‘interracial turn’ lens to Frederick Douglass’ 1876 Freedmen’s Monument Speech, in which he critiqued the myth of Lincoln as ‘the liberator.’ After sketching interracial dynamics in Douglass ante bellum career, I do a close reading of visual rhetoric in this oration. Read through a history of Douglass’ complex but ultimately fecund relationships with white men, the speech constitutes a performative resolution of Douglass’ ‘white man problem,’ I argue. A historically situated reading of Douglass’ rhetoric reveals the maturity of his political thought, which calls on future audiences to reassess Douglass’ identity, and legacy. A ‘revised Douglass’ charted a path by which the United States could revise its own ‘white male problem.’ Douglass’ model is timely, given recurring episodes of interracial vio-lence, and the social and rhetorical unrest they spark. As a figure who battled racialism and lived a ‘more attractive alternative,’ Douglass provides deep legitimation for an ‘interracial turn’ in fields including American Studies, communication, ethnography, rhetorical studies, and literary criticism.

Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History

Toward the end of Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Clara, one the novel's protagonists, describes terrifying and odd incident: the migration of egg-bearing land crabs toward the seashore. Startled awake in the middle of the night, she hears a most unaccountable noise, which seem[s] to issue from all parts of the room, not unlike the clashing of swords (145). This disturbance, she learns, is the sound of fiercely approaching fertile crabs, striking their claws and wearing paths along the way. Letting no obstacle tur[n] them from their course, the crabs move through Clara's room and across her shrieking companion's chest (145). They are massive and ubiquitous, yet intimately close. A seemingly anomalous event in the narrative, the land crabs' migration epitomizes the novel's overall tendency to combine horrific and reproductive imagery in phenomenon I call fertility. This scene, moreover, evokes distinctly ecological horror that conceives of the environment as frighteningly close-knit, interactive, and multidimensional. The land crab episode forms part of an extended series of representations of gothic fertility in the novel--a series that becomes ever more ecological as the narrative shifts from revolutionary Saint Domingue to nonrevolutionary Cuba, and from the voice of Mary to her sister, Clara. Ultimately, these moments of gothic fertility reveal in the text horrifyingly uncertain, concatenated, and mutually vulnerable environment. Although few critics have directly analyzed the gothic dimension of Secret History, they tend to locate the novel's horror in the first half of the novel, associating it with interracial violence, sexual atrocities, and the overall nightmarish portrayal of the slave rebellion. (1) Yet the novel's gothic dimension extends beyond revolutionary Saint Domingue--where the breakdown of racial hierarchies signifies the ultimate horror--to present, in Cuba, an ecological gothic, mysterious yet disturbingly intimate world where the boundaries between races, species, the living and nonliving, entity and environment are already blurred. (2) In the first part of the novel, moments of gothic fertility emerge alongside interracial violence. But after the sisters travel to Cuba, they describe fertility as having environmental effects, addressing concerns such as poverty, filth, and dwindling agricultural resources. Finally, when Clara describes the land crabs' migration, gothic fertility becomes thoroughly ecological. The novel's environment transforms from contested territory, stage of brutal revolutionary conflict, into frightening collection of interactive and heterogeneous elements in constant transformation. The crabs, moreover, seem to represent every faction of revolutionary Saint Domingue--white European colonials, black revolutionaries, and Creoles--and their meaning becomes impossible to pin down. They become strangely ungraspable; the features of what they symbolize--the characters in the revolutionary story--become hazy and unfamiliar. Indeed, Sansay's text is gothic not simply because it portrays the horror of revolutionary Saint Domingue but because it calls into question that very representation, revealing messier, more entangled world--one based on affiliation and interrelatedness rather than racial hierarchy and difference. These representations of gothic fertility, culminating in the land crab episode, recast Secret History as an ecogothic text--challenging and reframing gothic depictions of the revolutionary West Indies--and redirect the critical focus on the novel, from the plot of the female protagonists to the environment writ large. Critics have recently taken up Sansay's work, characterizing it as transatlantic, circum-Caribbean, and early American novel, reading the dynamics of race, gender, and colonialism through the domestic plot that occupies the foreground. (3) Approaching Secret History as uniquely transnational, they have tended to situate the novel within an exclusively geopolitical framework, eliding the larger environmental context of Sansay's world and the horror that accompanies it. …

Violence Against Native American Women in the United States

In response to the topic of Global Justice and Human Rights: Country Case Studies, I will discuss the origin and continuation of violence against Native American women in the United States. In a report named Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Violence by Amnesty International, the organization deemed the current status of violence against indigenous women one of the most pervasive yet hidden human rights abuses. The U.S Department of Justice has found that Native American and Native Alaskan women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted. During an International Expert Group Meeting discussing Combatting Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs declared it a human rights issue of epidemic proportions. One in three Native American women are raped and three in five are physically assaulted. In reference to interracial violence, four out of five Native American victims of sexual assault reported that the perpetrator was white. Unfortunately due to the shame and stigma surrounding topics such as sexual assault and rape it is estimated that in reality these numbers are far higher. Scholars and historians of pre-colonial Native societies have found that during this period women held prominent positions and violence against women was rare. With colonization came a radical change to the role of women in Native society. Gender based violence and the exclusion of women in important positions was a powerful tool used by British settlers to dismantle the structures of native society and ultimately conquer it. Presently, due to the inadequate legal power given to Indian nations the crisis is not being dealt with efficiently. For example, Indian nations are unable to prosecute non-Indian offenders. In my discussion of violence against Native women in the United States I will begin by analyzing its colonial origins. Next I will discuss why this violence persists today with reference to laws and judicial processes. Finally, I will discuss what must be done to end these human rights abuses.

Apartheid, Crime, and Interracial Violence in Black Boy

This article critically interrogates the interplay of compatibility among crime, violence, and racial discrimination in Wright’s biographical novel Black Boy ( BB). It exploits parallels between selected postcolonial and criminological theories to conceptualize crime and violence as a way of negotiating and translating hegemony in the third space of cultural enunciation. The objective of every oppressive system is to have an absolute monopoly on all structures of power, to make sure it has “total” control. This is evident in the American South where laws were enacted to exclude African Americans from the social, political, and economic spheres of life. However, that same system that was designed to silence and marginalize African Americans also, inadvertently, created spaces that led to the emergence of subcultures of resistance. This article focuses on criminal subcultures of resistance that emerged as a result of and in direct response to institutionalized racism/apartheid.

The Criminal Caste

The Criminal Caste

Peace as a Transnational Theme

Peace is normally understood as the absence of war among nations. But that definition presupposes the overarching importance of nations as the key units of human association. There are, however, many other non-national entities, such as races, ethnic communities, religions, cultures, and civilizations. These entities, too, engage in conflict from time to time, as exemplified by the interracial violence and religious antagonisms in various parts of the world today and, of course, that which took place in the past. Yet why do we preserve the terms “war” and “peace” only for interstate relations? This is a very limited perspective, inasmuch as wars are a phenomenon whose appearance long preceded the formation of nations in the modern centuries; and besides, a presumed state of peace among countries can conceal serious hostilities between races or religions within and across national boundaries. Nazi Germany was technically at peace with all countries till 1939, and yet violent acts were committed there against groups of people domestically who were not considered racially acceptable. In today's world, there are no large-scale international wars, but domestic tensions and physical assaults occur daily within many countries. Terrorists wage war against states and their citizens alike, but they are not nations. To counter their threat, war preparedness in the traditional sense may be useful, perhaps, but it is much less effective than the coming together of individuals and groups to create a condition of interdependence and mutual trust. World peace must fundamentally be founded on a sense of shared humanity, regardless of which country people happen to live in. To consider war and peace purely in the context of international relations, therefore, is insufficient, even anachronistic. What we need is less an international than a transnational idea of peace.

Interracial Violence, Western Racialized Masculinities, and the Geopolitics of Violence Against Women

This article examines violence against racialized women in North America and how this violence is obscured through liberal conceptualizations of violence. I focus on cases of interracial stranger attacks of Asian women and girls by men. I contend that these cases – that range from homicide, sexual assault, prowl by night, to tampering with a food product – are connected and are local manifestations of national and global power relations. I end by foregrounding how some of the non-Asian men targeting Asian women are men of colour. I argue that this violence is an assertion of the right to place and space in both national and global hierarchies informed by the neoliberal uplift of elite Asian men and capital, and western constructions of the Asia Pacific century. In highlighting the specificities of Asian gendered difference, the intent is less to include Asian women in theorizing on violence, and more to examine how an intersectional, relational, historically specific and structural analysis of gendered violence brings into clearer view the systems of domination that violence secures.

Death and the Rise of the State: Criminal Courts, Indian Executions, and Early Pacific Northwest Governments

In the decade after the Oregon Treaty (1846) formally divided the Pacific Northwest between Britain and the United States, the territorial and colonial governments of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and Oregon Territory used capital punishment to combat violence and demonstrate government authority, especially over indigenous peoples. The reliance on legal proceedings coupled with the use of the death penalty marked a shift from earlier attempts to curb interracial violence in the region, which had relied on swift action and summary executions. The use of the legal system, rather than overt violence and direct reprisal, to punish natives who killed whites was not without its problems. The governments had limited resources, judge and juror had to be pulled from a small and widely dispersed population, and they faced plaintiffs who not only did not speak English, but whose capture often had to be negotiated with gifts and promises of justice. While the Indian tribes may not have understood or interpreted the events surrounding trials and executions in the way the government intended, at the very least they were given a preview of how the new government would react to future homicides.

Partnering With Youth Organizers to Prevent Violence: An Analysis of Relationships, Power, and Change

Youth from the city of San Bernardino, California, launched a community organizing campaign to develop policy changes to address conditions of inter-racial violence in their community. Pitzer College students collaborated with the high school youth organizers in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project to study violence and racial conflict at local high schools. The purpose of the project was to explore the experiences and perceptions of high school youth about racial conflict in their community and to develop policy proposals to address this issue. Undergraduate student researchers and high school youth organizers collaborated in designing and conducting narrative research. Together they developed questions and carried out semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with 40 local youth. The undergraduate students then coded and analyzed the data to identify common themes. Youth organizer's feedback was incorporated into a final, shared research report, including policy proposals, which were presented to the greater community. Youth organizers worked with city and school administrators to secure the implementation of programs they recommended to address their research's findings. Programs were enacted to reduce racial bias and conflict on school campuses, and city leaders agreed to develop a strategic youth development plan together with youth organizers. The partnership experience supported important policy changes in San Bernardino high schools, yet also illuminated areas wherein the community-campus partnerships could work more intentionally to shift power dynamics between and within the partners, address conditions that generate dependency and inequality in the partnership, and expand outcomes of institutional and community transformation.

‘I'll Give You Something to Cry About’: The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family

ABSTRACT Feminist literary critics and historians have examined the role of a triad of social locations that are also recognisable as psychological conditions, structures of feeling and motivations for action: guilt, innocence and culpability. Feminist literary critics and historians have examined this triad guilt/innocence/culpability in cultural representations of white femininity in the post-apartheid era, because they are trying to write white women into the history of apartheid not simply as zombified non-actors. The attention to white women as perpetrators of anti-black and other forms of racialised violence has been critical for excavating the many forms of domination that constituted apartheid in the period prior to 1994 and in the political project of re-making a post-apartheid society. Thus, they wish to place white women into the history of apartheid as perpetrators of anti-black violence. I am concerned with this, but also with white women as perpetrators of racialised anti-white violence, because intra-racial violence is so intimately connected to the creation of inter-racial violence and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, while white women's pursuit of status as caretakers and social guides for blacks has been unmasked as a feature of domination and white supremacy, white women's relationships to poor white women have not been critiqued with the same robustness. This article utilises Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's (1875–1975) volume for The Poor White Study on The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family (1932) to consider this subject in the vignettes, oral histories and life histories collected for inclusion in the Poor White Study, and in order to urge greater attention to the Poor White Study as a data set for re-thinking guilt, innocence and culpability. I discuss the race, class and gender dynamics of the racialisation of poverty among poor whites, because poor whites were an essential racial formation in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalism as a gendered national project, and because the institutions and practices of rehabilitation of poor whites participated in a colonial logic of demonisation. I argue that Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's report for the Poor White study provides a cartography of how the history of philanthropy and welfarism bound poor white women and upper-class white women together in a dynamic of intra-racial violence which profoundly illuminates theories about white female guilt and culpability.

The individual and “the general situation”: The tension barometer and the race problem at the University of Chicago, 1947–1954

This article explains how social theories that posited white attitudes as the root of racial injustice gained traction in postwar social thought. Examining the production of a "tension barometer," an attitude survey that scholars from the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations created to predict interracial violence, I chart vigorous debate over the nature and causes of racial oppression in the critical postwar decades. Available-and unavailable-social scientific frameworks, activists" interests, and emerging anticommunism, the Committee's history shows, created an environment where individualistic conceptions of "the race problem" won out, despite critique.

Representing Violence, Rewriting Empire

Representing Violence, Rewriting Empire Evan Gottlieb Dentith, Simon. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 245 pp. $88.00 cloth. Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 270 pp. $69.95 cloth. Kucich, John. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. 258 pp. $37.50 cloth. Viewed retrospectively, the history of the British Empire seems to be composed of equal parts self-confidence and hubris. As John Kucich points out in the introduction of Imperial Masochism, however, for those living before or even within imperial times, their outlook was potentially different: “from the perspective of those who could not have anticipated future successes and who either knew of or had themselves experienced harrowing encounters with disease, captivity, enslavement, military defeat, dependence on non-whites, or sadistic cruelties…narratives of British suffering may have seemed more honest” (7). Notwithstanding their significant methodological differences, all of the books under consideration in this review are concerned with the [End Page 344] conjoined British experiences of nation and empire and with literary attempts to make sense of those experiences as they were taking place. Far from taking the coherence of nation- and empire-building projects for granted, each of the authors astutely recognizes that such coherence was precisely what writers during the period of the rise and zenith of the British Empire–approximately 1776 to 1914–struggled to articulate. According to Ian Haywood in Bloody Romanticism, most previous studies of British Romanticism share a failure to appreciate the pervasiveness of violence in the period’s culture. For Haywood, Romanticism as it was popularly experienced was not primarily about Wordsworth’s ruined cottages or Shelley’s skylarks; rather, it was about the apparently endless series of wars, uprisings, rebellions, and riots that punctuated the period. Between the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, slave rebellions in San Domingo (now Haiti) and Demerara (now part of Guyana), the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and a seemingly interminable succession of domestic riots, the British literary marketplace was consistently saturated with contemporary images of violence and death. Haywood admits in his introduction that he is “not trying to construct a coherent genealogy or metanarrative” (8) of violence in the Romantic era; rather, his primary aim is to demonstrate the omnipresence of violent images and motifs in Romanticism, a task that he admirably fulfills through copious examples, many of them archival and non-canonical and some of them visually striking. He includes, for example, William Blake’s disturbing images of slaves being beaten, which were commissioned to illustrate John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negoes of Surinam (1796). One noticeable drawback of Haywood’s approach is a certain amount of repetition: in his desire to convey just how thoroughly Romantic Britain was awash in bloody imagery, Haywood’s book occasionally reads like one of the catalogues of period violence that he discusses. The primary advantage of his method, however, is that it allows for a forceful rereading of the era’s poetry, prose, and visual culture that highlights the hitherto underregarded place of what Haywood calls “spectacular violence” in Romanticism’s representational repertoire. Throughout Bloody Romanticism, then, scenes of spectacular violence are carefully analyzed from a variety of ideological perspectives. Indeed, Heywood explicitly argues that such scenes cannot be identified in advance with any particular ideological motive; instead, different configurations of the three main elements of any scene of suffering–the victim, the perpetrator, and the spectator or reader–“made the relations of power…complex and challenging” (5). This productive refusal to prejudge the politics of a given scene of spectacular violence leads Haywood to propose interpretations that occasionally run counter to the currents of contemporary criticism. For example, whereas most recent critics have viewed accounts and images of slave executions as indexical of the British public’s voyeuristic [End Page 345] appetite for scenes of interracial violence and colonial domination, Haywood is more interested in the way such scenes were central to the antislavery campaign insofar as they “brought the body of the suffering slave into the...

A Dynamic Model of Racial Competition, Racial Inequality, and Interracial Violence

Race relations and stratification literatures offer explicit expectations concerning interracial conflict. Causal arguments derived from these perspectives are examined in this study to explore their ability to explain interracial violence above and beyond criminological perspectives of economic deprivation and racial inequality. The vast majority of previous aggregate-level studies on violence are cross-sectional, ignoring the importance of a dynamic model that incorporates the influence of changing structural conditions in urban areas on interracial violence. We explore theories that incorporate dynamic explanations for the influence of structural factors related to crime as well as racial conflict and employ a methodological approach that models the change in structural conditions for rare events such as interracial homicide. We find that changes between 1980 and 1990 in urban Black and Hispanic population composition, racial competition and racial inequality differentially explain the variation in White and Black interracial homicide offending.

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. By Christopher B. Strain. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 254. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.) In Pure Fire, Christopher B. Strain examines how self-defense developed within the civil rights movement in the very years that nonviolent methods used by Martin Luther King, Jr. were becoming the dominant approach in the struggle for racial justice. Arguing that self-defense has been a crucial element in African-American history, Strain suggests that the 1954 Brown decision and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till instigated the rise of self-defense ideology as a key element of the civil rights movement. Interracial violence had been on the decline for decades, but the 1950s saw a renewed militancy among white southerners. In response, many black activists began openly espousing self-defense as a necessary means of confronting white violence. But, as Strain notes, whites perceived self-defense quite differently, viewing armed blacks as terrorist threats to civility. When whites heard the rhetoric of self-defense, they tended to respond with fear and force (p. 176). Strain skillfully traces the evolution of self-defense, from its antebellum incarnations to its ultimate collapse as a viable by the 1970s. During the late 1950s, as Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly dismissed self-defense as reckless and unwieldy, other black voices emerged in support of it. The national black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier ran a five-part series in 1957 that directly challenged King's nonviolent approach, which the paper called a diversionary tactic (p. 50). National Association for the Advancement of Colored People local chapter leader Robert Williams, to whom Strain devotes a chapter, argued that blacks had to show a willingness to fight back on an individual level, that while Gandhian nonviolence might work for communal action such as the Montgomery bus boycott, it was useless for the solitary black facing white lynch mobs. Even Gandhi, he argued, had approved of self-defense when nonviolence was not feasible. A World War II veteran, Williams returned home to Monroe, North Carolina, determined to practice the egalitarian lifestyle he had encountered abroad. Eventually he promoted armed resistance against whites, found exile in Cuba, and became an early inspiration to Black Power advocates. Strain's study of Williams, however, yields little information that was not unearthed in Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999). Nonetheless, Strain rightly notes Williams's significance in the movement, a fact reinforced by Rosa Parks' eulogy at the latter's 1996 funeral. …

The effect of racial threat on interracial and intraracial crimes

Efforts to apply racial threat theory to explain interracial violence in America are restricted to historically dated events such as lynchings or to relatively infrequently occurring events such as race riots, hate crimes or interracial homicides. The present study extends extant research by using county-level data, drawn from South Carolina's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), race-specific voting data, and demographic data to investigate the relationship between racial threat and interracial and intraracial violent crimes. Results from a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis show that one dimension of racial threat, economic competition, has a modest substantive effect on interracial crimes involving white perpetrators and black victims—as economic competition increases between whites and blacks, whites commit more violent crimes against blacks. Political threat has no statistically discernable effect on the white-on-black crime rate. Further, neither measure of racial threat, economic competition nor political threat is associated with the black-on-white crime rate, the white-on-white crime rate or with the black-on-black crime rate. The implications of these findings for racial threat theory are discussed.

Racial Profiling: Is There an Empirical Basis?

The disparity between public sensibilities and empirical data has become so extreme that certain topics can no longer be investigated without bringing down cries of "racism". Nevertheless, blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit violent crimes at about three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate. Blacks are as much more criminally violent than whites, as men are more violent than women. Therefore, just as police stop and question men more often than women, they should stop blacks more often than whites. Of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence involving blacks and whites, 90 percent are committed by blacks against whites. Blacks are 50 times more likely than whites to commit individual acts of interracial violence. They are up to 250 times more likely than whites to engage in multiple-offender or group interracial violence. There is more black-on-white than black-on-black violent crime. Fifty-six percent of violent crimes committed by blacks have white victims. Only two to three percent of violent crimes committed by whites have black victims. Violent crime and interracial violence are important, agonizing concerns in this country, and we cannot begin to formulate solutions until we understand the problems.

Exploring the Racial Discrimination and Competition Processes of Race-Specific Violence in the Urban Context

There has been increasing effort devoted to examining the linkages between urban disadvantage and race-specifi c violence in the sociological literature. Much of this literature has either focused on identifying the consequences of urban disadvantage on different racial groups, particularly as it relates to offending rates, or documenting the impact of labor market factors on intra-racial and inter-racial violence. While this literature advances our understanding of the interconnections between race, economic disadvantage and violence in the urban context, our exploration into this literature has only begun. In this paper, we outline the contributions of the racial stratifi cation literature to the study of urban violence and argue that this literature plays an essential role in moving the study of race and urban violence forward. We offer ways (avenues) to incorporate the racial competition and exploitation literature into the study of violence within and between racial groups. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of “process” by delineating the interconnections between labor market exploitation, competition, and violence.