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Title: Whiteness from Violence: Lynching and White Identity in the U.S. South, 1882-1915
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2011
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Abstract: Lynching has in the last couple of decades moved into the center of scholarly attention and much recent sociological research and theorizing on lynching converges on understanding it as southern whites reaction to real or perceived threats from blacks to their dominant position and privileged access to scarce resources, above all economic or material ones. That is to say, to explain why lynching occurred in particular times and places recent research relies on theories of intergroup relations and conflict, above all Blalocks seminal work on intergroup relations (Blalock 1967), that consider lynching a mechanism for racial social control aimed at reducing the competition from free African-Americans and maintain their position as subjugated labor in the post-bellum South (for an exemplar study in this tradition, see Tolnay and Beck 1995). Research in this vein has generated important insights and substantially furthered our knowledge about lynching, but its strong focus on economic and material conditions causes it to downplay relevant cultural and ideational dynamics, causes, and consequences of lynching, rendering certain highly significant aspects of thephenomenon inexplicableone of which is its occasionally salient ritual and symbolism.
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Authors: Smangs, Mattias
Publisher: Fordham University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Race and Ethnicity
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