Black in America. Christina Jackson
Blackness is often thought of, and projected as, a monolithic experience that includes welfare, poverty, and female-headed households. The ubiquity of these images, and their taken-for-granted associations, force all Blacks to navigate their everyday lives through a lens of deviance, no matter how incongruous the fit. Among Blacks themselves, Black identity and its expression are shaped by a host of intersections, such as gender, ethnicity/immigrant status, class, sexuality and disability. The intersection of identities further marginalizes some Blacks while privileging others. This unevenness in oppression has the ability to create fractures within the Black community, even while it is one of its defining features.
Chapter 3, “Whose Life Matters? Value and Disdain in American Society,” reorients the reader away from the – unsettling for some – slogan Black Lives Matter to examine the historical value placed on Black life. We succinctly describe the devaluation of Blacks in the US through a focus on the historical treatment of the Black body and the myriad of ways in which the medical, legal and political system perpetuated it. We then chronicle Black resistance movements from slavery onward, demonstrating that Blacks have always resisted their subjugation, unwilling to accept the disdain for Black life even when racial oppression was violently reasserted. Movements, and the rise of the contemporary social movement Black Lives Matter, have essentially attempted to redefine the problem not as Blackness but as inequality that subjugates Black people.
Chapter 4, “Staying Inside the Red Line: Housing Segregation and the Rise of the Ghetto,” emphasizes the role of place in containing the Black body. Racial segregation still defines the life chances and landscape of inequality for Black urban residents, stigmatizing inner-city neighborhoods and rendering its inhabitants vulnerable. While segregation as an official policy, created to protect White citizens and lock in their advantages spatially, was eradicated nearly 50 years ago, other systems continue this protection and perpetuate historically stigmatized spaces such as the ghetto (Lipsitz 2015). Today, not only are we still avoiding “integrated” neighborhoods discursively, but the rationales used to rehabilitate spaces are coded racially. Historically Black neighborhoods are targeted for redevelopment and gentrification, needing “revival” and “resuscitation” through real-estate investment. Yet hegemonic ideas about Blackness, deeply held in the public’s imaginary, lock low- and middle-income Blacks out of quality housing that is created. We explore how Black residents make sense of this contradiction and resist.
Chapter 5, “Who Gets to Work? Understanding the Black Labor Market Experience,” emphasizes how race structures access to occupational opportunity that marginalizes Blacks in the labor market. In a meritocratic society, access to opportunity should be granted based on how hard a person works, and hard work should lead to economic rewards. This has not been true in America. Occupational opportunities were withheld from Blacks and extended to Whites. Blacks and Whites, men and women, when working alongside one another or in related jobs were compensated unequally because of their race and/or gender. Racism helped manage the dissonance between American ideals of equality and Black exclusion, ideologically and legally justifying the differential treatment of Blacks in the labor market until the Civil Rights Movement. There were some gains afforded by affirmative action, followed by losses as federal interest in enforcement waned. This chapter takes the reader on a journey to understand the context of historically unequal opportunity and the contemporary forces driving socioeconomic inequality today.
Chapter 6, “Is Justice Blind? Race and the Rise of Mass Incarceration” (with Lucius Couloute), examines the historical pathologization of Black bodies, placing it within a larger system of inequality and race-making. It begins first with the state of mass criminalization today, exploring the product of what Michelle Alexander (2010) calls “the new Jim Crow.” With millions of Black bodies under criminal justice system control, the chapter asks: How did we get here? The answer lies in the immediate post-emancipation period as social scientists, politicians, wealthy landowners and big business worked to create a system that reinforced racial inequality amid racial flux. We then examine shifting twentieth-century practices and policies grounded in – by then pervasive – racist ideas that governed the growth of our criminal justice system. The chapter then ends where it started, the contemporary period, this time examining the effects of criminalizing Black bodies and the reproduction of racial inequality in newer practices and policies.
Chapter 7, “Reifying the Problem: Racism and the Persistence of the Color Line in American Politics” (with Emmanuel Adero), provides an examination of the role of politics and policy in creating and driving the persistence of racial inequality. It outlines the politics of retrenchment after emancipation, which led to a split between Northern and Southern Democrats and the emergence of the Southern strategy, which appealed to the racism against Blacks held by Southern White voters. We then draw on the similarities between the Democratic and Republican parties and how racial appeals have shaped presidential politics and policies. While Blacks are a base to be catered to and at times courted by one party and antagonized by the other, both have played a definite role in the persistence of Black marginality. Finally, we outline policy as the outcome of racial politics. Though policies are seemingly race-neutral, their disparate impact on the Black community is well documented.
Book Features
We want you to get the most out of this book and have included the features below as additional resources.
Key terms are bolded throughout and compiled in a glossary.
Integrated into each chapter is a stand-alone feature called “Spotlight on Resistance” that highlights a contemporary or historical example of Black people asserting themselves and resisting racial oppression.
At the end of each chapter, there are critical questions to promote engagement and reflection.
Notes
1 * Where a term or concept is highlighted in bold in the text, you will find it defined in the Glossary at the end of the book.
2 1. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/post-racial.
3 2. www.archives.gov/files/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.
4 3. context.newamerica.org/there-is-the-south-then-there-is-mississippi-6cb154ee3843.
1 How Blacks Became the Problem: American Racism and the Fight for Equality
To be Black in America today is to exist among a myriad of contradictions, but there is none more striking and uniquely American than the adherence to the ideal of equality, and its sister meritocracy, alongside pervasive racial inequality. Slavery birthed this contradiction. As slaves, Blacks were the solution to America’s labor problem, marked by race for unequal treatment. They were forcibly brought to the United States for the sole purpose of serving as an intergenerationally stable, coercible labor force (Branch 2011). Their racial otherness enabled the brutality that American slavery required (Fredrickson 2002). Black slaves were bought, sold and traded like cattle. “Auctions were government sponsored events taking place on courthouse steps” (Roberts 1997:35). The slave trade was a permanent legal part of the foundation of America.
Slavery normalized the objectification and dehumanization of Blacks, and the Constitution legislated this. The “three-fifths” compromise was the resolution to one of