Black in America. Christina Jackson

Black in America - Christina Jackson


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equal citizens and competitors in the racialized social structure of the United States. (2011:30)

      While racism was initially intended primarily to justify enslavement, after emancipation the pursuit of racial stratification and Black subjugation itself became the goal. Racism played a central role in justifying the unequal treatment of emancipated slaves and led to the rise of Jim Crow, which defined Black life in America for nearly a century.

      Racial inequality is maintained by racial ideologies and ideological constructs that normalize racial differences in everyday life. One of the key underpinnings legitimizing American racial inequality is the understanding that Blacks are the problem, rather than a group with problems reproduced within a racialized social structure. We began this chapter by describing how slavery and its ultimate abolition birthed the Black problem. In the remainder of this chapter, we will review the active resistance to Blacks coexisting in American society as equals, which produced the racial inequality we falsely attribute to Black intrinsic characteristics today. First, we describe how sociologists understand race, racism and racialized social systems to provide a shared understanding of how these intellectual claims manifested in the lives of emancipated slaves.

      There is a fundamental contradiction in the way that conventional and critical scholars approach race and racism. Conventional scholars acknowledge the historicity of race but suggest that its effects are no longer present and any contemporary racism is a remnant of a former time (Alba 1990). Racism in this view is an ideology or a belief and thus lends itself to be studied at the individual level within social psychology (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan 1998). Critical race scholars espouse the centrality of race and racism in defining the life chances of racial minorities historically and in the present day (Blauner 2001; Bonilla-Silva 2001). Racism is viewed as being materially based in the structural position of the racial and ethnic groups in the racialized social structure, thus individuals’ racist beliefs or lack thereof are not central because they do not affect the structural basis of racism (Bonilla-Silva 1996). Despite the class fracturing along racial lines, all members of the dominant group reap the benefit of dominant group position in a racialized social system2 even if they do not equally share in the material benefits (Bonilla-Silva 1996).

      It is impossible to understand the Black population in America without interrogating the role that racism played in its formation and the continued maintenance of the racial boundaries imposed on it. Yet this argument that racism is central is debated among sociologists with conventional versus critical approaches to the study of race. Jacques Derrida (in Crenshaw 2000: 550) notes that “Western thought … has always been structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities” and that “these polar opposites do not … stand as independent and equal entities. The second term in the pair is considered the negative, corrupt, undesirable version of the first.” Conventional approaches to race and ethnicity accepted this fact as it was the basis for the rationalization of slavery and “old-fashioned” racism as displayed during the Jim Crow Era. However, with the decline of overt racist behavior and increasing economic divisions within the Black community, conventional race scholars posited that class had replaced race as the most salient determinant of life chances for Black Americans (Wilson 1978).

      In contrast, critical race theorists recognized this shift as a transformation of racism from an overt to a covert form expressed as colorblind or cultural racism, rather than an actual decline in racism (Bonilla-Silva 2003a). Critical race scholars argue that the underlying belief in the superiority of the White race was still maintained. It just gained expression through a colorblind belief in egalitarian values while disavowing a “head-start” for the dominant group. Alternatively, in the case of cultural racism, subordinated minorities are judged to be culturally deficient and this cultural deficiency/inferiority is the basis of their demeaned social position, not racism or discrimination (Bonilla-Silva 2003a; Wilson 1973).

       Spotlight on Resistance

      In San Francisco, sociologist Christina Jackson conducted an ethnography from 2008 to 2010 in Black neighborhoods in the city: in particular, Bayview – Hunters Point. She joined a diverse community group called Stop Redevelopment Corporations Now (SRCN) that was created to organize against the erasure of Black San Francisco and other groups of color due to redevelopment, gentrification and environmental justice struggles associated with the Hunters Point shipyard. Residents conceptualized redevelopment and delayed environmental clean-up as implicit racism within a social structure that sought to erase their community. Through interviews and participant observation, Jackson captured the effects of redevelopment on the remaining low-income Black residents in the city. She interviewed Brother Ben, a 41-year-old small-business owner and member of SRCN who grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood and organizes in the Bayview – Hunters Point section. When asked about desirability, redevelopment and the SRCN movement he responded:

      This


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