(Dis)Continuities in Racialized Legal Violence

• DOI: 10.1177/00027162211023354
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Setting the Agenda

22 ANNALS, AAPSS, 694, March 2021

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211023354

(Dis)Continuities

in Racialized

Legal Violence

By

GEOFF WARD,

DAVID CUNNINGHAM,

HEDWIG LEE,

and

SARAH GABY

1023354ANN The Annals Of The American Academy(Dis)Continuities In Racialized Legal Violence

research-article2021

Amid growing research on the history and legacies of

racist violence in the United States, there has been

limited development of theory and measurement per-

taining to racist violence as a sociological process.

Social science research has centered on lynching and,

to a lesser extent, slavery and broader Jim Crow laws

and customs, and rarely have these and other forms

been engaged together and in relation to contemporary

outcomes. We focus on racialized “legal violence”—

uses of law in ways that are harmful to populations

defined by race—and use the case of South Carolina

“slave courts” to explore modes of racialized violence

that are expansive and intertwined. Contrary to a more

sequential and linear reading of successive and discreet

modes of repression (e.g., “slavery ended. . .”), our

analysis shows recursive, multidimensional, and cascad-

ing aspects of injurious legal action and inaction that

accumulate and repeat over time. Continuities of

racialized legal violence, which are contested and thus

dynamic, modify and maintain age-old structural con-

straints. Rather than unfolding in sequence—from set-

tler colonialism to enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass

incarceration—“peculiar institutions” are more fluid,

sharing repertoires and networks of racialized legal

violence that recombine over time.

Keywords: racial violence; legal violence; policing;

courts

“[Slave Court] decisions are rarely in conformity

with justice or humanity.”

—South Carolina Governor James H. Adams, 1855

“Slavery didn’t end in 1865,” attorney and

Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan

Stevenson has emphasized, “it just evolved”

(Seslowsky 2018). This logic underscores the

Geoff Ward is a professor of African and African

American studies at Washington University in St.

Louis. His research focuses on the racial politics of

social control and pursuit of racial justice, historically

and today.

Correspondence: gward@wustl.edu