Editor’s Introduction: Responding to the Cumulative Damage of Racism

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12247
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018

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Volume 77 May–September 2018 Numbers 3-4

Editor’s Introduction: Responding to the

Cumulative Damage of Racism

Despite superficial progress in overcoming the deep legacy of racism

in the United States, it remains firmly rooted as the shadow side of

American life. Although many Euro-Americans have declared racism

to be an anachronism, it has not disappeared. It is invisible to the

white majority but not to those who have endured the injuries of

racism. The essays presented here will attest to the cumulative effects

of racism that persist whether acknowledged or not. The aim is to

make visible the patterns of racism as a system of domination or white

supremacy that remain largely opaque to the white population in

the United States1 The focus is on the conditions endured by African

Americans. The reasons for that focus are explained below.

The system of white supremacy that operated openly from the 17th

century until the 1960s in the United States was a state of terror. Not

only were enslaved people taken from their land and culture, deprived

of freedom, tortured, bought and sold, dehumanized, forced to learn

a new language and religion, cut off from their ancestors, and denied

even the minimal solace of family attachments, they were forced to

survive under those degraded conditions for 15 to 20 generations

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-Septe mber, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 47

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582 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

with no hope of rescue. White prisoners of war, such as Senator John

McCain, who survived those sorts of conditions for four or five years,

are considered national heroes. The African Americans who survived

centuries of far greater abuse have never received an official apology,

much less an effort to rectify past transgressions.

Racism as a system of domination is a species of terrorism.2 All

Americans today are trying to come to terms with fear of terrorist attacks

on the soil of the United States. However, no group in American society

understands the nature of terrorism better than African Americans be-

cause they lived with a constant dread of irrational white violence from

the start of slavery to the civil rights movement in the 1950s. To those

who think that Martin Luther King’s great accomplishments were his or-

atory and his organizing of marches, they have missed the depth of his

legacy. As Hamden Rice (2011) explains the meaning of King’s work:

I was having this argument w ith my father about Martin Luther Ki ng and

how his message was too conservative compared to Ma lcolm X’s message.

… I was kind of sarcastic and asked someth ing like, so what did Martin

Luther King accomplish other than giv ing his “I have a dream speech?”

… My question pretty much reflect [ed] the national civic religion view of

what Dr. King accomplished. … My father told me with a sort of cold fur y,

“Dr. King ended the terror of living in the South.” … Living in the South

(and in parts of the Midwest and in ma ny ghettos of the North) was living

under terrorism. It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate d rinking

fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the

bus. It was that white people, mostly white men, occasional ly went ber-

serk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, a nd lynched them.

… White people also randomly beat black people, and the black people

could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment. This const ant low

level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system run ning. It made

life miserable, stressfu l and terrifying for black people.

In the war waged by whites against blacks, no truce was ever declared,

no treaty signed. The police, along with private security guards hi red

by neighborhoods, businesses, and universities, continue to function

in many ways like the slave patrols of the 18th and 19 th centuries. There

is no place of sanctuary for African A mericans, no place to hide from

the random shootings that go unpunished, the demeaning securit y

checks they endure, the sense of being intruders in a white world,

the denigrating messages in advertising and entertain ment, the long

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Editor’s Introduction

commutes to and from still-segregated housing, the family traumas

associated with the crimi nal justice system, and the ongoing difficulty

of achieving a modest level of economic security. A state of terror does

not consist of isolated events. It is a constant hum in the background,

a thousand messages that are designed to destroy the soul over time.

White supremacy causes damage of many kinds. Although it exacts

a psychological or spiritual price from everyone in its orbit, never-

theless, the focus of the essays gathered here is on more tangible

forms of suffering.3 This project began with a desire to approximate

a comprehensive statement about the nature and correct scale of rep-

arations. Most discussions about reparations seem to stall quickly,

perhaps because the magnitude of the debt is enormous. Thus the

original hope was to compile the sort of evidence that might be used

in support of a legislative or judicial case for reparations. During the

long gestation of this project, that approach has come to seem overly

optimistic and simplistic. Nevertheless, it is the central feature that I

asked most authors to consider.

The original connection with reparations also partially explains

why the focus here is specifically on the damage experienced by

African Americans, not other oppressed racial or ethnic groups. There

are other reasons for focusing on African Americans: 1) they have

endured racism longer in the United States than most other groups

(other than Native Americans), and 2) racism in the United States was

largely constructed to create a social division between Euro-Americans

and African Americans. Various immigrant groups made the transition

from “nonwhite” or “not fully white” to “white” in the past 150 years,

starting with the Irish, who did so, in part, by siding with pro-slavery

forces in the decades leading up to the Civil War (Jacobsen 1998;

Gleeson 2016). But the fluidity of white identity required that “black-

ness” had to remain permanently stigmatized. Otherwise, the advan-

tage of attaining the status of whiteness would not have had any

meaning. Thus, the black-white racial divide was a durable phenom-

enon, unlike more permeable forms of racism.

Personalizi ng Racism is Counter productive

A fundamental barrier to a ser ious assessment of racism in the United

States is the tendency to personalize the issue. The conf lict is then