Bonus Links: Academic Writing about the Legacies of Slavery (2023)
Usually, we use this space to share recent news stories related to the legacies of American slavery. But while we’re scan for newsworthy clips, we also come across many scholarly articles that take a deeper look at the same topics. Below is a small sample from the extensive academic journal literature devoted to the afterlives of slavery, which we have sorted into a few familiar legacy themes—plus a new theme that we call “Somatic and Emotional Legacies of Slavery.”
Most of the articles below are available through open access but a few require personal or institutional subscriptions. The bibliography is drawn from many academic disciplines, including law, medicine, history, sociology, literature, geography, criminology, and theology. (We don’t have special expertise in most of these fields, but we do trust the peer review process.) As always, a link here does not signify agreement or approval by the Council of Independent Colleges.
Commemoration and Memory
Rachelle Berry, et al., “Wake Work: Unearthing the Legacy of Slavery at the United States’ First Publicly Chartered University,” GeoHumanities 9:2 (2023), pp. 333–354: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2170813 (open access).
Athens-Clarke County, Georgia is home to the first publicly chartered institution of higher learning in the United States: The University of Georgia (UGA). For the last 200 + years, UGA has brought settlers to Athens and led them in Indigenous removal, slavery, Jim and Jane Crow politics, segregation, and racial discrimination. A reckoning with this history of slavery and the ongoing harms of settler-colonial higher education is long overdue. This paper describes the efforts of a group of faculty and students at UGA beginning this process. In particular, we utilize Christina Shape’s (2016) notion of “wake work” to reflect upon a visceral moment of anti-Black violence on our campus: the unearthing and contested reburial of human remains that were likely enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals during the expansion of UGA’s Baldwin Hall. … We conclude with specific recommendations to other universities and their faculty, students, staff, and community members fighting for racial justice.
Hilary Green and Adam H. Domby, “Studying Slavery on Campus: Research, Reconciliation, and Public Engagement,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 13:2 (June 2023), pp. 155–177: https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2023.0028 (subscription required).
Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of colleges and universities have begun the difficult work of examining how their institutional histories are tied to the systems of slavery, the slave trade, settler colonialism, and segregation. As more schools continue to embark on the soul-searching process of researching the darker sides of their institutional pasts, this roundtable brings together eight scholars who have engaged in the hard work of research and reconciliation to discuss how they have approached the topic of slavery on campus. The discussion includes how to start a slavery on campus project, the challenges faced therewith, and strategies for publicizing the findings. Domby and Green hope the robust discussion will help other scholars begin similar projects around the country.
Matt R. Jantzen, “Confederate Theology: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Theological Afterlife of Slavery,” Modern Theology 39:4 (October 2023), pp. 751–774: https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12870 (subscription required).
In the wake of social movements to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces and expose suppressed legacies of white supremacy in the United States, this article uncovers an influential and overtly white supremacist tradition of US Christian theology through a case study of the Reformed theologian Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898). Regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most prolific theological teachers and scholars of his time, Dabney was also an unrepentant defender of racialized chattel slavery and white supremacy. He was also a leading contributor to Lost Cause revisionism after the Civil War. This reveals a troubling paradox: one of the leading theologians in the United States during the nineteenth century was also one of that century’s most committed white supremacists. While Dabney’s theological defense of a patriarchal, white supremacist society has too often been either conveniently forgotten or uncritically excused by later generations, this article offers a theological reckoning with Dabney’s project in order to diagnose its ramifications for contemporary theology and articulate a constructive response.
Nafees Khan and Susan Cridland-Hughes, “Counterstorying as Shining a Light: Teaching about Slavery through Narratives,” The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 96:3 (2023), pp. 104–110: https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2023.2196050 (subscription required).
The article critiques schools’ current reification and overreliance on teaching slavery as a history of exceptional individuals and unbroken progress toward freedom. The authors explore how the counterstorying of narratives of formerly enslaved individuals in both preservice and in-service education coursework complicates and engages the histories and legacies of slavery. … The authors focus on The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano as representative of the current canonical frame, then introduce interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans from the Federal Writers Project, Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, and the graphic novel Abina and the Important Men by Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke to demonstrate how counterstorying slavery shines a light on power and resistance.
… The property and partial personhood status of African-Americans [under slavery], combined with standards developed to facilitate the growth of the international commodities market for products including cotton, contributed to the current beliefs of business investors and even how communities of color are still governed and supported. … The commodities markets and the nations that rose and prospered would not be possible without the slave trade, and that trade would not be possible without the legal, business, and social norms in place to facilitate private ordering and growth while reinforcing the subjugation of African-Americans. Yet, many business and commercial law professors devote class time to teaching foundational and historical material, without any consideration of the impact of slavery. To avoid slavery in business and commercial law courses is to ignore an institution that plays a pivotal role in much of what we do today. Slavery is not a frolic, it is foundational. … [In my course at the Washington and Lee Univ. School of Law], I devote time and space to discussions of race and the law by making the connection between the history of commercial concepts, slavery, and the role of the cotton industry in the shaping of international commercial law norms … [including] the story of Washington and Lee University’s sale of individuals for the purpose of ensuring the institution’s financial survival, then extrapolate from the facts to review the high points of commercial law. …
Joshua F. J. Inwood, “The Modern Infrastructure Landscape and the Legacy of Slavery,” The Professional Geographer 75:1 (2023), pp. 44–51: https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2022.2085120 (subscription required).
I argue that a broad reading of the infrastructure landscape of the contemporary United States opens space to see how slavery affects our current geographies. By focusing on infrastructure—the roads, ports, rail lines, and buildings, among other examples—built by enslaved people, we can locate slavery in contemporary landscapes. By focusing on the built environment, we can also understand the centrality of slavery in making the U.S. nation-state. Perhaps most geographically significant, the modern infrastructure landscape built through enslaved labor generates existing wealth for individuals and corporations. If, for instance, the infrastructure built through slavery is still generating income, are there ways to capture that income and redistribute it to individuals or communities through reparative justice frameworks? This approach to addressing inequities within the U.S. economy can serve as a form of reparations and might help address fundamental economic inequities within the United States.
Larry Santucci, “The Racial Wealth Gap and the Legacy of Racially Restrictive Housing Covenants,” Wharton Pension Research Council Working Paper 2023-17 (September 2023): https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4616634 (open access).
One of the ways in which Black Americans were prevented from accumulating housing wealth during the 20th century was through the use of racially restrictive covenants. Recent research provides evidence that the current wealth distribution is influenced in part by historical inequalities in opportunities to create wealth. In Philadelphia and other US cities, racial covenants made it difficult for Black Americans to acquire homes, and affected both prices paid and returns to home ownership. Future research will assemble the data necessary to understand the long-run consequences of these barriers on the acquisition and intergenerational transmission of wealth in Philadelphia.
Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the politics of memory suggest why reparations are an important indicator of the prospects for multiracial democracy. Because the language of reparations has been used to advance a range of political ends, I conclude by considering some of the dilemmas that remain unresolved in the literature.
Jeffrey Insko et al., “Abolition’s Afterlives,” American Literary History 35:4 (Winter 2023), pp. 1759–1824: https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab006 (open access).
The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.
Carol Klier, “Understanding Discursive Framings of Reparations for Slavery and Jim Crow,” San Diego Law Review 60:3 (2023), pp. 481–495: https://digital.sandiego.edu/sdlr/vol60/iss3/3 (open access).
… This Article investigates a range of perspectives and proposals for reparations paid to Black Americans for the atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow laws, with particular attention to how each advocate frames their argument. Addressing the frame employed by each writer may facilitate a more robust understanding of the desired outcomes, the means promoted to achieve those outcomes, and how these differing discursive frames might help or hinder progress in the face of opposition.
… Drawing from case studies that have implemented transitional justice schemes, this Note argues for the adoption of a responsive, holistic transitional justice scheme by the federal government. Such an approach, this Note contends, will position the United States on a path to achieving lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality. To achieve this end, the Note recommends amending the Constitution, establishing a commission on truth and history, re-examining the way we teach history in schools, and providing reparations. Thus, the Note offers a novel contribution to the literature on reparations and racial justice by demonstrating the efficacy of pairing reparations and a truth and history commission with education policy and constitutional amendments. The path to achieve transitional justice goals in the United States will be a long one, but as this Note demonstrates, this approach presents a viable means of fully achieving these goals. Discussing holistic transitional justice in the United States and developing strategies within this framework lay the first bricks in the path to achieve lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality in the United States.
Racial Violence and Resistance
Caroline M. Bailey, “The Evolution of Anti-Blackness in the American South: How Slavery and Segregation Perpetuates the Victimization of Black People,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 60:1 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1177/00224278221120811 (subscription required).
Drawing on the “legacy effect” framework and the intergroup contact hypothesis, this study examines whether 1) slavery is associated with anti-Black hate crimes, 2) racial segregation is associated with anti-Black hate crimes, and 3) racial segregation moderates the relationship between slavery and anti-Black hate crimes. … [F]indings from the analyses reveal that both slavery and racial segregation are significantly associated with increases in anti-Black hate crimes. Moreover, the relationship between slavery and anti-Black hate crimes is amplified by racial segregation. Conclusions: The results from this research suggest that historical practices and institutions, such as slavery, can influence the contemporary maltreatment of Black citizens. Specifically, the racism and discrimination inherent in slavery has manifested in the form of modern-day anti-Black hate crimes. Additionally, the relationship between slavery and anti-Black hate crimes is amplified [by] racial segregation….
Melanie R. Holmes, “Black Power & the Slave Trade: How the Memory of Slavery Disrupted White Supremacy, 1959-1989,” Madison Historical Review 20:1 (Spring 2023): https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/mhr/vol20/iss1/8 (open access).
Memory is a useful methodology when studying how historical events are currently remembered. Not often has the methodology been applied to the Black Power Movement. However, the public memory of slavery was deeply rooted in the Black Power Movement beginning in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. This paper demonstrates slavery as the root public memory which energized the spirit of resistance within the Black Power Movement. Beginning with the unprecedented work of Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, this research takes a chronological journey through the lineage of Black Power leaders Garvey inspired between 1959-1989. This period begins with the rise of Malcolm X in 1959 and includes speeches from the transformational activism of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Stokely Carmichael; Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; extends to writings of Obi Egbuna who led the British Black Panthers; and concludes with the artistry of Black Panther descendant TuPac Shakur.
Jonathan C. Reid, “A Culture of White Violence: The Enduring Impact of Slavery on Contemporary Interracial Killings,” Social Problems (September 2023 preprint): https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad045 (subscription required).
While the literature has documented various factors influencing the geographic distribution of interracial homicide, little is known about the role of historical antecedents. This article deepens our understanding of interracial homicide by investigating the relationship between slavery and contemporary interracial killings in the American South. The study draws on historical accounts of race-making and Black dehumanization to argue that slavery provided a fertile backdrop for the emergence of a culture of White interracial violence. Slavery’s legacy in this regard is expected to influence contemporary rates of White interracial homicide but not impact other racial homicide outcomes. Findings from county-level negative binomial regression models support these predictions, revealing a significant association between the historical legacy of slavery and higher rates of White-on-Black Southern killings. Conversely, slavery does not influence other race-specific homicide patterns, including Black-on-White, White-on-White, and Black-on-Black homicide.
Hema Preya Selvanathan, Jolanda Jetten, and Alexis Umeh, “A History of Collective Resilience and Collective Victimhood: Two Sides of the Same Coin That Explain Black Americans’ Present-Day Responses to Oppression,” British Journal of Social Psychology 62:1 (January 2023), pp. 136–160: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12562 (open access).
Collective victimhood and collective resilience are two sides of the same coin. However, most literature to date has focused on the experiences and consequences of collective victimhood. In the present research, we focused on the experiences of Black Americans, a group that has a legacy of victimization and resilience. As a part of Black Americans’ collective memory, we explored the nature of historical collective resilience and examined its role in explaining collective responses to present-day oppression, over and above any effect of historical collective victimhood. … [We] found evidence that perceived historical collective resilience was linked to a greater sense of collective continuity, which, in turn, explained greater support for the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. Our findings underscore the importance of considering narratives of resilience in a group’s history and point to the way such collective resilience narratives can serve as a resource for the group in the present.
Despite a long line of scholarship on race and social control, evidence that incarceration can be connected to slavery is difficult to provide. This study evaluates whether slavery had long-term effects on growth in state incarceration rates by focusing on two key theoretical indicators: the size of the enslaved population prior to the Civil War and demographic changes during the Great Migration. Results reveal that states that historically had larger enslaved populations and those that acted as destinations for southern migrants experienced increased growth in incarceration between 1970 and 2015. … These findings lend support to theoretical claims that link slavery to mass incarceration and shed light on the mechanisms that enable racial histories to map onto current criminal punishments.
This essay discusses several controversial aspects of the relevance of slavery law to issues of racial inequality today. Racial profiling has been a consistent policy in the United States that has allowed racial inequality, particularly in the criminal justice system, to continue. Specifically, this essay addresses the distorted view of this country’s slave history, the harm inflicted by the racial profile that created a presumption of slave status for those who looked Black, and the current racial inequities exacerbated by the continuation of this racial profile.
Matthew Ward, “Slavery’s Legacy of White Carceral Advantage in the South,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (October 2023): https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492231207009 (subscription required).
Legacy of slavery scholarship has experienced a renaissance as of late, with researchers across numerous disciplines focusing increased attention on the long-term ramifications of America’s original sin. Using quantitative methods these researchers have found that where slavery was deeply entrenched—particularly in the South—racial inequality and Black disadvantage across numerous domains is exacerbated. While this research has contributed enormously to understanding slavery’s legacy in the South and its nefarious consequences for Black communities, little attention has been paid to the other side of slavery’s legacy of inequality—notably, the many ways White populations continue to benefit from slavery. The state’s carceral apparatus represents a significant area of such advantage and, yet, despite the genealogical linkage historians and socio-legal scholars have drawn between the two institutions, few studies empirically examine slavery’s enduring effects on modern incarceration. Using quantitative methods, this article examines whether—and, if so, how—greater slavery levels in Southern counties generates carceral advantage for contemporary White populations. Where slavery levels were once greater, White populations living in those same areas today—relative to White populations living in areas where slavery was less deeply entrenched—have accrued significant formal social control benefits in the form of lower jail incarceration rates. This effect, however, operates indirectly. …
Race, Place, and Migration
Samuel Bazzi et al., “The Confederate Disapora,” NBER Working Paper 31331 (June 2023): http://www.nber.org/papers/w31331 (open access).
This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become pervasive nationally in the early 20th century. Occupying positions of authority, former slaveholders played an outsized role in this process. Beyond memorializing the Confederacy, migrants exacerbated racial violence, boosted novel forms of exclusion, and compounded Black disadvantage outside the South. Moving West, former Confederates had larger effects in frontier communities lacking established culture and institutions. Over time, they continued to transmit norms to their children and non-Southern neighbors. The diaspora legacy persists over the long run, shaping racial inequities in labor, housing, and policing. Together, our findings offer a new perspective on migration, elite influence, and the interplay between culture and institutions in the nation-building process.
Jane Peterson and Michael M. Gregory, “Preserving Chicago’s Great Migration Legacy through Archaeology and Public Engagement,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (2023): https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2023.2205701 (subscription required) or open access version.
Chicago’s Great Migration history constitutes a critical chapter in the narrative of African-American post-emancipation diaspora in the United States. Excavations demonstrate that substantial amounts of material culture from household contexts are preserved within Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Artifacts from three residences, in combination with archival sources, prove useful in exploring the often contradictory forces that shaped the daily experiences of working-class migrants arriving from the South. These data add material dimensions to those experiences and provide tangible evocations of a landscape that is under threats of erasure. Fieldwork and outreach are organized to amplify the work being done by heritage specialists and community stakeholders to preserve Bronzeville’s Great Migration legacy while improving the conditions for today’s residents as well.
Environmental Justice
Tianna Bruno, “Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113:7 (2023), pp. 1542–1553: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2107985 (open access).
Building on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Black studies scholars have long theorized and analyzed what it means to exist in the afterlife of slavery, which refers to the precarity and devaluation of Black life since chattel slavery. This article draws the natural environment into this discourse to conceptualize the biophysical afterlife of slavery. The biophysical afterlife of slavery describes how the precarity and devaluation of Black life has affected the natural environments in which these lives exist. Slavery left lingering impacts on soil, water, and vegetation regimes as it maneuvered and settled across the earth, but importantly, its ideological and sociopolitical legacies continue to impact Black ecologies today. I argue that to methodologically attend to the biophysical afterlife of slavery there must be a meaningful integration of critical physical geography and Black geographies. As an example of this integration, I suggest that there is a myriad of methods used to reconstruct environmental histories, such as dendrochronology that, when brought together with a Black geographies lens, create mechanisms to analyze the past, present, and future of the biophysical afterlife of slavery.
Race, Health, and Medicine
Nientara Anderson et al., “The Long Shadow: A Historical Perspective on Racism in Medical Education,” Academic medicine 98:8 suppl. (August 2023), pp. S28–S36: https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0000000000005253 (open access).
To dismantle racism in U.S. medical education, people must understand how the history of Christian Europe, Enlightenment-era racial science, colonization, slavery, and racism shaped modern American medicine. … Within this historical context, the authors expose the histories of violence underlying contemporary terms such as implicit bias and microaggressions. Through this history, they also gain a deeper appreciation of why racism is so prevalent in medical education and how it affects admissions, assessments, faculty and trainee diversity, retention, racial climate, and the physical environment. The authors then recommend 6 historically informed steps for confronting racism in medical education….
Maheetha C. Bharadwaj et al., “Abstract A091: County-Level Analysis of the Link between Historical Slavery and Prostate Cancer Incidence,” Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 32:12 suppl. (December 2023), p. A091: https://doi.org/10.1158/1538-7755.DISP23-A091 (open access).
Black individuals with prostate cancer in the US experience the widest racial disparity in both cancer incidence and mortality when compared to the average population. These differences are driven by the intersection of race and a wide range of structural and social determinants of health and equity. Structural and social inequities can drive disproportionate and adverse exposure to violence, poverty, and physical and emotional stress—among other exposures—which may impact biologic risk, health behaviors, and healthcare access. We hypothesize that the impacts of these structural and social determinants are rooted in historical events that continue to inform present day prostate cancer events and outcomes.
Julia E. Goldberg et al., “How We Got Here: The Legacy of Anti-Black Discrimination in Radiology,” RadioGraphics 43:2 (February 2023), pp. 2–13: https://doi.org/10.1148/rg.220112 (open access).
Current disparities in the access to diagnostic imaging for Black patients and the underrepresentation of Black physicians in radiology, relative to their representation in the general U.S. population, reflect contemporary consequences of historical anti-Black discrimination. These disparities have existed within the field of radiology and professional medical organizations since their inception. Explicit and implicit racism against Black patients and physicians was institutional policy in the early 20th century when radiology was being developed as a clinical medical field. Early radiology organizations also embraced this structural discrimination, creating strong barriers to professional Black radiologist involvement. Nevertheless, there were numerous pioneering Black radiologists who advanced scholarship, patient care, and diversity within medicine and radiology during the early 20th century. This work remains important in the present day, as race-based health care disparities persist and continue to decrease the quality of radiology-delivered patient care. …
Rupinder K. Legha et al., “Teaching the Legacy of Slavery in American Medicine and Psychiatry to Medical Students: Feasibility, Acceptability, Opportunities for Growth,” MedEdPORTAL 19 (2023): https://doi.org/10.15766/mep_2374-8265.11349 (open access).
Understanding the legacy of slavery in the United States is crucial for engaging in anti-racism that challenges racial health inequities’ root causes. However, few medical educational curricula exist to guide this process. We created a workshop illustrating key historical themes pertaining to this legacy and grounded in critical race theory. … Though this workshop improved awareness of the legacy of slavery, students criticized its structure and approach. When teaching this legacy, medical schools should consider expanding content, ensuring opportunities for discussion in safe spaces, and connecting it to immediate anti-racist action.
Additional Theme: Somatic and Emotional Legacies of Slavery
Catoctin Furnace operated in Maryland in the 18th and 19th centuries using both free and enslaved African American labor. Harney et al. analyzed DNA from 27 individuals from an African American cemetery that was excavated 40 years ago during highway construction. The authors found genetic evidence of biological family groups, modern-day African populations with whom they may have shared ancestry, and even possible distant relatives in the United States through identity-by-descent comparisons with consenting customers of 23andMe. This study demonstrates that when studied responsibly with input from stakeholders, long-buried DNA can be used to uncover obfuscated or forgotten histories of marginalized individuals.
Fatimah Jackson et al., “Core Issues, Case Studies, and the Need for Expanded Legacy African American Genomics,” Frontiers in Genetics 14 (June 2023): https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2023.843209 (open access).
Genomic studies of Legacy African Americans have a tangled and convoluted history in western science. In this review paper, core issues affecting African American genomic studies are addressed and two case studies, the New York African Burial Ground and the Gullah Geechee peoples, are presented to highlight the current status of genomic research among African Americans.
Susana María Jiménez Placer, “Legacies of Slavery: Black Domestic Workers, Waste, and the Body,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 86 (April 2023), pp. 109–125: https://doi.org/10.25145/j.recaesin.2023.86.07 (open access).
One of the legacies of slavery which helped shape the ideology of the Jim Crow South concerned the perpetuation of black women’s exclusion to the margins of the established order through their exclusive association with the body and its functions. This association was used to justify black women’s destiny as domestic workers in the Jim Crow South, which meant that they were doomed to handle filth, and thus to become tainted with it according to the official discourse. This article explores first the deprecating connotations of the association of black women with the body established by the dominant southern ideology as a relic of the slave period, and then focuses on black domestics’ involvement in the management of bodily fluids and waste as part of their professional tasks in the Jim Crow South.
Ashley V. Reichelmann, “Racialized Emotions When Thinking about Slavery: Associations Between Group Identification and Feelings of Threat, Shame, and Guilt Among White Americans,” Social Currents 10:6 (December 2023), pp. 555–582: https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965231168781 (subscription required).
This paper highlights the relationship between group identification and racialized emotions among white Americans when asked to think about slavery on U.S. soil. Previous scholarship focuses on the consequences of such emotions or stimuli that increase them; however, there is limited work focusing on threat as a racialized emotion, or more broadly who is likely to experience heightened emotions when asked to think about historical racial violence that implicates their group. Using Group Position Theory and Identity Theory, I elevate work on racial threat as an emotion, and demonstrate how it is linked to white Americans’ group identification with their racial, national, and class identities. Then I compare this relationship to other commonly studied emotions—guilt and shame—to demonstrate threat’s unique relationship with these identities. Using survey data collected from a Survey Sampling International panel (n = 869), I find that feelings of threat are maximized among white Americans who strongly identify with their racial and national identities. In contrast, guilt is heightened among whites who strongly identify with their racial identity, but weakly identify with their national identity, while shame has no significant relationship with these identities. Feelings of threat are also more likely in respondents who self-identify as members of the lower or working class (in comparison to the middle class). The results highlight one way that threat is a distinct emotional experience for white Americans when compared to other emotions. I conclude by discussing how understanding emotions as an outcome of white Americans’ self-perceptions of their identities as group members stands to advance the study of intergroup relations and racism in the United States.
Takesha M. Rice, “Echoes of Slavery: Reflections on Contemporary Racial Discrimination in Black Americans’ Romantic Relationships,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 40:8 (2023), pp. 2637–2659: https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075231154934 (subscription required).
Informed by ecological and intersectional perspectives, this study examined how Black Americans’ reflections on the historical context of slavery and experiences with discrimination shaped their understandings of and experiences within their own relationships. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 individuals in romantic relationships. Findings of the thematic analysis covered five themes: comparing social climates, assumptions about Black relationships, the discrimination triad, an opportunity to respond, and valuing and celebrating Black love. Contemporary experiences of discrimination were a filter that echoed the historical devaluing and mistreatment of Black individuals and their relationships. Partners’ interactions around discrimination were critical opportunities to offer support to their romantic partner.
