America Becoming Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001) / Chapter Skim
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10. Racial Trends and Scapegoating: Bringing in a Comparative Focus
10. Racial Trends and Scapegoating: Bringing in a Comparative Focus
Pages 302-317
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From page 302... ...
In other words, explaining the outcomes of racism may suggest its more general root. Adding historical comparison to an analysis of racial trends in the United States requires looking at different countries' experiences.
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From page 303... ...
Legal structures of racism, however, also generate conflict by reinforcing the cohe~The original "Jim Crow" was a character in a nineteenth-century minstrel act, a stereotype of a Black man. As encoded in laws sanctioning ethnic discrimination, the phrase refers to both legally enforced and traditionally sanctioned limitations of Blacks' rights, primarily in the U.S.
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From page 304... ...
In fact, given the significance of legal racial domination, we are pushed back analytically to accounting for the emergence of such policies in their varying forms. The first thing to note is that racial prejudice is the bedrock on which legal racial proscriptions were built, and its significance cannot be overestimated in explaining why Blacks were singled out for the more heinous and persistent forms of ill treatment.
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From page 305... ...
Legal racist practice was shaped, if not strictly preordained, by slavery. Certainly enslavement powerfully reinforced prejudice; White slave owners needed to justify and defend their heinous form of exploitation, so claimed it reflected the natural order of Blacks' inferiority and, therefore, subjugation by Whites (Fredrickson, 1981~.
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From page 306... ...
White economic gains from racism were a powerful part of the incentives for Jim Crow laws and apartheid, with racism also shaping industrialization and urbanization. But here again, the commonality of Whites' economic incentives for racism cannot fully explain the variations in legal outcomes.
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From page 307... ...
After their victory, however, the British agreed to indefinitely postpone reforms to appease the Afrikaners and, thereby, diminish further conflict and unify White support (Denoon, 1973:14, 242~. During the next half century, British and Afrikaners competed for political power, with the British reinforcing racial domination to win Afrikaner support, and Afrikaner nationalists pushing for even further enforcement.
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From page 308... ...
The South resisted, and eventually even the Northern Republicans decided that appeasement of Southern Whites was more important than reforms for the Black minority. Though few Southern Whites would abandon the more explicitly racist Democratic Party, the possibility of gaining White voters in the South (outnumbering newly enfranchised Black voters)
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From page 309... ...
The first thing to note at this point is the implication that legal racial domination was likely not an artifact of social dysfunction after all. We tend to see such segregation as an unfortunate but inescapable legacy from past prejudice.
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From page 310... ...
When the legal structure or scaffolding was dismantled, the prejudice, discrimination, and inequality remained freestanding. The most notable arena of such continuity is economics, with racial discrimination continuing to serve the interests of business profiting from paying lower wages to Black workers, and loyalty of White workers who benefit by being paid more because they are White.
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From page 311... ...
There, racial discrimination is illegal, and its existence widely denied. Nevertheless, Afro Brazilians are much more likely to be poor in a country with the second highest recorded overall income inequality (do Valle Silva, 1985~.
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From page 312... ...
But we know that such respect for African traditions has not implied or brought respect for Africans, and such cultural tolerance takes place within a larger context of projected homogeneity and assimilation toward the mean. Perhaps cultural inclusion provides a useful cover for continued exploitation.
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From page 313... ...
The United States long suffered from a major intra-White conflict gradually diminished by unifying Whites as such through official domination and exclusion of Blacks. That legal scapegoating solidified Black racial iden
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From page 314... ...
Even less positively, the remaining salience of race in the United States means that the historical pattern of using denigration of Blacks to unify Whites may be, and still is, called upon. This has been apparent in the recent partisan squabbles about the federal deficit, where agreement on how to resolve this issue seemed to be paved by prior agreement to cut programs targeted to or perceived as benefiting Blacks.
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From page 315... ...
Beyond the issue of effective protest or electoral pressure, there are other real and direct costs to continued racism in the United States. Deprivation due to discrimination constrains markets for goods, skews labor markets, and fosters alienation and antisocial behavior requiring costly social policies of support and policing.
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From page 316... ...
Historical comparison suggests that in the United States (and South Africa) , racial exclusion has been reinforced and codified as a tool for building national loyalty and coherence among a core constituency of Whites otherwise divided.
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From page 317... ...
1967 The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations. London: Oxford University Press.
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