Post-Reconstruction lynching reasserted naturalist racial violence against legalist racial order.
Evidence
So the surge of the spectatorial blood sport of lynching throughout Dixie from the 1890s to the 1920s, while complexly prompted, can be seen in this light as a naturalistic reassertion in the face of a critical insistence on historicist legalism. Reconstruction was the attempt in part to shift racial order in the South from a primarily forceful to a principally legal mandate. Segregation was a spatial schema that once more mixed force with legality, though in varying order. … The decade of the 1890s averaged one lynching in the South every other day, Certainly, no participants, direct or indirect, active or passive, were punished for their acts. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 80
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how law and ritual violence interact; also resonates with the sacrifice essay’s treatment of sanctioned communal violence. — connects to: Retributive racial violence functioned to reassure whites of racial dominance — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 633; Rioting ranked among the defining privileges of antebellum white citizenship — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 472; Naturalistic racial governance treats racialized people as extractable natural resources — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1691
- SHARE: The one-lynching-every-other-day statistic in the 1890s, with zero punishment, is a striking datum for someone working on American racial history.