Rural working-class Americans frame racialized violence as routine sport

Evidence

If what we saw at Abu Ghraib was neither the aberrant behaviour of a few soldiers nor an overly aggressive approach to terrorism gone awry, explanations much favoured in the media and by the current American administration, then it is the public participation of ordinary people in racial violence that requires the most explanation. How do race, class, gender, and sexuality underwrite each other in these moments of public racial violence and how do these practices of violence enable men and women to achieve a profound sense of (gendered) racial superiority? These are questions that require an interlocking approach for understanding the violence at Abu Ghraib – an approach that tracks how multiple systems of oppression come into existence through each other. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 148 (#expands, via linked claim)

Unlike earlier groups which had resorted to violence, Wallace promised that the WECC would seek to use capitalism and conversation to solve the problem. If whites would purchase homes from blacks and help them “find homes in the Negro district,” he argued, they could effectively “remove all Negroes from the West End.” After that, the neighborhood could be permanently protected by a “Great White Wall” of racially restrictive covenants written into the deeds of neighborhood houses. … “I put some of our ladies to work making chain telephone calls, and in no time we mobilize quite a crowd around the house where the nigger is trying to move in,” he explained to a confidant. “Then I step in and have a little private talk with the nigger. I tell him he has a perfect legal right to move in, and that I will try to protect him. But at the same time I tell him I doubt if I can control more than a small part of the mob, and that if he does move in he’ll be endangering his whole family.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 132 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As the twentieth century unfolds, racial concerns lie less with agricultural labor supplies and stock theft, with skirmishes over slave rebellions and wars over broad territorial claims or control. Rather, they are directed to urbail ecologies, to migrant and immigrant influx into cities, to town turf, manufacturing and mining labor supply, protection of skilled white workers, school access, housing stock, and a sense of social elevation. The concerns over race increasingly become those about the nature and discipline, aesthetics and morality of public space, about who can be seen where and in what capacity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 93 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Routine racial violence reflects ordinary participation, not aberrant soldiers — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 148; Rural American hunting culture normalized viewing Iraqis as sub-human prey — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 184; Retributive racial violence functioned to reassure whites of racial dominance — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 633 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Routine racial violence reflects ordinary participation, not aberrant soldiers #expands (0.92) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 148
• Respectable segregationism paired capitalism rhetoric with veiled mob violence #complicates (0.73) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 132
• Twentieth-century racism shifted from rural to urban concerns #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 93