Slavery was replaced by coercive systems preserving white economic control

Evidence

According to the sociologist Heather O’Connell, after slavery ended, it was replaced by “coercive systems of social and economic control in the U.S. South, such as sharecropping, lynching and Jim Crow laws, developed in response to the social and economic void created by the abolition of slavery.” Thus white supremacy continued to provide white Americans with social and economic control over black Americans long after slavery was declared illegal. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 270

Categorization

• DEFINE: O’Connell’s framing is the hinge: post-slavery systems arose expressly to fill the ‘social and economic void’ abolition created — a key definition of the mechanism for the reparations case.
• XREF: Connects to the saturated-system harm architecture — later chapters build remedy design on this claim of continuity.