Using comprehensive lynching data from the Beck-Tolnay Inventory, I analyzed Southern episodes of lynching from 1877-1950 using Tableau software.
In the storyboard, you can play around with a few important variables (state, race, sex) to see differences in where lynchings took place, and the demographics of the victims. With the maps, you can identify the number of lynchings in an area down to the county level.
If clicking on the map below doesn’t take you to the story, just click here.
I’m late in announcing this, but my latest book, Affective Labour: (Dis)Assembling Distance and Difference (with Jennifer G. Correa) is now available as a hardback, paperback, and e-book. If you buy directly from Rowman and Littlefield, you can use the following promotional code and save 30%: RLI093
Below are some of the reviews:
Thomas and Correa offer an important empirical study of affective labor’s central role in sustaining two pillars of inequality: racial difference and socio-spatial distance. Noteworthy for its comparative and relational approaches, Affective Labour reveals the entwinements between racism and affect in everyday practices and places.
— Paula Ioanide, Associate Professor of Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies, Ithaca College
In this theoretically groundbreaking yet remarkably accessible book, Thomas and Correa establish a strong case for why affect should matter to scholars of race and racism, as well as to activists working for social justice. Affective Labour describes the painstaking work of identification, the crafting of difference, and the production of social distance, in effect asking how forms of violence and exclusion become imaginable or unimaginable. The book takes the reader on an intellectual journey from a college-town bar scene to the US-Mexico border, through the contemporary diversity regimes of predominantly white institutions. The authors then bring the lessons from these case studies to bear on the emergent affective politics of Black Lives Matter and similar radical democratic social movements. In spite of the grimly neoliberal landscapes of difference and inequality it explores, Affective Labour remains optimistic in its evocation of coming into being and the potential for an affect of liberation in progressive politics.
— Rebecca R. Scott, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia
Bringing together critical social, cultural and political analysis, phenomenology and original ethnographic research, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the politics of affect. Thomas and Correa provide an imaginative and incisive account of how the manufacturing of gendered, racialised, sexualised, and classed relations of distance and difference is a matter of affective labour. Through a diverse range of in depth examples – from American nightlife cultures, to University diversity-initiatives, to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – the book offers a refreshing and distinctive examination of the affective work of everyday life and its wider critical implications. The analysis offered is at once productively troubling and optimistic: Contemporary forms of affective labour frequently work to reproduce relations of domination, but they also fuel solidarity, resistance and ‘a sense of hope for what can be, despite the reality of what is’.
— Carolyn Pedwell, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies/Cultural Sociology, University of Kent
Thomas and Correa’s expansive research into distance and difference takes us on an immersive journey into configurations of affective subjectivity – from above and below. Carefully crafted case studies of urban nightlife in Columbia, Missouri, ‘War on Terror’ at the US-Mexico border, diversity regimes in higher education, and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, underline why affect should be of critical concern to social, cultural and political theorists. Affective Labour is an original and timely contribution that will have implications for how we approach the politics of difference in the classroom, the polity and on the street.
— Christopher Kyriakides, Associate Professor of Sociology, York University, Canada
My colleague and dear friend, Jennifer Correa, and I recently had our article on Latino border patrol agents and the dynamics of racial power published in the new American Sociological Association journal, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Entitled, “The Rebirth of the U.S.-Mexico Border”, in it Jennifer and I expand upon Nick Crossley’s “phenomenology of power” to articulate the dynamic interplay between race, space, and power as it’s practiced in the policing of brown bodies by brown bodies along the U.S.-Mexico border. We describe a phenomenology of racial power as
“the cultural and social “thickness” of racial embodiment [which] recognizes that power is a fluid force within ‘institutions, laws, [as well as the] practices of political officials, law enforcers, and practitioners” (Crossley 1994:197). It is through these sets of relations that the body’s materiality is produced. Further, it is through the body’s materiality that we apprehend the world or accomplish being-in-the-world. These processes are interdependent and inseparable in the unfolding of everyday life. Each action of the body reconfigures the spaces it inhabits, enabling and/or constraining its ability to expand beyond those spaces.”
Our focus on the phenomenology of racial power aims to address my previous call for a more dynamic account of culture in the enabling and constraining of contemporary racialization by centering the experiences of Latina/o state agents who function as both enforcers and targets of racial power.
Jennifer and I are currently working on a book together, with Rowman and Littlefield, entitled Affective Labour: (Dis)Assembling Difference and Distance, in which we theorize affective labor as both producer and product of phenomenologies of power.
Yesterday I was interviewed by the student-run campus broadcast channel, NewsWatch 99. The focus of their story was the one-year anniversary of the symbolic lynching of the James Meredith statue that took place last spring on the University of Mississippi campus.
The clip is short, so I feel the need to elaborate a bit on my comments. I was asked whether I thought the campus reacted at all to the incident when it happened. Though the video doesn’t show this, I responded by saying there was a very strong reaction to the incident by most of the members of this campus community. Many students, faculty, and staff were outraged, and expressed this in private conversations, and in some public forums. However, what I also stated was that the response was far from collective or sustained. Furthermore, what I tried to articulate in the interview is that the “loud” reaction to extreme acts of racism, like the symbolic lynching of the Meredith statue, are rarely situated within the context of an environment where more mundane forms of racism are commonplace. Instead, we treat those incidents as anomalies, as the products of a few “bad apples” in an otherwise “good bunch.” This seems to be fairly common in many other social settings. We, as a society, tend to distance ourselves from the most extreme bigots, racists, and acts of intolerance because they don’t fit with our general ideals about civility and community. However, in doing so, we also perpetuate a culture that does tolerate everyday, microassaults and microaggressions toward people of color. When I stated that our campus policies are ‘missing the boat’, I was referring to policies (like the formation of a Bias Incident Response Team) that, in an attempt to respond strongly against such extreme acts of intolerance, ignore that these extreme acts are the least common instances of racism on our campus.
Watch on YouTube: Changes Since the Meredith Incident
Like many, I was hurt and horrified by the death of eighteen-year old Mike Brown, of Ferguson, Missouri, this past weekend. Growing up in the central city of Kansas City, Missouri, I was not unfamiliar with police violence against black and brown communities of color. However, it appears many Americans are unfamiliar with these experiences. For example, stories about Sunday night’s riot are now being framed as “just another example” for why black and brown communities need policing, rather than as a response to a collective memory of state-sanctioned violence against those communities, including the death of Mike Brown.
Motivated by the ignorance and garden-variety tropes of white racism I’ve seen this morning on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve put together a VERY brief and INCOMPLETE history of St. Louis Police Brutality over the past one hundred years. I used the archives of The Chicago Defender from 1905 through 1975, and the Lexus Nexus database for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 1989 to the present, I ran a search for the term “police brutality”. The information below was compiled based on this very narrow search.
I would love for others to help crowd-source more information here, especially if there are any incidents I’ve missed, or failed to accurately summarize.
My goal with the timeline below is to demonstrate that incidents like what happened in Ferguson do not stand on their own. They represent a greater historical narrative, whereby collective memories — and responses — are shaped by the totality of these incidents. A great quote that, I think, captures the response of the rioters last night is from the late Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1966 interview with Mike Wallace:
I contend that the cry of “black power” is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.
May, 1917: Three thousand white men gathered in downtown East St. Louis and began attacking blacks. Nonresponse by the police led to the Illinois governor to call in the National Guard. Some evidence of police participating in attacks.
July, 1917: A car occupied by white males drove through East St. Louis, firing shots at a standing group of blacks. Shortly thereafter, another car driving through the same area was mistaken for the previous car, and black residents shot at it, killing two police officers in the car. Thousands of whites marched into the black neighborhood of East St. Louis and began burning entire sections, shooting residents as they tried to escape the fires. Rioters lynched several black residents, claiming, “Southern negroes deserve a genuine lynching.” National guardsmen who were called in participated in the rioting, rather than helping to squash it. The Chicago Defender, led by Ida B. Wells, estimates between 40-150 blacks were killed that July. Six thousand blacks were left homeless.
November, 1923: Reports emerge that “whenever a crime has been committed and the perpetrator wishes to conceal his guilt, or the authorities are at a loss to solve the riddle,” St. Louis police often report that the crime was committed by a black person.
November, 1928: Grand jury ordered to convene as the result of a fatal shooting of a 20-year old man by a St. Louis patrolman. Three eye witnesses voluntary appeared to testify against the officer.
October, 1929: Black leadership calls upon then-Missouri Governor Henry Caulfield to end the “murdering of our people and the numerous brutalities they suffer at the hands of the police” in St. Louis
September, 1933: Members of the Clothing Workers Union complained to Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann that they had been beaten by police during a parade
September, 1941: A STL cop beats a black hospital patient. This attack led to the STL branch of the NAACP beginning a movement against police brutality against blacks.
July, 1965: About 40 demonstrators paraded in front of a city police station protesting alleged police brutality. The John Birch Society denounced a proposed investigation into the charges.
July, 1967: Dance choreographer Katherine Dunham begins legal action against East St. Louis police charging they “manhandled and arrested” her on false charges.
August, 1971: Joseph Lee Wilson, 37, had been drinking heavily and had passed out shortly after midnight in the back yard of his mother’s house in the Third Police District. After she called for assistance, she and others contend, police beat him. An employee of old City Hospital said that Wilson, already suffering from massive injuries, was even beaten by St. Louis policemen when he was on a hospital table. Wilson was found dead in the holdover at 5:45 a.m. An autopsy showed that he had suffered seven fractured ribs, a punctured lung, a ruptured pancreas and lacerations of the liver. The official police version, adopted by the coroner, was that Wilson had fallen from a stool in a tavern on Chippewa Street. Syndicated columnist Mike Royko likened that to falling from a bar stool atop Chicago’s 100-story, 1,127-foot John Hancock Tower.
March, 1977: Following a car chase, two young men who had been in the car that led the chase were beaten. It was estimated that as many as 50 police officers were on hand to see at least part of the beating. Two Third District police officers were indicted for assault with intent to maim with malice. Other police officers were suspended for not cooperating with a grand jury investigation. Circuit Attorney George Peach was furious with departmental obstruction. He called it a ”conspiracy of silence.” And, in the end, it was impossible to prove who actually had administered the beatings. One of the indicted police officers was later acquitted; he is now a lieutenant in the department.
January, 1989: Seventy five people gather in front of the 6th District police station to protest a St. Louis police attack on a 15-year old girl.
June, 1991: University City police arrest a man for illegally skateboarding on a sidewalk in the Delmar Loop. Four witnesses report the man was handcuffed and beaten by a group of at least five officers.
October, 1993: Harry B. Hegger, Internal Affairs officer, claims his division handles roughly a hundred or more cases of physical abuse per year.
October, 1993: The Organization for Black Struggle, along with other community groups and activists, charges that for at least 10 years incidents of police brutality are rampant in St. Louis city and the metropolitan area. These allegations include: The continued employment of racist officers on the St. Louis and University City police departments, beatings and Russian roulette games police play with suspects, a special anti-black unit in the Belleville Police Department, and rampant car and property seizures.
October, 1993: In a hearing sponsored by the NAACP, Clarence Harmon, the first black police chief of St. Louis, stated police officers often project fears onto black residents: ‘There are tensions related to sometimes unrealistic fears of officers who traverse high crime areas . . . unrealistic fears as to their safety, which cause for not a great relationship between themselves and the community.” In that same meeting, Joyce Armstrong, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri, said 52 percent of the complaints made to her office were against police departments in Florissant, Jennings, Beverly Hills, Breckenridge Hills, Dellwood and Maplewood. She said 30 percent were complaints against the city police.
October, 1993: About a dozen people picketed two St. Louis police stations Sunday night, alleging brutality by police officers in the arrests of three suspects earlier in the day.
October, 1993: Frontenac Police Chief Benjamin Branch has taken an administrative leave to investigate allegations of police brutality and civil rights violations by his department. That June, Branch, 16 Frontenac police officers and five dispatchers were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to answer questions about police brutality in Frontenac.
January, 1996: Garland Carter Jr., 17., shot and killed, in the back, by a St. Louis police officer.
January, 1997: Post-Dispatch reports that at least 11 people have died in police custody in the St. Louis area since 1990 while in the throes of a mysterious, often violent medical condition called agitated delirium, a review of death records shows. In all, at least 20 people have died from the syndrome here over the last decade – 14 of those after police restrained them.
April, 1997: Gregory Bell, suffering from a developmental disability, is beaten by police officers until bloody. As many as 12 police officers were in his home during the beating, which included five blows to the head with an ASP baton. only one officer was charged with a crime. He was acquitted in May.
May, 1999: Two officers charged with the death of a nineteen year old. The police report — which made no mention of blows to the teenager’s head — is inconsistent with the medical examiner’s report that the victim suffered a massive skull fracture caused by a blow with an object to the back of his head.
May, 1999: A review showed that between 1994 and 1998, sixty people were shot by city officers, with twenty four of them dying. Brutality was charged in many of those cases
March, 2001: The St. Louis County Council on Tuesday appointed a 10-member committee to review two incidents in the past year involving county police that led to the deaths of three people.
June, 2002: Leaving a Coalition Against Police Crimes and Oppression meeting, Victor McKinney, 25, was hand-cuffed and body-slammed to the ground by two officers. Roughly 100 people gather at police headquarters to protest the incident.
September, 2002: A Kinloch police officer said he accidentally shot a motorist during a traffic stop. The officer suspected the motorist, a 24-year-old man from Bridgeton, was involved with a drug transaction. Police did not find any drugs on the suspect. The suspect was unarmed.
November, 2002: Aldermen Terry Kennedy, D-18th Ward, proposed forming a panel to investigate police shootings and allegations of brutality and other misconduct
May, 2003: About 50 protesters gathered outside the Pine Lawn City Hall and Police Department Thursday night, claiming police officers there have abused African-Americans in the city. “They are here to protect us, not beat us,” Brian Brooks told the crowd. “We’re paying their salaries.” Brooks said police beat him with a metal baton or flashlight and sprayed him with Mace in his driveway after he got into an argument with his wife on May 4. He said he was later beaten for several hours at the Police Department, where a gun was pointed at his head by a police officer. Another man, Willie Payne, said he was beaten by officers, including one accused of attacking Brooks, after his car was stopped in Pine Lawn. He said officers choked him, held his mouth open and sprayed Mace into it, pulled his shirt over his head and beat him. Justin Meehan, an attorney assisting the men, said they had made complaints to the Police Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is also looking into the claims, Meehan said.
October, 2003: Protesters demanding better treatment from police blocked traffic on downtown streets Wednesday night and burned an effigy of “white racist power” in a park across the street from St. Louis City Hall. The crowd swelled to about 200 people, as several activist groups led by the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression called for the city to establish a board to review complaints of police brutality. A bill proposing such a board is locked in a battle between aldermen and Mayor Francis Slay over who would appoint the board members and what powers they would have.
February, 2006: About 40 people gathered outside Maplewood City Hall to seek justice for a man whose beating and kicking by Maplewood and St. Louis police has been televised coast-to-coast.
September 2013: A former Velda City police officer is facing federal charges of excessive force and lying to FBI agents. A federal indictment alleges Stan Lee Stanback, 47, used unreasonable force using a police baton to hit and injure two juveniles and an adult on Sept. 17, 2008. Stanback is also accused of lying to FBI agents by claiming he was surrounded by 15 men in the Velda City Police Department parking lot and was forced to draw his gun. He actually encountered four to five people and he never drew his gun, authorities said. Velda City’s police chief says the two 16-year-olds and one 26-year-old man he is accused of hitting were already in police custody when Stanback struck them with his baton.
August, 2014: Mike Brown, 18 years old, shot multiple times by Ferguson police. Eye witnesses claim initial shots were fired into Brown’s back.
Check out my newest article, ‘Laugh Through it,’ available online first through the journal, Ethnography
Abstract
Through an examination of a Midwestern professional comedy club, this article theorizes stand-up comedy as part of the broader affective-cultural assemblage that is nightlife entertainment. Using the Deleuzian notion of assemblage, this analysis builds on poststructural accounts of the dynamic and transient properties of culture, and the relationship between space, culture, and affect. As a specific affective-cultural assemblage, stand-up comedy operates as both constrainer and enabler of racial and heteronormative order through the bringing together of a variety of diverse logics and practices. I argue that stand-up comedy should no longer be thought of strictly in discursive or symbolic-interactionist terms that over-determine the roles of particular agents (i.e. comics). Instead, when described as emergent, transient, and fundamentally affective, stand-up comedy and other cultural forms can be seen for their openness and multiplicity, both contributing to racial and heteronormative order as well as upending it.
(Excerpt from manuscript conditionally accepted)
…In 1969, a group of Black psychiatrists, including Alvin Poussaint, presented a list of demands to the American Psychiatric Association at their annual meeting. The demands included acknowledging racism as the “major mental health problem of this country,” and the addition of extreme bigotry as an officially recognized mental illness within the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM). At a news conference following the presentation, Poussaint told the press, “It’s a contradiction in terms for someone to say that he’s a psychiatrist – that is, someone who deals in mental health – and at the same time openly practice racism and segregation.” The APA’s official response expressed gratitude for the presentation, endorsing its “general spirit of reform and redress of racial inequities in American psychiatry.” However, the APA rejected the demand to classify extreme bigotry as a mental illness on the grounds that in order for racism to be considered a mental illness, it would have to deviate from normative behavior.
In their rejection, the APA specifically cited a series of studies conducted by the Harvard social psychologist, Thomas Pettigrew. Interviewing residents of eight small towns in the North and South in the late 1950s, Pettigrew had tested, among other things, whether Southerners exhibited a stronger ‘authoritarian personality’ than Northerners. Pettigrew determined that while Southerners exhibited a higher level of prejudice toward Blacks than their Northern counterparts, the level of authoritarianism among Northerners and Southerners was virtually identical. In sum, racism was normal behavior, and as such the APA refused to acknowledge it as an abnormal condition.
Despite the APA’s rejection, clinical workers pressed on, developing treatment models for the effects of racism, as well as for individual racists. One of the more infamous examples occurred following the 1967 deadly shoot out between Houston police officers and students at the all-Black Texas Southern University. Then-mayor Louie Welch called upon Dr. Blair Justice, a Rice University psychology professor, to initiate a psychotherapeutic program to alleviate tensions between Houston police officers and Houston’s Black community. By 1969, group sessions including up to two hundred officers and community members at a time were being led by psychologists. These sessions encouraged heated exchanges between participants in order to get deep-seated prejudices out in the open. After just one year, Mayor Welch and other prominent city officials were touting the program’s success based upon pre- and post-tests of police attitudes demonstrating a small decrease in identifiable prejudices.
Meanwhile, within its own ranks, the APA’s rejection of the motion to classify racism was, and remains, highly contentious. In 1971, then-Vice President of the APA, Charles Prudhomme, wrote an editorial for the APA’s official journal, The American Journal of Psychiatry, asserting that racism “parallels and is an analog of psychosocial development.” At the APA’s 1979 annual meeting, the prominent psychiatrist Carl Bell gave a paper later published in the Journal of The National Medical Association, entitled “Racism: A Symptom of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Linking his diagnosis to findings from The Authoritarian Personality, Bell claimed the narcissistic racist is a person whose racism is primarily a symptom of a narcissistic personality disorder. Patients suffering from narcissistic racism seek constant praise from their authority figures as a means of sustaining their self-esteem. To illustrate an extreme case of this disorder, Bell quoted the scholar-activist, Angela Davis: “Because it was drummed into the heads of U.S. soldiers that they were confronting an inferior race, they could believe that raping Vietnamese women was a necessary soldierly duty.”
Finally, in his presidential address at the APA’s 1980 annual meeting, Alan Stone remarked on the contentious debate within the APA between those members who regret the association’s stances on social issues, and those members who believe that social issues, including racism, are clearly psychiatric in nature. Stone stated, “Our professional training obliges us to understand conflict rather than repress or deny it, and I believe that in view of recent events the time has come to confront this conflict openly.” While Stone’s remarks did little to end the debate, some scholars took his remarks seriously. Poussaint and Bell remained critical and vocal of the APA for not including racism in the DSM III in 1980, its revision in 1987, and the DSM IV in 1994, voicing their dissent in both mainstream and academic presses.
By the late 1980s, a number of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists were proposing diagnostic tools for identifying and treating racism as a psychopathological condition. Judith Skillings and James Dobbins, for example, in a 1991 article entitled “Racism as a Disease”, proposed a clinical diagnosis through the identification of four symptoms: a belief that one’s heritage is superior to another; when racism becomes infectious without any conscious sense of antipathy by the person who is the host; when’s one’s perceptions are merely distorted or confused; and by identifying racism as a “silent killer” that robs its hosts and targets of their mental and emotional well-being. Skillings and Dobbins even suggested the access to power that racism affords produces a dependency upon that source of power for the individual racist. In other words, racism is addictive!
In a 2000 article entitled “Racism as Clinical Syndrome”, Dobbins and Skillings describe four signs of this addiction: rationalization (“I know we need to increase diversity, in general, but why do I have to play a part?”), selective comparison (“I can’t be racist, because I’ve never called any Mexican a wetback”), protecting the source of addiction (“I know I have White privilege, but what do you want me to, give it up?”), and minimization (“I’m not being racist, I’m just telling it like it is”). Meanwhile, Edward Dunbar, a clinical psychologist at UCLA, initiated a series of clinical studies in the mid 1990s meant to develop an instrument for measuring what he termed a ‘prejudiced personality.’ Individuals with high scores on Dunbar’s ‘prejudice scale’ included clients who distrusted financial advice from racial and ethnic minorities, job loss due to the inability to interact appropriately with customers of color, and even one who expressed support for the Oklahoma City bombing.
By the early 2000s, racism had several clinical names, though no official diagnosis within the DSM: prejudice personality, intolerant personality disorder, and pathological bias, which was considered for admission in the 2013 DSM V under a rubric that would have included racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Although pathological bias was not included in the DSM V, there is an entire chapter devoted to its assessment in the 2012 Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders…
(now available online at Ethnicities)
Theorizing the centrality of race remains a key issue within the social sciences. However, an examination of four programs that dominate critical inquiry, particularly in the US context – Racial Formation Theory; Systemic Racism; Color-Blind Racism; and Critical Race Theory – reveal two key problems: a reductivist account of the role of culture in the production of race and racism and the essentializing of the political identity of racial Others. This article, then, considers a different paradigm for the study of race – an affective program. Two components of an affective program identified in this article are: (a) a more dynamic account of culture, opening up the realm of the discursive to more than just signification and representation, but also expression; and (b) locating the possibilities of racial politics as matters of racialized and anti-racist practices rather than matters of racial identity.
(with Dr. David Brunsma)
Here is my letter to The Daily Mississippian re: the University’s student government’s judicial council’s decision to declare the use of ‘Colonel Rebel’ unconstitutional.
The Daily Mississippian, Friday, April 5th, 2013
Letter to the Editor
Politics and Pedagogy 