Why Race Matters: The Legacies and Presentation of Race Relations in American History

Using the social scientific theory of “weathering”, the case study presented here reveals the broader explanatory power of the theory. Arline Geronimus developed the concept to describe the impact of racist systems on marginalized populations. Based on more than four decades of empirical research, Geronimus posits that the cumulative impact of navigating the structural racism embedded in US institutions results in accelerated declines in health and premature aging. The historical case study of the Łódź ghetto demonstrates that Nazi persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust resulted in a similar process of weathering among Jews. From 1939 to 1945, German authorities systematically dispossessed and uprooted, purposely starved, and exploited for labor the tens of thousands of Jews held captive in the Łódź ghetto. Despite valiant Jewish efforts to ameliorate the hardships of life in the ghetto, the persistent onslaught of racist policies and degradation ultimately resulted in widespread weathering of the population on an individual and communal level. I propose that the concept of “weathering” developed by social scientists has broad interpretative power for understanding the personal and communal impact of white supremacist societies in a historical context. The case of the Łódź ghetto is instructive beyond what it reveals about the particular persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich. The abrupt imposition of a racist system of government, the steady escalation of antisemitic policies from oppression and exploitation to genocide, and the relatively short duration of the ghetto’s existence lays bare the cumulative effects of widespread individual weathering on the vitality of the community itself. In the Łódź ghetto, prolonged exposure to an environment governed by white supremacy also resulted in communal weathering. Full article

This paper examines the lineages of police violence, family trauma, and police reform through a case study of the Rochester police killing of Denise Hawkins in 1975. Michael Leach, a 22-year-old, white police officer, responded to a “family trouble” call involving a domestic dispute between Hawkins and her husband. When the 18-year-old, 100-pound Black woman emerged from the apartment, she held a kitchen knife. Within five seconds, Leach had shot and killed her, later claiming she endangered his life. Though Hawkins’ name is included in lists of Black women killed by police, little is known about her life and legacy. Using newspapers, police records, and oral history, we examine activists’ attempts to scale the call for justice for Denise Hawkins to the national level, the police department’s defense of Leach as the true victim in the incident, and the city leaders’ compromised efforts to establish a civilian oversight of police. Within the context of Rochester’s robust history of resistance to police violence, we argue that the reform efforts of the late 1970s ultimately failed to redress the police use of deadly force. Furthermore, when Michael Leach killed again in 2012—this time shooting his own son, whom he mistook for an intruder—his defense attorney successfully depicted Leach as the sympathetic figure. In shifting the focus to Denise Hawkins, this work contributes to the Black feminist call to memorialize Black women killed by police and suggests that the policies that protect the officers who use deadly force cause widespread, intergenerational harm to officers and their victims. Full article

Virginia’s Readjuster Party was the most successful interracial political coalition in the post-Reconstruction South. Initially arising from a conflict over the payment of Virginia’s massive public debt, the new party became a force of liberal reform and democracy in the Old Dominion. It represented an alternative path before Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement became the norm. While the Readjusters have long interested historians, the significant work performed by Black Readjusters in building and sustaining the always-tenuous coalition has gone understudied. Knowing their white counterparts were anxious about interracial political alliances, Black Readjusters eased these anxieties by using the Lost Cause. Black Readjusters condemned carpetbaggers as corrupt and repurposed the myth of the faithful slave to strengthen the interracial coalition, press for their own demands, and demonstrate their status as true southerners. The strategy and its seeming contradictions succeeded in some cases and failed in others, and its ultimate effects remain unclear. By shifting focus to Black Readjusters’ coalition-building labors, this article centers Black political activism and challenges the presumptions scholars make about interracial politics and white supremacy. Full article

The legacy of chattel slavery persists in the lives of Black people all over the world. The current state of race relations in Bermuda is shaped by the underlying features of European domination and imperialism that gave birth to chattel slavery. The current racial climate in Bermuda is an example of the long-term impact of chattel slavery and the system of controls that followed. The damaging consequences of these systems of exploitation and oppression continue to shape the life chances and opportunities of Black people. Racial ideas, attitudes, and behaviors influence contemporary race relations between Black and White people throughout the African Diaspora, including Bermuda, which is the focus of this essay. Full article

While marginalized as a juvenile medium, comics serve as an archive of our collective experience. Emerging with the modern city and deeply affected by race, class, and gender norms, comics are a means to understand the changes linked to identity and power in the United States. For further investigation, we turn to one such collective archive: the MSU Library Comics Art Collection (CAC), which contains over 300,000 comics and comic artifacts dating as far back as 1840. As noted on the MSU Special Collections’ website, “the focus of the collection is on published work in an effort to present a complete picture of what the American comics readership has seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century”. As one of the world’s largest publicly accessible comics archives, a community of scholars and practitioners created the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset, which comprises library metadata from the CAC to explore the production, content, and creative communities linked to comics in North America. This essay will draw on the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset at Michigan State University to visualize patterns of racial depiction in North American comics from 1890–2018. Our visualizations highlight how comics serve as a visual record of representation and serve as a powerful marker of marginalization central to popular cultural narratives in the United States. By utilizing data visualization to explore the ways we codify and describe identity, we seek to call attention to the constructed nature of race in North America and the continuing work needed to imagine race beyond the confines of the established cultural legacy. Full article

Movies beyond the scope of Hollywood and entertainment have shaped notions of race in American culture since the early decades of cinema. A range of nontheatrical sponsors and creators in the US made films to serve practical functions in society—to inform, to organize, to persuade, to promote, etc. The US federal government was a major sponsor of many of these films, which provided American and foreign audiences depictions of race that differed considerably from popular commercial images. For example, Men of the Forest, a film made in 1952 by the United States Information Service focuses on the Hunters, a Black family who owns land and a forestry business in rural Georgia. A documentary of sorts, the film highlights Black life, work, and land ownership in the South in ways not seen in popular feature films of the day. Yet, in the film and others like it, histories of institutional racism are woven into cinematic form and content in ways that are distinct from the entertainment industry. The creators of Men of the Forest omit details of segregation in the South to emphasize the Hunter family as examples of American democracy, a choice suited to the film’s Cold War purpose: to counter the anti-American message of Soviet propaganda for foreign audiences. On one hand, by producing and distributing the film, the federal government acknowledged Black farmers and landowners in the Jim Crow South. On the other hand, it avoided the structural inequality surrounding the Hunters to frame their reality as an example of American democratic progress for international circulation. Today, government films like Men of the Forest prompt contemporary reflection on the institutional histories they represent and their evolution into the present. The film and many others are available online due to the digitization of collections from the National Archives, Library of Congress, and elsewhere. With this increase in access, contemporary scholars have the ability to investigate how the federal government and its various internal entities mediated racial ideologies with moving image technologies. As an example of such research, this essay examines Men of the Forest by focusing on the past and present contradictions that arise from its depiction of a Black family with land and an agricultural business in rural Georgia. Two recent events shed light on the histories reflected in the film and their contemporary significance. In 2018, Descendants of Men of the Forest, The Legacy Continues—a documentary created by family members of the film’s original participants—contextualized the original production as evidence of the Hunter family’s legacy in the community of Guyton, Georgia. Underlying this local effort, Men of the Forest serves as an important historical event and record of the family and the community. On a broader scale, in March 2021, Congress passed a large relief package for disadvantaged minority farmers, intended to help alleviate decades of systemic racism in government agricultural programs. Lawsuits from white farmers and conservative organizations followed quickly, challenging the provision of government aid based on race. In this federal context, Men of the Forest exposes an institutional image of individual success that downplays the structural racism facing people of color, especially those with agricultural livelihoods. Even as politics and legislation evolve, this vision of democracy once exported by the federal government has widespread currency and accumulating effects. The connections between Men of the Forest and these recent events reveal the racial politics at play in government films and the ways in which they take shape in the real world beyond the screen. Full article

This article examines the reach of Black Internationalism, a dialogue on race, politics, and modernity nurtured by Black nationalists in the United States, between 1971 and 1974. It focuses on Israel’s encounter with the topic and how Israeli political leaders neutralize its effects. Israel, one of America’s closes Cold War allies, faced three explosive movements with ties to the discourse and politics of Black Internationalism—the Israeli Black Panthers, the Black Hebrews, and the Jewish Defense League. Each group challenged the narrative of inclusion the nation cultivated since its inception. Israel’s ability to manage the crisis of Black Internationalism demonstrates the topic’s global reach in the final stages of the Cold War, but also its limitations. Full article

The decade after World War I has traditionally been defined as an “age of isolation.” The American public’s disillusionment with World War I, highlighted by the dismal failure of President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to join the League of Nations, led to “A Return to Isolationism,” according to a brief summary of American diplomacy produced by the Department of State. Despite the fact that historian William Appleman Williams attempted to destroy the “legend of isolationism in the 1920s” and other scholars have followed his lead with a string of publications recounting the very active U.S. engagement with the rest of the world following the war, many textbooks continue to describe the 1920s as an age wherein the United States withdrew into a shell of isolation. My article suggests that one way of reconciling these apparently contradictory interpretations of American foreign policy in the decade after World War I is to examine one particular factor that has been largely overlooked: Whether “isolationist” or not, the United States during those years utilized race as a way to simultaneously build walls in and around the American nation as well as construct the ideological foundations for U.S. postwar expansion and engagement. Full article