“Jim Crow: Caste Terrorism in America”: Racial Domination Mechanisms

According to Loïc Wacquant, the political and repressive system known as “Jim Crow” was responsible for imposing white supremacy in the United States from the 1890s until the 1960s.

Additionally, in 2018, members of the National Assembly attempted to remove the word “race” from the first article of the Constitution; however, their efforts were unsuccessful. Stéphane Beaud, a sociologist, and Gérard Noiriel, a historian, both attempted to contest the use of this phrase in the social sciences three years later, but they were unsuccessful in their efforts.

In particular, specifically in their contentious study titled Race and the Sciences of Society. Essai sur les usages publics d’une catégorie (Agone, 2021), they attacked him for importing American discussions that were poorly adapted to comprehending French realities. This accusation was made in the context of the book.

Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at Berkeley (California), has been engaged in the study of the mechanisms that underlie racial dominance in the United States for a considerable prolonged period of time.

In a book that was released in English just a month ago (Racial Domination, published by Polity Press and not translated), he has become the theoretician of this concept. His book, Jim Crow: Caste Terrorism in America (Raisons d’agir, 190 pages, 24 euros), is the French translation of one of the chapters that are included in this substantial anthology.

After being named after a fictional character who was used by white people to make fun of black plantation workers, the term “Jim Crow” ultimately evolved into an adjective and subsequently became a common noun that referred to an entire system of inferiorizing black people in the southern United States for the period of time between the 1890s and the 1960s.

As opposed to discussing “structural racism” or “racial capitalism,” which are two concepts that he takes a stance against, Loïc Wacquant suggests that this particular time in the history of the United States of America might be comprehended by utilizing the concept of “caste terrorism.”

Dominance reporting and analysis

The concept of caste, which was initially proposed by Max Weber and later adopted by a number of researchers from the United States before being largely abandoned, might be helpful in providing an explanation for a dominance that is simultaneously economic, institutional, and symbolic, and which cannot be summed up as simple spatial division.

As a result of the structural indebtedness of black farmers to white landowners (collectively referred to as “peonism”), the systematic duplication of public facilities, and the double political and legal exclusion, this dominance was never accepted by those who had believed that they had finally achieved equality after the abolition of slavery in 1865.

Because of this, the only way for it to continue to exist is by the use of a kind of violence known as “terrorism,” which was simultaneously “state-sponsored, legal, and directed from the top down,” as well as “civil, illegal, and yet tolerated.” This type of violence “infused through the social body as if by capillary.”

“Jim Crow: Caste Terrorism in America”: Racial Domination Mechanisms

By nr39r

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