Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past

Abstract

Scholars increasingly agree that histories of racial violence relate to contemporary patterns of conflict and inequality, and growing interest exists among civic leaders in reckoning with these legacies today. This volume examines the contributions and limitations of scientific research on legacies of racial violence and suggests implications for policy, practice, and other forms of intervention aimed at redress.

Policing and Population Health: Past, Present, and Future

“…There is a large body of research and writing across multiple disciplines, but especially in the humanities and social sciences, that has examined the nature of racial violence in its many forms -from slavery to Southern mob violence to contemporary, often aggressive and punitive, policing practices (as well as their intersections). 3 Similarly, a growing body of interdisciplinary work has examined the social drivers of population health and health disparities, with more and more evidence suggesting that institutions outside of the healthcare system, such as schools and workplaces, shape health in considerable ways. 4 While neither the examination of police violence and its societal consequences nor the examination of the social determinants of health is novel, understanding the relationship between policing and health is.…”

Historical Redlining and Contemporary Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Life Expectancy

“…One major limiting factor is the depth and availability of historical data that might be used to satisfy assumptions pertaining to unconfoundedness. Indeed, while innovative data curation efforts (Bailey and Tolnay 2015;Cunningham, Lee, and Ward 2021;Nelson et al n.d.;Ruggles et al 2021;Ward n.d.) have provided researchers with some capacity to reconstruct the social conditions that shaped the distribution of both historical treatments and subsequent outcomes, the absence of widespread, formalized data collection mechanisms during the historical periods typically being studied means that researchers are limited in their ability to condition estimates on pretreatment information-and bolster confidence that results are not driven by unobserved confounders. By the same means, we often lack precise historical information on alternative mechanisms that might unfold concurrently, over history, alongside the mechanisms that we can observe (posttreatment confounding); lacking this detailed intermediate information similarly complicates the causal interpretation of our mediation estimands.…”

The Legacy of Slavery and Contemporary Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates

“…This is not to suggest researchers have ignored slavery's legacy. On the contrary, some even suggest that post-Reconstruction lynching is best conceptualized as an important-albeit far from the only-mechanism 1082066S REXXX10.1177/23326492221082066Sociology of Race and EthnicityWard research-article2022 1 the university of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, uSA perpetuating slavery's legacy (Cunningham, Lee, and Ward 2021;Rigby and Seguin 2021). However, until the last decade or so, much of the scholarly examination of slavery's consequences remained primarily "theoretical, historical and speculative" (Reece 2019:2).…”

“…2 This is all the more necessary given historical work locating the origins of modern policing within slavery and establishing the important role law enforcement played in defending racist institutions erected after slavery's abolishment (Alexander 2010;Hadden 2001;Reichel 1999;Wacquant 2000;Wadman and Allison 2004). The current racial climate in the United States, a resurgence of White nationalism, inequalities in policing highlighted by contemporary social justice mobilization, and law enforcement's role as gatekeepers to the modern criminal justice system (Neusteter et al 2019) add additional urgency to the need to more fully explore the origins of modern policing and minority social control practices (Cunningham et al 2021).…”

“…As others have pointed out, the central theoretical weakness of historical racial violence and social control literature has been the absence of attention given to intervening processes and structures involved in the transmission of these legacies (Messner et al 2005;Petersen and Ward 2015). There are some exceptions (e.g., O'Connell 2020;O'Connell et al 2020), yet David Cunningham et al (2021) underscore this point when they note that as conceptions of racial violence and social control expand to include slavery, often the "mechanisms connecting histories of racial violence to contemporary outcomes remain theoretically under elaborated and imprecise and often implicit or absent" (pp. 12-13).…”