A Call for Integral Violence Studies

The Standard Way to Investigate Legacies

Typically, investigations of the legacies/aftereffects/costs/consequences of contention focus on a single form of contention (e.g., civil war or a riot/rebellion) and a single outcome (e.g., economic development or social welfare expenditures) across a single unit of analysis (e.g., longitude-latitude, city, state, and region) and temporal domain (e.g., short, medium, and long term). For example, one can easily find a study regarding how civil war influences gross national product or GNP (e.g., Collier et al. 2003) or, more closely related to racial violence, how riots/disturbances influenced social spending (e.g., Piven and Cloward 1979). In fact, these are two of the more frequently examined topics in the area.

This approach has many advantages. First, it brings attention to a subject that is generally neglected. Second, it leverages the fact that a tremendous amount of data already exists on contention as well as diverse outcomes about which people care. Third, empirical investigations have advanced in numerous ways to facilitate the analyses of interest on both the data collection as well as estimation fronts. Fourth, some much-needed attention has been given to a variety of different forms of contention as well as political-economic outcomes of interest within diverse places around the world.

Importantly, though, the typical approach also misses important effects. First, it misses the fact that the distinct forms of contention employed by the different sides of a conflagration are relevant to another. For instance, one thing that we now know with a reasonable degree of confidence is that repression influences dissent and dissent influences repression (e.g., Davenport 2007). This connection is important because if one focused on the legacies of state repression directed against the civil rights movement but ignored the efforts of the civil rights movement itself, not much useful information would be provided, as it is the coevolution of the two sides that informs what then can happen (e.g., Oliver and Myers 2003). We need to develop an idea as well as approach to studying contention that includes and accommodates comprehensive evaluations of the reportorial shifts undertaken by both sides of a contentious episode (e.g., challengers as well as governments).

This is clearly relevant today. As one can see within the manifestos generated by the numerous organizations associated with Black Lives Matter (BLM), the diagnoses of the problems identified and the solutions offered very much look like the Black nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., defunding and abolishing the police as well as reparations). This said, some of the topics that the earlier movement raised (e.g., secession and armed rebellion) are some of the most threatening to the U.S. government and economy. I think it makes sense that we do not see these topics being advocated by current BLM organizations because those who held these positions received the greatest amount of repression of the claims-making efforts for their day, which, in turn, eliminated awareness of what they had to say. This process emerges from something that looks like an evolutionary one.

In this application, variation occurs among actors as well as between the local environmental contexts within which they interact (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992; Dennet 1995; Dawkins 2006). These variations constitute the equivalent of natural mutations in goals, purpose, and function. Each represents different interests as groups and individuals compete in their desires and struggles to achieve power, autonomy, and success as they define those accomplishments, either as state actors or in opposition to the state.

These variants are then selected by the state, on the basis of some political and/or legal criteria (e.g., “subversion,” “treason,” or “threatening political order”), however arbitrarily defined. In this way, governments choose which groups to support and which to oppose, on the basis of ideological, material, or other grounds. When the state or its functionaries employ some coercive method such as repression or an alternative method such as material inducements to “select” among challengers, the basis for selection may have nothing to do with the relative value or popularity of the positions advocated by different groups. Rather, in these cases, the government may “select” on the basis of the compatibility of a group’s goals with larger state plans or purposes. When this happens, the government uses its repressive power to select victors among actors, which then inherently and inevitably imposes restrictions on the visibility and viability of other social actors, even if those losing players represent a more popular or societally beneficial position. However, when existing political authorities do not intervene, selection can also occur as a result of the success of one actor or group relative to other actors or groups. These victors can more accurately represent the interests of their relative constituency or prove more effective at persuading others of their value and merit. Thus, state action can pervert a more representative or efficient outcome when it selects on criteria that do not reflect the interests of the constituency. In this way, some groups survive only through state support and intervention, while others wither prematurely under various forms of state repression.

In time, “winning” actors replicate differentially relative to their opposition, at a cost in resources and members to other competing groups. By retaining a disproportionate share of resources, whether material, social, or ideational, such groups survive, in part, by perpetuating the extinction of less viable groups. Most important for our study, this happens when repression is likely diminished precisely because it is no longer deemed necessary. In this context, the relevant territorial unit is populated with actors who are most like the preferred occupants of the political elite. As with any process of replication, some processes grow faster and with less opposition than others. When we talk about a phenomenon as “going viral,” we are colloquially leveraging this notion of rapid replication. When conditions are right for contagion to emerge, replication can prove rapid indeed, whether in the realm of viruses in the human body or processes of democratization in the Middle East.

The legacy of this exchange finds itself in the movements of today. In short, it is because of the dynamic interaction between challengers and governments earlier that subsequent movements chose what to challenge as well as how to do it. If one were simply focused on the challenger side of the contentious interaction, this isomorphic adaptation would be missed. Now, what is being discussed here connects distinct subfields, for example, protest–protest policing, terrorism-counterterrorism, insurgency-counterinsurgency, revolution-counterrevolution, as well as everyday resistance–everyday repression. This will be necessary to properly understand what is taking place.

Second, the typical approach to analyzing the consequences of contention misses the connection between distinct forms of violence undertaken by a single side in the contentious episode. For example, if one were focused on the destruction of the Black community within Tulsa during 1921, then one would miss the violence that preceded this moment in this locale as well as the activities in other nearby locales that may have been called or labeled something different. Similarly, if one focused on the anti-Black violence directed against protestors without connecting this violence to that directed against protestors over time as well as against individual African Americans out in the street, one would underestimate the magnitude of the problem, the degree of frustration with political authorities, and the difficulty with impacting such a pattern of behavior. Now, this again connects what are somewhat distinct subfields. In the current context, this would mean criminology with its emphasis on civilian-police interactions would need to be considered alongside sociology and political science with their emphasis on protest–protest policing, but it would also compel consideration of other subfields as well.

Third, the typical approach misses the connection between overt manifestations of violence and more subtle, insidious structures that systematically work against sustaining life (i.e., structural violence [Galtung 1969]). This shift is incredibly important with regard to racial violence. At one time period, white vigilantes were able to engage in a variety of different tactics against African Americans; but after they were unable to engage in some of the most violent, they did not then decide to embrace their fellow Americans of African descent. No, they used other levers to subjugate and destroy them.

Briefly, consider the work revealed by Pigford et al. v. Glickman (1999). In 1900, there were 746,717 African American–owned farms, which makes sense, as farming was all that many African Americans knew after slavery (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2003). By 1997, there were only 18,451. The legal case revealed that most of the farmers were not killed or threatened—which of course also happened. Rather, the African Americans were simply denied credit or shifting terms of repayment, which is standard in farming. The dynamics involved are actually quite complex.

The civil rights movement emboldened many black farmers to join cooperatives. (Unfortunately) (i)t may have also provoked more discrimination by white-owned businesses against black farmers in commercial dealings. But, discrimination in some cases induced cooperative formation. In a time of interracial tensions, bulk purchasing of farm supplies or assembling member products for consolidated transactions enabled black farmers to minimize the frequency of their individual interactions with white merchants and product brokers. Cases of this mechanism are documented, where farmers’ access to supplies or markets were blocked when they were known to be members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1956, black farmers in Clarendon County, NC, organized the Clarendon County Improvement Association to circumvent discrimination due to their NAACP membership. It provided small loans, farm supplies, and services. When area gins would not accept cotton from black farmers, the cooperative transported it to distant facilities for ginning (Daniel 2000, 247). Circumventing discrimination was also the purpose of forming the Grand Marie Vegetable Producers Cooperative, Inc., in Louisiana in 1965, after brokers boycotted some growers for their civil rights activities (Marshall, 51).

While cooperatives helped to reduce members’ exposure to potential racial discrimination in commercial dealings, the formation of associations elicited antagonism and reprisals from racist business owners. The Clarendon association lost access to credit from local banks, but it was able to borrow from the NAACP and also received funds from the United Automobile Workers for purchasing farm machinery (Daniel 2000, 247). One of the largest and most widely publicized black cooperatives to emerge in the late 1960s was South West Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association (SWAFCA). It encountered numerous boycotts from local businesses and discriminatory actions from politicians. (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2003, 9)

Of course, the denial of financial support does not look the same as a lynching or a mass shooting, but it is devastating to individual African Americans as well as collectivities of Blacks who relied upon farming to not only feed themselves but clothe their children, pay their mortgages, and try to build a life in America. Therefore, to understand the legacy of racial violence, researchers need to take a broader view of violence.

Fourth, the typical approach is generally fragmented in nature in not only what it studies but how it is studied. Repeatedly above I have noted that distinct fields and subfields would need to be drawn upon to facilitate the proper understanding of the complexity, magnitude, and duration of the problem of racial violence. This concerns clear conceptualization as well as developed theory and research design. It also concerns data. For example, it is important to pull together racial violence events from national newspapers but equally as important to identify events in the hundreds of local newspapers that are (potentially) available from churches, civil and human rights groups, as well as all residents within a geographic locale. Some of these collection efforts have been initiated by researchers of lynching (Seguin and Rigby 2019), but the data created have not generally been made available to interested scholars or the general public, which has hindered progress. As a consequence, comparative analyses to gauge the variability in events derived from distinct coding rules are rare (e.g., Cook 2012), and attempts at creating estimates through some form of latent variable modeling like that undertaken by the Human Rights Data Analysis group have not yet been undertaken broadly. Such efforts could be combined with searches in Google, tweets, information from morgues, city councils, publicly available police records, and patents and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at all levels of government. Moving even further, it would be useful to also bring together information that is generally not thought of as data in most of the research noted above but that has been highlighted within cultural studies and critical race theory, for example, song lyrics, poems, pictures, and stories. These could be geocoded and dated to get a sense of what was created under what circumstances, giving us a richer sense of how lives have been impacted by racial violence.

In a sense, what I discuss in this piece is nothing less than what I am calling integral violence studies. It is an attempt to bring together the best that the social sciences have to offer as well as the humanities in an effort to understand what has taken place in the fullest way possible. Using this approach would allow scholars to understand without deferring to fields and subfields with myopic focus on specific theories, specific units of analysis, specific forms of data, and specific methodologies. Individuals from many walks of life could engage with the material and be able to analyze it in diverse and better ways.

Note that despite the collection and interest here, I do not say integral racial violence studies, and I do not because it should be an empirical question how much (if at all) this form of violence is connected to other forms of violence (e.g., antilabor, antiwomen, anti-immigrant, and antitransgender). We cannot make these types of evaluations unless the broader constellation of data is collected. Indeed, if there are some deeper currents to the violence that we see and assess, then it is only with the broader evaluation that we would see them and use them to build a world without violence. We cannot fix racial violence and address its legacies if it turns out that these forms of violence are intricately connected to others.