AAS 311

• Cognitive transitions


  The founding of America and the development of the Racialized Worldview
• Exploitation


  Easier for those less than human
• Children follow the condition of their mother

  1662
• Enslavement's 3 levels of facilitation

  • Facilitates the dehumanization process in a logical manner by the contradiction that a human being is simultaneously both a piece of property, a ''thing'' and a person
  • Permits emphasis on the property element and the prioritization of the rights of owners to their property
  • It also allows gross subjugation and brutality on a large scale, while reducing the possibility of guilt
• The new labor force happened to be not only culturally different but physically distinct and not easily mistaken for any of the other populations in the new colonies
• The African Atlantic trade provided an unlimited supply of this labor
• Public Demeanor


  Every act symbolically had to remind both masters and enslaved, whites and free blacks, of the subhuman status of the blacks
• • Enslavement and the creation of Race in North America gave the colonists, individually and collectively, the unrestrained power to create their own savage
  • They developed and imposed their ancient image of savagery over an easily distinguishable, category of human beings making it possible to view them as subhuman
  • Enabled the colonists to maintain ''The enslaved African'' as a separate and discrete social category, regaurdless of enslavement, imposing laws that preserved their distinctness
  • Because of it's unequivocal linkage of social identity to physical characteristics, all people could easily be conditioned to such inequality
• Physiocrats


  A group of European thinkers who believed in an economic theory which considered that the wealth of nations was derived solely from agriculture
• Blacks and whites negotiate public spaces
• • The fugitive slave act of 1850 brought the federal government into the business of returning runaway slaves
  • A national triumph for the southern view of slavery
  • The northern free black person was forced to depend on southern justice when returned
• Drapetomania


  The insane desire to run away
• Jim Crow


  • The racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid 1960's
  • Rigid anti-Black customs and way of life
  • Africans in America were regulated to the status of second class citizens. Jim crow represented the legimization of white supremacy and anti-Black reality
• Toms, Coons, Mulatoes, Mammies & Bucks by Donals Bogle
• Jim Crow Etiquette


  • A Black Male could not offer his hand (to shake hand) with a white male because it implied being socially equal
  • Black and whites did not eat together in public
  • Blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks
  • Blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names
  • If a Black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the Black person sat in the back seat, or the back of the truck
  • White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections
  • Any gesture of any kind made by a Black man towards a white women without a white mans consent was grounds for prosecution and capital punishment
• The Black Codes


  • If unable to find employment faced the potential of being arrested and charged vagrancy
  • Those that found employment had their day regulated
  • Codes dictated their hours of labor, duties and the behavior assigned to them as agricultural workers
  • The freedom to choose a type of work was often regulated
  • Many white southerners believed blacks were presidented to work as agricultural laborers
  • Prevented African Americans from raising their own crops. In Mississippi, for instance, they were restricted from renting or leasing any land outside of cities or towns and black ownership was left up to local authorities
• Plessy – v – Ferguson (1896)

  • Racial segregation is a custom or tradition ordained by the decency of man
  • Law is reasonable when it follows custom and unreasonable when it does not adhere to custom
  • A contrary decision in Plessy would have meant the enforcement of social inequality (for whites)
  • Law cannot ''eradicate'' the racial instincts
• Symbolic Interactionism


  • The premise that human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them
  • The meaning of such things is derived from or arises out of the social interaction one has with other human beings
  • These meanings are handled in and modified through an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with those individuals one encounters
• The Racial Contract


  • How the individuals in that society were created or crucially transformed
  • How the individuals in that society were constructed
  • How the State was established
  • How a particular moral code and a certain psychology was brought into existence
• White Supremacy


  The Caucasian race is superior to other races
• • The Psychopathic Racial Personality by Bobby E. Wright
  • White Racism A Psychohistory by Joel Kovel
• The Normative Gaze


  • A conceptual framework of American modernity and a global phenomenon
  • Establishes what is other, different, peculiar, strange, less than
  • Establishes what is beautiful and what is ugly
  • Establishes what is suspicious
• Two Types of White Racism

  • Dominative: Acts out beliefs and is willing to use physical force to further the ideology (VVC)
  • Aversive: Believes in white superiority but does nothing overt about it. Allows institutions to further the ideology (IJC)
• Countermajoritarianism


  The ability to countermand or act against the preferences of a majority culture, particularly to protect Minority interests
• • Marbury V Madison 1803 established the authority of the Supreme Court to declare acts of congress and by implication acts of the president, unconstitutional if they exceeded the powers granted by the Constitution
  • The Court became the arbiter of the constitution, the final authority on what the document meant
  • Judicial review: The authority of the federal courts over state laws and judicial decisions that involve the federal Constitution
• Legal Education as a training for Hierarchy

  Legal education mirrors the social relationships one finds within society at large, with ethnic minorities being marginalized within the law school framework as they are within the context of each other mainstream cultural institutions
• • Is the Countermajoritarian capacity of the supreme court highly inflated and perhaps ultimately a fiction in the context of American Race Reality?
  • Is the Supreme court – as a sociological fact – incapable of protecting the interest of non – white Americans against the tyranny of the majority. Veil majoritarianism
• Veiled Majoritarianism


  • The promotion of majority interests through supposedly neutral legal principles, principles that while in outward appearance promotes the goal of protecting people of color from injustices from the ''will of the majority.''
  • These legal principles give the justices the power and discretion to inscribe their socialized belief systems into the law, while at the same time passing off such inscriptions as objective jurisprudence
• ''The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men, have such a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed'' Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Legislation can be socially engineered because they are human beings not rubber, wood, or plastic
• The Racial Contract


  • How society was created or crucially transformed
  • How individuals in that society were reconstituted
  • How a moral code was brought into existence
• The convergence of Interest Thesis


  The interests of people of color will be advanced if and only if such advancement guarantees the parallel advancement of white majority interests
• • Derrick Bell's Analysis: The ideological battle the U.s was battling fighting against communism in the 3rd world
  • The economic toll segregation was taking upon the south with the necessity of ''separate but Equal fac
• Oliver Wendell Holmes: 'Judicial decisions have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed'
• The Racial Contract


  Accounts for how society was created or crucially transformed, how individuals in that society were reconstituted, and how a moral code was brought into existence
• Convergence of Interest Thesis

  The interests of people of color will be advanced if and only if such advancement guarantees the parallel advancement of white majority interests
• Veiled Majoritarianism


  Allows for the maintenance of inequality within the supposed objective structural dimensions of American law, particularly when the supreme court is generally regarded as a: ''Contermajoritarian Institution.''
• The Racial Contract continues to manifest itself in unofficial local agreements of various kinds (restrictive covenants, employment, discrimination contracts, and political decisions about resource allocation)
• De jure


  Racial separation that is required by law
• De facto


  Racial separation that exists as a matter of ''custom'' and tradition rather than as a legal requirement