Previous weeks!

Please Be Aware: We expect everyone to read the rules and guidelines of this thread. Mods will remove questions which we deem to be too involved for the theme in place here. We will remove answers which don't include a source. These removals will be without notice. Please follow the rules.

Some questions people have just don't require depth. This thread is a recurring feature intended to provide a space for those simple, straight forward questions that are otherwise unsuited for the format of the subreddit.

Here are the ground rules:

• Top Level Posts should be questions in their own right.

• Questions should be clear and specific in the information that they are asking for.

• Questions which ask about broader concepts may be removed at the discretion of the Mod Team and redirected to post as a standalone question.

• We realize that in some cases, users may pose questions that they don't realize are more complicated than they think. In these cases, we will suggest reposting as a stand-alone question.

• Answers MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. Unlike regular questions in the sub where sources are only required upon request, the lack of a source will result in removal of the answer.

• Academic secondary sources are prefered. Tertiary sources are acceptable if they are of academic rigor (such as a book from the 'Oxford Companion' series, or a reference work from an academic press).

• The only rule being relaxed here is with regard to depth, insofar as the anticipated questions are ones which do not require it. All other rules of the subreddit are in force.

• The wildly disproportionate rate at which Black suspects were killed by Chicago police officers in comparison to the percentage of Black residents in the city
• That a suspect or criminal (of any race) is “a product of his surroundings in the slum areas in the same way in which the good citizen is a product of the lake front environment.” [PDF]

By the 1920s, research pioneered by women scholars at the University of Chicago was already highlighting how stereotypes around “slum environment” turned residents into perceived criminals. They observed that the Black neighborhoods defined as "slums" exhibited precisely the same "disorderly" characteristics that had spurred the creation of official police departments in the previous century. And they observed how these conditions were the result of pervasive, systemic white supremacy.

Additionally, social workers documented how school segregation and the massive underfunding of Black schools by city politicians contributed to those same conditions, creating a feedback loop; The disorder the police were approved to combat was created by the lack of funding and resources. The ideal of order that the majority of white Chicagoans found attractive, in other words, both justified and resulted from police violence against their Black neighbors.

The nature of a survey, like the Illinois Crime Survey, demonstrates the same thing we recognize in lynching: individual cases of state violence against Black Americans, whatever the specific circumstances, are part of a pattern. But while the specter of lynching haunts the fringes of American crime, the pattern of police brutality against the Black community has not let up. In 2015, Jamil Smith showed how the final moments of some many of those killed by police across the decades echoed each other, again and again.

From the Fugitive Slave Act to George Floyd, examples of police violence against Black Americans are endless, gruesome, and there for everyone to see and behold. In 1942, Private Thomas Foster was beaten and shot four times by Little Rock police officers after intervening to stop the assault of a fellow soldier. In 1967, a cab driver named John William Smith was savagely beaten by the Newark police. In 1984, New York City police officers shot Eleanor Bumpurs multiple times as they tried to evict her, making the call that getting her out of her apartment was more important than accommodating her mental health struggles. We could list hundreds, if not thousands, further such examples that illustrate this pattern.

But it’s not enough to say, “here are a bunch of examples of police officers brutalizing Black people.” The ability of individual officers to assault and kill Black Americans year after year, decade after decade, murder after murder, stems from the unwillingness of the white majority to step beyond protesting individual cases or do to more than stroke our chins and say, “Yes, I see a pattern.”

That pattern exists because despite every act of police brutality, and even despite protests following individual acts, white America’s preference for an "orderly" society has been a higher priority. From the inception of official police forces in the mid-19th century, to school truancy officers and border patrol, the American police have existed at the will of the white majority to keep and restore order, as defined by the white majority, using the "necessary" force, as defined by the mostly white police force and legal system.

When we come to write the history of the last few days, we need to remember this wider context and that it goes beyond any single member of the police. It is not that every officer is evil, but they do operate in a system which was designed to build and maintain white supremacy. Justice for the individual Black Americans killed by individual members of the police is necessary, but so is a long, hard look at - and action against - our understanding of societal order and how it must be upheld.

Exposing these structures has taken years of untold work and sacrifice on the part of Black communities, activists and historians. It is far past time that white Americans help rather than hinder this work.

~~

Further Reading:

• Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South. Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press, 2001.
• McGuire, Danielle L.. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Vintage Books, 2011.
• Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. PublicAffairs, 2016.
• Williams, Kidada E. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. NYU Press, 2012.

Recommended listening:

• NPR. Code Switch’s "A Decade Of Watching Black People Die"
• Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Scene on Radio’s Seeing White and The Land that Never Has Been Yet
• AskHistorians Podcast, Episode 144 - The Fire Is Upon Us

~~

Please--save any money from awards you might give this post. The AskHistorians community asks you to donate it to a charity of your choice that fights for justice for people of color, in your country or around the world.

Reddit has announced its alignment with antiracist protesters. We demand to know: where are the actions to back up the words? The Reddit administrators’ policies have made their site downright hospitable to exactly the kinds of racists and fascists against whom it claims to be protesting.

Every day our sub, which has zero tolerance for such speech, has to remove the kinds of intensely problematic and hateful rhetoric that Reddit has become a safe haven for. For example, questions and answers supporting Holocaust denial forced us to establish a clear policy of immediate deletion, as moderator /u/commiespaceinvader describes here.

Reddit has few such qualms. Most recently, the admins' recent attempt to force unmoderated chatrooms on every community would have circumvented our rules and allowed our sub to become just the platform for allowing hate speech that we work every day to prevent—reflecting the admins’ concern for their bottom line above all else. It was subreddits, including AskHistorians, whose protests of that decision made Reddit rescind this particular move towards allowing hate speech.

The /r/AskHistorians mod team has also issued a statement on state violence and white supremacy: George Floyd was murdered by America: a historian's perspective on the history of U.S. police brutality against Black people

Reddit’s stance is hypocritical. It leaves us no choice but to protest.

~~

Please--save any money from awards you might give this post. The AskHistorians community asks you to donate it to a charity of your choice that fights for justice for people of color, in your country or around the world.