DRAFT Appendix 10.1: Chaos and transience
In the South, unfortunately, no kind of labor is either free or respectable. Every white man who is under the necessity of earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow, or by manual labor, in any capacity, no matter how unassuming in deportment, or exemplary in morals, is treated as if he was a loathsome beast, and shunned with the utmost disdain.
Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It [1857] (reprint, A.B. Burdick, 1860), p.41.
A certain class of white men … ha[s] been suffered to remain in our midst too long, and [their] intercourse with the slave population is altogether too intimate. So long as their presence is tolerated it will be found a difficult matter to preserve the decorum so essential among slaves. … There must be … new white laws as well as new black laws.
The Pointe Coupee Echo quoted in Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840–1875, Louisiana University Press (1939), p.95.
… the sudden appearance of a white man generally excited some apprehension with regard to personal safety, but the sight of a black man was always cheering, and made him feel safe.
Report of comments by a physician about travelling in the antebellum South, cited in Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South, Oxford University Press (1984), p.132.
What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (1903).
We associate the nineteenth century, particularly the Victorian era, with a prim and proper religiosity and presume that the institution of marriage was solid in Eurosphere societies. Especially in the notoriously religious United States. For a large slice of the US population, especially in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South, this was far from true. Poor Southern ‘whites’ were notorious for being unchurched, bawdy, drunken, gambling carousers who were transient in employment, residence and relationships.
Some of their cultural patterns came from and with the borderers, the so-called Scots-Irish, whose violence-prone honour culture had arisen on the violent, cattle-raiding Anglo-Scottish border; had persisted in the violent, cattle-raiding Ulster plantations; and persisted again in the violent, cattle-rustling American frontier. In frontier societies, signalling a willingness to violently protect you and yours via an overt sense of honour was a protective mechanism. When there is a lack of sources of order, such that violence is not suppressed, this creates a fear-deterrence-status dynamic, of pre-emptive and retaliatory violence, spiralling out from (a tiny) minority of highly violent men, that can generate high rates of violence. Proactive aggression becomes more likely to be successful while reactive aggression becomes both a protective mechanism, and a more effective social strategy, in the absence of countervailing constraints. This is a pattern that can be seen across history and in under-policed urban neighbourhoods throughout the contemporary Americas and elsewhere.
Add in significant income flows from illegal goods — such as from alcohol or narcotic prohibition — and there will not only be more to be protected by reactive aggression, the rewards from proactive aggression will also be magnified.
The descendants of the borderers can still be identified as a distinct American cultural variant, often labelled hillbillies. They are concentrated in a large strip westward from West Virginia, across Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, and Texas.
The contemporary classic Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance gives a perceptive insight into their outlooks and habits of life. The US Presidents that most exemplified their outlooks were Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) and Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) while contemporary borderers tend to be particularly strong supporters of Donald Trump (b.1946). Add in Bill Clinton (b.1946) from Arkansas, and we have all three impeached US Presidents. (Richard Nixon [1913–1994] resigned before he could be impeached.)
Much of the patterns of life of poor Euro-Americans in the antebellum South can, however, connected to the social, economic and political position they were placed in by the interests of the slave-owning landowners who comprehensively dominated Southern society, economy and politics. Especially as those patterns of life extended beyond the borderer belt into the Deep South.
Competition with slaves that were paid only basic subsistence drove down Southern wages, and the status of physical toil, while raising land values. Largely illiterate, dominated by an elite that refused to invest in public schools, poor Euro-Americans in the slave States had few opportunities for stable employment or to rise out of their social situation. Like the slaves, they could be publicly whipped as a legal punishment, or their labour auctioned off to pay outstanding fines. Often not on tax registers, rarely able to commit to time off from foraging and seeking work, likely to have at least one felony conviction, any indictment (with its likely imprisonment, easily for months) was not at all likely to be by a grand jury of their social peers, and any conviction only somewhat more likely to be so.
Constrained, but not much protected, by the structures of public order, they sought refuge in the autonomies of leisure, since that was generally the only realm of autonomy left to them. The social control and dominance mechanisms that were later racialized and intensified as the system of Jim Crow, had their origins in the mechanisms developed to ensure these rowdy transients did not threaten the slave order. They were ‘masterless men’ in a social order built on mastery and seen, and treated, as a threat to it. W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) may have, in the quote above, been talking of his fellow African-Americans but his words applied with as much force to poor Euro-Americans in the Antebellum South.
Poor Euro-Americans lived largely subsistence lives, often going hungry. But this was not a subsistence anchored in place or property. They generally lived somewhat chaotic lives; a chaos not at all conducive to stable marriages. Fathers were often separated from their families for long and recurrent periods of time or abandoned their families altogether. They were constrained by institutions but otherwise lived lives largely outside them. To a considerable degree, they lived lives of atomised individualism. Hence a general, and violent, commitment to a sense of personal honour or bravado that was, in many ways, their only significant asset or protective mechanism. A bravado and patterns of violence that, in themselves, also undermined the development of stable social ties and connections.
The problem was not poverty: vast numbers of people living at subsistence levels have had stable family lives. The problem was the lack of ordered subsistence, of a culturally maintained and economically supported structure to their lives, especially for the men. Mothers raising children tend to have a basic structure to their lives inherent in child rearing. Fatherhood on its own does not provide that. It is the social role of fatherhood — being protector, provider of resources, of connections and social place — that a lack of structured employment, that also entails residing with their family, directly undermines.
The transient nature of their employment opportunities, in both time and space, greatly weakened the ability of poor Southern Euro-American men to be effective provider husbands and fathers. Roles that their surrounding culture and institutional fabric did little to support and much to undermine. The very weak state of marriage in their social milieu flowed predictably from such social and cultural circumstances.
With the abolition of slavery, the former slaves and ‘free blacks’ came to form a common community (for they were all now ‘free blacks’) and largely moved into the social role that the poor Euro-Americans had previously occupied, adopting much of their culture on the way through. The churn of slavery, mixing together people of various ethnicities while depriving them of the normal processes for building social order, had left slaves with precious few survivals of their previous cultures. As slavery had been well established in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans to purchase slaves, they were already from generally low trust cultures. Adopting the resource-intensive and oppression-associated culture of their former masters was not a practical option. Absorbing that of the section of the Euro-American population that they had had the broadest commercial, social and sexual contact with was far easier, especially as they now lived in similar circumstances.
Nor does slavery accustom its sufferers to the internal creation and maintenance of order. Though it did encourage a reflexive solidarity under the burdens of the stigma and exclusion that their social experience kept feeding. A solidarity that could, and sometimes did, leave the wider African-American community hostage to its most troubled elements and patterns. Something denounced by African-American intellectuals from Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jnr. (1929–1968). The lack of strong internal structures of order based on culture or kinship has tended to greatly weaken the capacity to internally enforce norms of order against such toxic solidarity.
Such reflexive solidarity is not a manifestation of the strength of structures of order within a community but of their weakness. For the creation and maintenance of order requires penalising chaotic and disorderly behaviour. An undiscriminating solidarity acts to entrench, even legitimise, chaotic patterns within a community and, over time, undermines that community’s capacity to improve its lot. Thus, seeing ‘white supremacy’ as the key problem is a double fetter, as it locates both agency and redemption in the hands of others while encouraging an indiscriminate, and so dis-ordering, solidarity.
Conversely, cultures and family structures that have strong tendencies to impose order on the lives of their adherents, to reward dutiful and orderly behaviour and to stigmatise chaotic and disorderly behaviour, even in situations where they are not part of surrounding institutions, have a powerful advantage across the generations. Outsiders see the strong internal networking of such ethnicities and often miss how much reputation and internal social sanctions affect participation in those networks. Indeed, it is precisely the ease with which information flows along their interlocking networks, and how such connections are, in a sense, hostage to reputation and social sanctions, that permits participants to take advantage of high trust within their networks to be more commercially successful. The answer to the question posed above by W.E.B. DuBois is to look at any successful ‘market minority’, especially those who overcome previous legacies of stigmatisation, such as Chinese-Americans in California, Japanese-Americans in Hawaii and Eastern European Jews in New York.
Another feature conducive to community success is a strong commitment to education. Cultures with a long-established reverence for education, such as Chinese, Japanese and Jewish cultures, have an advantage over people from cultures with no local tradition of literacy. Especially when the churn of slavery crushed any previous tradition of status through knowledge.
Moreover, the circumstances of Sub-Saharan Africa — with a high concentration of diseases, predators and competing megafauna (a herd of elephants could strip a farmer’s field in a few hours) due to being the continent where Homo sapiens evolved — meant very different approach to parenting than seen in European or Asian cultures. Children tended to be dispersed (such as being fostered with friends or relatives) and parenting was likely to focus more on (the many) threats than opportunities. Sub-Saharan African societies also tended to have high rates of polygyny, which tends to lower investment of time and attention in individual children, particularly by fathers. Age-based ritual groups often provided counter-balancing socialisation and training effects (generally for young men), but nothing of them survived the churn of slavery, though the later development of street gangs provided a pathological echo of their role.
As parenting patterns (who looks after children) and practises (what they do when they look after children) are elements of culture most likely to survive the churn of slavery, such systematic difference from Eurasian patterns were not likely to be as conducive to success in urbanised, industrialised societies with high returns to education. The experience of slavery and Jim Crow would have also encouraged more threat-focused parenting.
Evidence suggests that children of Euro-American mothers and African-Americans fathers tend to follow Euro-American patterns, while children of African-American mothers, regardless of the continental ancestry of their father, tend to follow African-American patterns. If Euro-American mothers provide more concentrated and opportunity-focused parenting, and African-American mothers provide more dispersed and threat-focused parenting, this may help account for the strikingly different patterns of equally mixed-ancestry children. As may passing on different social cues and expectations.
After the abolition of slavery, achieved by the expending of so much blood and treasure in the Civil War, the poor Euro-Americans moved into a role the yeoman farmers of the South had previously held — protectors of the status of the plantation elite. What did not change is that they continued to be the group who had to be blocked from making common cause from the local population of African ancestry. Just as racial stigmatisation had previously been wielded to justify slavery, so now it was used to give the former ‘poor whites’ a stake in the restructured social hierarchy. The shift in the treatment of the ‘poor whites’ (from exclusion to co-option) demonstrates particularly clearly that racism has been the product and the support of systems of slavery, domination and mastery, not its driver. As it had been in the Islamic world for over a thousand years of mass slavery.
It is striking how much race talk has been, across US history, a weapon of elite dominance, of elite prestige-and-dominance plays. Up to, and including, its ostentatiously anti-racist versions.
With the abolition of slavery, the poor Euro-Americans were subject to religious evangelising establishing stabilising social connections and marriage-supporting norms. Public schools began to be provided, employment prospects expanded and provision of policing services improved. Much of their culture persisted but the capacity of men within the social milieu to fulfil the social role of fatherhood steadily improved, as did the normative and social support for them to do so, and so therefore did the coverage and persistence of marriage among them.
The combination of harsh laws and variable enforcement, supported by extra-legal violence such as lynchings, that was the Jim Crow system, was an adaption of the social control and dominance system that had operated in the Antebellum South. A system constructed by the plantation elite to protect its social and economic dominance. A system that had allowed that elite to organise secession from the United States. One that was then re-jigged in an intensely racialised form after the withdrawal of federal troops at the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Jim Crow was simply the most intense, and most explicitly racialized, version of the Southern control-and-dominance system (apart from slavery itself). Indeed, given the existence of ‘free blacks’ under slavery, Jim Crow was more intensively racialised than slavery.
Before the Civil War, the Southern system (particularly with its extensive application of nonviolent behavioural crimes such as vagrancy) had generated masses of ‘white’ convicts and criminalised. A persistent number of whom were lynched. After the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction, the system similarly generated masses of ‘black’ convicts and criminalised, a persistent number of whom were lynched. Lynching in both cases being mob justice to enforce, via extra-legal violence, a legally-entrenched and normatively-supported social hierarchy.
In both eras, the attempts to racially divide and differentiate an increasingly mixed continental origins population to create and sustain a racialized hierarchy collided with the biological reality that such mixing made physical markers increasingly unreliable indicators of ancestry. The result was endless litigation to create and enforce a social division less and less able to rely on physical markers. “One-drop” rules are patently a political and social differentiation parading as a biological one. Such enforced differentiation continued its work of maintaining control by differentiating status.
With the abolition of slavery, the former slaves moved, as free persons, into somewhat better schooling and more generally stable (via share cropping) employment than poor Euro-Americans had previously had. African-American churches also became famously vibrant. But they and their descendants were controlled, rather than protected, by such policing services as came their way. A bravado culture (an honour culture without elite endorsement) persisted, as personal ‘rep’ had to provide the protection that the police forces did not. As had been the case with the ‘poor whites’ before them, a fear-deterrence-status dynamic was the prime source of the ‘reckless bravado’ that W. E. B DuBois ascribed to a different source in his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
As had been true of antebellum ‘poor whites’, African-Americans were constrained and controlled by institutions they were not part of and had to struggle to simply achieve a subsistence living. It is hardly surprising that similar cultural patterns persisted among them. As ex-slaves, they had no wealth, and barriers were put up to their acquisition of assets, Gen. Sherman’s (1820–1891) ’40 acres and a mule’ proclamation having been explicitly reversed under President Andrew Johnson (1865–69). This meant that, as had been the case with the poor Euro-Americans of the Antebellum South, property ownership provided limited countering effect to any chaotic and disorderly cultural patterns. Both groups suffered from stigmatisation in the service of social hierarchy, with similar patterns of denigration and techniques of exclusion, though that inflicted on African-Americans was clearly more intense and more persistent.
In both groups, retreat into the autonomies of pleasure, and the protections of bravado assertiveness, generated a cultural vibrancy expressed in music and dance. Country and western music in one case, jazz and blues in the other. The intersection between them generating, most famously, rock music.
And if social circumstances changed in a way that undermined the social role of fatherhood, then the descendants of American slaves were precisely the section of the US population that could be expected to feel the impact first, and most strongly. Followed by lower income Euro-Americans, especially in the borderer belt. Which is, of course, precisely what has since happened.
But not as a direct result of slavery (as distinct from persisting cultural patterns interacting with new circumstances). Up until about 1960, African-Americans had the same, or higher, rates of marriage as Euro-Americans. While premarital births were quite common, marriages typically followed such a birth. Despite the pressures on African-American communities, the social role of fatherhood, and so the institution of marriage, was solid in their communities. In the two generations after the abolition of slavery, there was a remarkable surge in literacy among African-Americans, driven by private schools and churches, as spending on public schools for their communities was tardy and lacking.
A cultural model of citizenship had evolved within the wider American society: sober, hard-working, self-controlled, diligent, responsible, restrained. A self-image largely not embraced by African-Americans, either during slavery or after, much to the frustration of many African-American intellectuals, including Martin Luther King. But, then, why would they embrace such a constrained ideal? They were literally excluded from citizenship when slaves and functionally excluded afterwards by Jim Crow and segregation. The autonomies of pleasure provided refuges from, and rewards independent of, their legal, political, social and economic exclusions. Hence the cultural vibrancy that waves of newcomers found attractive but whose rejection facilitated inclusion into social acceptance as proper American citizens.
The growth of manufacturing employment in Northern cities drew in both the borderers (or hillbillies) of greater Appalachia as well as the descendants of American slaves. ‘Free blacks’ had lived in Northern cities for generations, without being segregated. With the mass movement of the descendants of American slaves into these cities came residential segregation. Given the lack of prior residential segregation, it was not ancestry per se, but the numbers and culture of the newcomers, especially the consequences of bravado culture, that explain the development of residential segregation in northern cities. Segregation that was, however, rapidly racialized; in all senses.
Usually, if folk are left to themselves, the incentives of commerce and sociality lead to ‘race mixing’, unless a culture has strong mechanisms to exclude contact with outsiders. This means that segregation generally occurs as a result of being imposed on people. A partial (but only a partial) exception to this general requirement for segregation to be predominantly imposed, and coercively enforced, was the residential segregation that developed as southern African-Americans streamed into northern industrial cities.
The notion of white flight is usually exaggerated. What generally happens when new arrivals move in significant numbers into a neighbourhood is previous-group avoidance. As the normal churn of city living leads people to leave a neighbourhood, members of the group whose numbers are declining in an area increasingly avoid moving there. It will, after all, be decreasingly likely to be an area favourable to their networks and social connections. Hence the leavers are replaced by members of the incoming group(s), not members of the originally resident group. This process can change the demographics of entire cities, let alone local communities, remarkably quickly; as has happened in recent decades in the case of London, which stopped being a majority Euro-British city by the 2011 census.
The extra element that intensified this more general pattern was that movement into the northern cities tended to aggravate, not undermine, the patterns of bravado culture among young male African-Americans, as it often separated men from their families and permitted young men to congregate. City authorities found it easier to segregate off the newcomers, quarantining away their (much) higher level of violence, than expending city resources to find effective ways to deal with bravado culture and its consequences. Which, of course, led to bravado culture continuing, even intensifying. A pattern that many city governments continue to this day, though generally less than in the past. Policy quarantining via a lack of effective policing (as measured by crime clearance rates), plus bravado culture generated and sustained by such insufficiency of effective policing, continue to generate much higher homicide rates in African-American urban neighbourhoods along with disorder in their schools. In rural areas, where policing is much more even and bravado culture is much harder to sustain, there is no difference between Euro-American and African-American homicide rates.
In metro US, the (much) higher level of violence motivated both group-avoidance and flight, especially for families with children, and negatively affected house prices, encouraging existing residents to leave and further undermining the ability of the newcomers to build wealth. All patterns that differing physical markers from different continental origins made easier to engage in, and to focus on. African-American urban violence became accepted as a background pattern. A pattern both normalised and stigmatised.
In Philadelphia in the nineteenth century, the African-American homicide rate was 2.7 times the Euro-American (7.5 to 2.8 per 100,000). In the years 1948–52, it was 13.7 times the rate (24.6 to 1.8). In the early 1970s, it was 22.9 times the rate (64.2 to 2.8). A study of national figures found that the ratio shifted from 5.8 times higher in 1919 (30.5 to 5.3) to 8.3 times higher in 1927 (43.8 to 5.3). Since the overthrow of the Jim Crow system in the 1960s, the problem of violence within African-American communities has become an entirely urban problem.
In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, “the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime”. At various times, suburbanisation (the movement of the African-American middle class out of inner-city neighbourhoods), youth bulges (increasing the tendency of young men to congregate and so size and convergence of the prime bravado culture group), increased income from illegal activity (providing income sources for gangs and illegal assets to fight over), increased welfarisation (encouraging chaotic lifestyles among recipients, especially male recipients) and fatherlessness (undermining, by lack of example and teaching of boundaries, young male commitment to social order) all acted to increase the patterns of bravado culture, and so the level of violence. The 1960s thus became a ‘perfect storm’, ramping up violence, and undermining fatherhood, via factors that aggravated already existing patterns of bravado or ‘street’ culture.
Welfare (i.e., various forms of government subsidies) has two sorts of effects. One is in simply providing an income. As an income, there is no particular reason to expect any notable difference in its effects from income from other sources. The other is the incentive effects arising from the constraints the subsidy creates. Welfare can undermine searching for cooperative opportunities by providing an income that does not require cooperative activity. Indeed, welfare can actively undermine cooperative behaviour by being compatible with quite chaotic lives.
The problems of violence intensify the more urbanised communities are, as urbanisation strengthens the factors feeding bravado culture and urban communities are much more prone to developing violence ‘hot spots’. They tend to be more opaque to outsiders and more easily “quarantined” via much lower effective police response, and so crime clearance rates. Conversely, with the collapse of the Jim Crow system, Southern rural law enforcement has tended to revert to the more general pattern of rural law enforcement being much more locally connected and much more evenly responsive.
Marriage and fatherhood both reflect the structures of order (or lack thereof) in a community while also acting to provide and support order within a community. It is by examining the strength or weakness of the internal and external structures of order within a community that permits us to see the interactions between marriage, fatherhood, community prospects and violence. Unfortunately, race talk is so often a means to avoid talking about class, networks, connections, norms and other aspects of culture.
Race talk typically impoverishes analysis. It is a morally and analytically misleading habit that has spread across the Anglosphere. Hopefully, the above provides an insight on how pernicious, and how unnecessary, race talk is. (The linguistic ease involved in such talk is not remotely a sufficient excuse.)
Sources
Elijah Anderson, ‘The Code of the Streets’, Atlantic, May 1994 provides a discussion of ‘street’ culture, what I have called bravado culture.
Peter Arcidiacono, Andrew Beauchamp, Marie Hull, and Seth Sanders, “Exploring the Racial Divide in Education and the Labor Market through Evidence from Interracial Families”, Journal of Human Capital, 2015 ; 9(2): 198–238 found no significant differences in outcomes between black and white males with white mothers but large differences persist between these groups and black males with black mothers, suggesting that differentiation in labour market and other social outcomes is not occurring on the basis of child skin colour but via mother-child channels such as dialect or parenting practices.
Bradley Campbell & Jason Manning, ‘Microaggression and Moral Cultures’, Comparative Sociology, Vol.13, №6, pp.692–726 discuss the difference between honour cultures and dignity cultures. The latter developed in Northwest Europe in the early modern (i.e. post-medieval) era and spread south and east across Europe in the following centuries.
Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective, March 2018 found that higher rates of father presence in a community was a significant positive factor in improving prospects for young African-American males.
Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instincts and the Fate of Nations, Bloomsbury, 2018, sees the United States as creating a supergroup uniting different ethnicities in a single American identity.
Catherine Cubbin, Linda Williams Pickle, and Lois Fingerhut, ‘Social Context and Geographic Patterns of Homicide Among US Black and White Males’, American Journal of Public Health, April 2000, v. 90, n. 4, pp. 579–587, presents data showing there is no difference in African-American and Euro-American male homicide rates in rural US, but that the disparity grows dramatically the more urbanised an area is.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, “Killing the Competition: male/male and female/female homicide”, Human Nature, Vol. 1, №1, March 1990, pp. 81–107, note the similarities across human societies in patterns, but not levels, of violence and examine the evolutionary underpinnings of those recurring patterns.
Manuel Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice; A Review of Research, 2003. 30, pp. 83–142, includes incidents from medieval London when honour culture held sway across medieval Europe that, with very little change in the language, could happen in any modern urban ghetto and notes the decline in homicide rates that starts in Northwest Europe in the post-medieval period and spreads south and east across Europe in the following centuries.
Orjan Falk, Marta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstrom, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsater, Nora Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions’,
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (2014) 49:559–571, found that patterns of violence in Sweden in the period 1973–2004 were extremely concentrated, such that about one percent of men committed close to two-thirds of convicted acts of violence and another seven per cent of men, and one percent of women, committed the rest.
Raymond B. Fosdick, Crime in America and the Police, Century, 1920, provides highly revealing statements from senior police about (not) policing African-American communities as well as describing some revealing incidents.
Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, Crime and Justice 3, 1981, pp. 295–353 provides the homicide rate numbers cited above.
Eric Kaufman, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, Penguin [2018] 2019 includes a discussion of white avoidance and urban demographic shifts.
Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce and Deborah Prothrow-Stith, P Kennedy, Kimberly Lochner, ‘Social Capital, Income, Inequality, and Mortality’, American Journal of Public Health, September 1997, v. 87, n. 9, pp. 1491–8, found strong associations between low levels of social trust and social connection with higher income inequality and mortality rates.
Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Harvard University Press, 2002, which could equally be entitled ‘The Anatomy of Stigmatised Inequality’, as the patterns so clearly analysed could be applied to such groups as the ‘poor whites’ of the antebellum South or the Cagots of northern Spain and Western France. (The latter suffered centuries of shunning and persecution for reasons that are still mysterious: patterns that, once entrenched, seem to have been self-sustaining.)
Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Cambridge University Press, 2017. A revelatory and comprehensive discussion of the social structures, and the corrosive social logic, of mastery in the antebellum South. It is the source of the contemporary quotations cited above.
Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the United States, Free Press, 2011, covers the high level of ‘race mixing’ in Northern cities during the Revolutionary War period, African-American cultural vibrancy as a rejection of the sober citizen model and Martin Luther King’s denunciatory sermons against what he saw as moral failings within African-American communities.
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Encounter Books, 2005, discusses the various cultural varieties with African-American communities, including the way residential segregation in Northern cities developed as a result of the influx of Southern ‘blacks’ with very different cultural patterns than those of the already resident ‘free blacks’ who had resided in mixed neighbourhoods.
Sa’id al-Andalusi, Science in the Medieval World: ‘Book of the Category of Nations’, (Tabaqat al-‘Uman), Sema’an I. Salem and Alok Kumar (eds. and trans.), University of Texas Press, [1068] 1996, includes derogatory descriptions as races of Sub-Saharan Africans and Slavs, Islam’s dominant sources of slaves, that are highly reminiscent (particularly the comments on Slavs) of very similar derogatory commentary on African slaves by Euro-American writers.
Paul M Sniderman, Edward G. Carmines, ‘Color-Blind Society’, Ch.4, Reaching Beyond Race, Harvard University Press, 1997, demonstrate that the Euro-American and African-American attitudes on the proper role of ‘race’ in public policy are far more similar than they are different.
J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, HarperCollins, 2016 discusses family and cultural dynamics and how they isolate people from paths to success in the wider society.
Richard W. Wrangham, “Two types of aggression in human evolution”, PNAS, January 9, 2018, vol. 115, no. 2, 245–253.
This is a draft appendix to Chapter 10 of a book on marriage to be published by Connor Court. It is a work in progress, so this may not be the final version.
