Crime against Law: Legacies of Racial Violence for Crime and Punishment

Histories of racialized violence relate to an array of contemporary crime and criminal justice system outcomes. This was anticipated by observers by the 1830s who warned that indulgence of racist violence corrupted the rule of law. Recent studies focus on county-level variation in two forms of racial violence (i.e., violence motivated or organized by racial politics)—area histories of slavery and racial-terror lynching—theorizing that these histories shape path-dependent patterns of racialized conflict, violence, and inequality in these same places, historically and today. Studies have demonstrated legacies in attitudes, behaviors, and institutional outcomes that include patterns of violent victimization, criminal justice policy support, police violence, and state executions. Yet recent studies are surprisingly cut-off from earlier legacies of research by predominantly Black scholars and public intellectuals, which was relegated to the margins of academia. This historically long-standing understanding of racialized violence as a lingering “crime against law” has important implications for contemporary research and reparative interventions.