By Loïc Wacquant. We associate the notion of caste with Brahmanical India but, in the South of the United States between the 1890s and 1960s, blacks, descendants of slaves, were treated as a sub-caste, true “untouchables” in the country. cradle of democracy. Jim Crow is the name commonly given to the system of racial domination which held them in its ferocious grip and against which the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King rose up. But what exactly did it consist of and how did it work?
Loïc Wacquant draws up a meticulous historical assessment aimed at constructing a rigorous sociological model of this regime. It shows that, backed by the myth of the “drop of black blood” banning miscegenation, it was made up of four closely intertwined elements: an economic infrastructure of sharecropping turning into debt bondage; a social core made of institutional duplication and the demand for permanent deference from Blacks towards Whites; and a superstructure of political and judicial disenfranchisement. But African-Americans have never acquiesced to these three mechanisms of exploitation, subordination and exclusion. It was therefore necessary to secure them by means of a fourth element, terrorist violence, protean violence (intimidation, aggression, rape, manhunt, pogrom, whipping, lynching and public torture, but also arbitrary arrests, abusive embeddings and hasty executions on the side of the law) which hovers over every social interaction between whites and blacks and which can strike at any time with impunity to communicate a strident political message: the imperiousness of white supremacy.