Dark horde: tardis.fandom.com
In 1955, teenaged Emmett Till, born and raised in Chicago, visited relatives in Mississippi. At a local store, Emmet said or did something to newly married 21-year-old white Carolyn Bryant that crossed a line. Reports vary, not just between white and black bystanders, but also over time. It was claimed by one journalist that Mrs Bryant recanted over 50 years later from her claims that Emmett had touched her. There was a wolf whistle. And that may have been enough.
Mr John Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam came for Emmett a few nights later. They kidnapped him, tortured him, shot him, weighed the body and dumped it into a river.
That would have been that, but Emmett’s mother Mamie Till insisted, when the body was found, on it being returned to her. She arranged an open casket funeral – so all could see what had happened to her boy. Thousands turned out in Chicago, and there were many photographs illustrating the maiming that Emmett had suffered.
Mamie Till at Emmett Till’s funeral: Wikipedia
As a result of the publicity Bryant and Milam were arrested, then found not guilty. They later sold the story of how they murdered Emmett (having been found not guilty they could not be prosecuted again). Milam is reputed to have said: “What else could I do? He thought he was as good as any white man.”
Lynching, extra-judicial killing, was prevalent after the American Civil War, and into the first half of the 20thcentury. It was more common in former slave states, and the victims were disproportionately young black men. The point of lynching was to oppress the black population. To ensure that no black man could think they were as good as a white man.
Lynching had declined to low levels in the 1950s – 1952 was the first year with no lynchings. The rarity of this horror, together with Mrs Till’s courage in sharing her tragedy, would have made the story even more outrageous.
Lynching scuttled out of sight in the 1960s (the last lynching was in 1964). Did that mean that violent suppression of Blacks was over? The evidence, convincingly presented by Frank R Baumgartner, Christine Caron and Scott Duxbury and published in 2022 in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, is that the death penalty performs the same role as lynching did, except now presenting a judicial face. The rationale of legal execution is that this is the enactment of the law, rather than vigilante justice. Baumgartner and co-authors show that it is the expression of racial resentment.
There is good evidence that members of society’s dominant group feel threatened if they feel outnumbered by a previously subordinate group. Maybe you have talked to someone who got onto the bus, or entered a supermarket to find they were the only older, white male there (or some other combination of visible signs of slipping out of the dominant, that is majority status).
When experimenters “prime” their white American experimental subjects with the message that white people will not be the majority group in the US by 2042 these people endorse more conservative views, including leaning more Republican.
This is not a one-off result. Such “status threat” – the view that your dominant group will lose its majority status has been connected with support for extreme right groups, and also proneness to conspiracy thinking and paranoia.
Is there evidence that this threat of being outnumbered is related to state’s enthusiasm for execution? The majority (27) of US states do retain the death penalty. Are these states where there is a higher percentage of Black people?
Yes – if there are more black people in a state, it is more likely that state will continue to use the death penalty. But this is not a significant difference. The p-value of the test to measure the difference in the proportion of blacks between death penalty and no death penalty states is just less than 0.10. As you know, only < 0.05 will do.
But what we are interested in is not simply “are you about to be over-run?” It’s the message that individuals pick up after that fact that triggers a threat response, and so the potential for violent reaction.
“Racial resentment” measures this level of threat. People rate their agreement on such resentment statements as:
Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.
Baumgartner and colleagues went looking to see if this attitude of racial resentment contributed to state’s use of the death penalty.
Their approach was more subtle than the simple approach I illustrated above. Rather than the dichotomous Yes/No in terms of states having a death penalty, they measured the number of executions in states, from 1989 to 2019. As well as including “racial resentment” they included a general measure of political conservatism. And they included the level of homicide in the state. After all, if the death penalty is reserved for the most serious of crimes, we might expect that more homicides would result in more executions.
Racial resentment and conservatism at the state level led to higher rates of state executions.
The state level of homicide did not affect the level of executions. This is a strong indication that the death penalty serves another purpose than to control homicide. The researchers checked if other variables were indirectly influencing execution rates by acting on the two attitudes of racial resentment and conservatism.
The “percent black” or relative size of a state’s black population drives increases in racial resentment.
Incredibly, so does a state’s history of lynching. Lynching from decades ago continues, out of sight, to motivate the subjugation of blacks.
Members of the majority can feel resentment at “uppity” members of the subservient minority. This resentment can lead to support for repressive policies to keep those who they see as outside “their” in-group in their place. That can be the death penalty in the United States, or punitive approaches such as the “Three Strikes Law” or “Boot Camps.”
More positive approaches could emphasise the alignment of the values of people from minority groups with those of the majority – the love of a mother for her son could be such a universal.
Thanks to Scott Duxbury for the “Percent Black” data for US states.