The longest afterlives ever: Legacies of slavery and Jim Crow

Professor of African American Studies, Department of Black Studies Slavery and its legacies are both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. On the one hand, citizens acknowledge that slavery and its legacies have had an indelible imprint on the United States’ history, culture, politics, wealth, education, healthcare, and so forth. In other words, for those of us who study slavery, for those who live in the afterlives of slavery (and Jim Crow), and for those allies who listen, read, and otherwise pay attention, the argument is simply put like this: there is not an institution in the United States that currently exists that slavery (and its legacies) did not build, shape, or, at the very least, impact. On the other hand, or perhaps on the same one, resistance to this claim persists and emerges from a wide range of people. Objectors cannot, or, perhaps more accurately, they refuse to, fathom the possibility that more than 300 years of slavery and 100 years of legalized Jim Crow segregation might have produced the inequalities that persist in American society, and that, in some ways, these inequalities have grown more intractable since the passing of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. But a quick lesson in math might challenge this thinking. For example, it is indisputable that 400 (the years of persistent, legalized discrimination against Black people that set them at all types of disadvantages) is greater than 60 (the number of years that have passed since civil rights legislation allowed Black people to access institutions that had previously excluded them). The idea that 60 years would undo the cumulative effect of 400 plus years of systemic, systematized, and seismic racial inequities seems implausible. Yet this claim undergirds some of the explanations for racial inequities and disparities that underestimate—if not altogether deny—the significance of the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. Of course, anti-Black racism and white supremacy remain co-contributors and co-conspirators to these explanations. And, of course, the denial of anti-Black racism and white supremacy as explanatory reasons keeps both forces invisible and empowered. This point underscores the importance of making them visible, identifying how they work, explaining the effects of their work, and proposing solutions to mitigate and possibly undo the harms they have done and continue to do.