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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Legacy of Racial Violence (LEGACY)

Alternative title: Arv etter raserelatert vold (LEGACY)

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

After the killing of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world. While the killing of Black men and women by police receives the bulk of attention, there are parallel calls to address how hundreds of years of racial violence affects contemporary inequalities between and within communities. Yet, our understanding of the deep roots of inequality still lacks comprehensive data coverage, appropriate testing, and a theoretical understanding of the broad effects of past racial violence. The LEGACY project seeks to address gaps in our understanding of the long-term effects of past racial violence on contemporary communities – particularly economic, political, and health inequalities between, as well as within, Black and white communities in the United States. To more fully evaluate long-term consequences we trace their origins by measuring short-term effects. By doing so, we map consequences from the past to the present, ensuring we account for the duration, magnitude, and dispersion of affect-effects. Of equal importance, we are interested in understanding how communities mitigate the long-term effects of racial violence. Given significant variation and evolution of redress claims overtime, we undertake a qualitative methodology relying on elite interviews and primary source data to identify variation across redress claims, including what claims (and remedies) were proposed and pursued, when, and why. We identify cases involving redress efforts and cases where no redress claims were made to understand the restorative potential of reconciliation. We consider the legacy of violence as being not only its direct detrimental effects but also the process by which communities address after-effects through restorative acts. We use multiple approaches combining statistical modeling of large data sets, causal analysis, and qualitative data, ensuring a complementary approach to identify general patterns across the US as well as test why inequalities persist. In contrast to previous research, we seek to trace consequences from its inception through its contemporary effects. We evaluate short-term and long-term effects through full US Census count data of millions of Americans between 1850 and 1940. In addition, we link individuals across censuses to create longitudinal datasets. The full geocoded place and individual linked data enable the study of processes that unfold over generations at the individual, family, and communal level. We propose that accounting for how violence engenders deleterious outcomes at different time frames and efforts to redress those aftereffects offers the potential to fundamentally understand and reduce endemic and seemingly permanent inequalities across communities. Work we have completed on the relationship between racial violence and educational attainment, for example, suggests that those Black Americans who experienced the racial riots of the Red Summer in 1919 were significantly less likely to achieve the same levels of educational attainment as Black Americans who were not exposed to racial riots. This pattern is stronger for women who were more significantly impacted by their exposure to violence. Through our quantitative index of racial violence we have identified four dominant patterns in racial violence across the United States. We have identified US counties with a consistent negative trajectory, counties with a consistent positive trajectory, those counties which have improved in their treatment of Black Americans over time, and those counties where the treatment of Black Americans has declined over time. Using these identified patterns we are now testing the impact of those legacies on political, health, and social outcomes.

After the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests swept across the globe. While the killing of Black men and women in the United States by police receives the bulk of attention, there have been parallel calls to address how hundreds of years of racial violence affects contemporary horizontal inequality in countries around the world. Despite calls for reform, our understanding of the deep roots of inequality lacks comprehensive data coverage, appropriate empirical tools, and a theoretical understanding of the broad effects of the legacies of racial violence. The LEGACY project seeks to address gaps in our understanding of the long-term effects of historical racial violence on contemporary communities in the United States – particularly why and how type, severity, scope, and relative amount of racial violence affects economic, political, and health inequalities between, as well as within, Black and white communities. Of equal importance, we are interested in understanding how communities mitigate the long-term effects of racial violence. We use a mixed-methods approach combining statistical methods, causal inference techniques, natural experiments, and content analysis, ensuring a complementary approach to identify general patterns across the US as well as test causal mechanisms. In contrast to previous research, we build on a theory that maintains that violence shapes political order, leading us to expect that not only does the form and intensity of violence directly impact critical measures of well-being, but continues to influence outcomes generations later. We propose that accounting for how violence engenders both long-term deleterious outcomes and efforts to redress those aftereffects offers the potential to fundamentally understand and reduce endemic and seemingly permanent horizontal inequalities. Our project offers a promising approach to more fully understand and address a legacy that impacts millions of people around the world.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam