Chapter 23: The Boundaries of Whiteness: From Till to Trayvon
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
11-2021
Editor(s)
Janet Dewart Bell and Vincent M. Southerland
ISBN
978-1-62097-734-7
Publisher
The New Press
Language
en-US
Abstract
Today, far too many people argue that racism is a thing of the past. As proof of racism’s disappearance, these individuals point to formal equality in the form of laws that prohibit explicit discrimination on the basis of race and that allow for the prosecution of individuals who engage in clearly racially motivated, violent attacks. Additionally, they note that most Americans today would condemn the use of racial slurs, and most would profess a belief in racial equality.
However, as Derrick Bell so wisely taught us, the fact that racism operates in different ways today than it did in the past — the fact that racism is more subtle than it was in the past or the fact that much racial discrimination, in some respects, is more likely to stem from non-conscious, rather than conscious, bias — does not mean racism is not present. It does not mean that racism is not a current and pressing problem in our society today. Indeed, I argue that the same race-based forces and the same racist tropes that worked in the past — a past that we do not and cannot deny was steeped in the ugliest forms of race hatred — are still operating in contemporary society. I do so by taking what many view as an extraordinary case about racial hatred from the 1950s, the Emmett Till murder and trial, and comparing it to the Trayvon Martin killing and trial in 2012 and 2013. In so doing, I show how the stereotypes that undergirded the Till case remain quite ordinary today.
At the same time, I highlight a very subtle difference in the operation of these forces and tropes by showing how the Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin cases reveal a movement from the Jim Crow era of protecting whiteness as property in and of itself to a post–civil rights era of protecting what sociologist Elijah Anderson has called “the white space.” In all, I argue that the Till and Trayvon killings and trials centered on the policing of the boundaries of whiteness.
Recommended Citation
Angela Onwuachi-Willig,
Chapter 23: The Boundaries of Whiteness: From Till to Trayvon
,
in
Race, Rights, and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory
331
(Janet Dewart Bell and Vincent M. Southerland ed.,
2021).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3985
Comments
The following is an excerpt from Race, Rights, and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory, edited by Janet Dewart Bell and Vincent M. Southerland, originally published in hardcover as Carving Out a Humanity. This collection gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume of essays that illuminates the facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium, celebrating the legacy of Derrick Bell, a legal scholar, educator, activist, and pioneer of Critical Race Theory.