Читать книгу Black in America - Christina Jackson - Страница 17

During the Reconstruction era, when both Blacks and Whites possessed a degree of political power, no one group was able to elevate their racial groups’ interest over the other, enabling a period of near-equality in educational funding. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva defines power within a racialized social system as a “racial group’s capacity to push for its racial interest in relation to other races” (Bonilla-Silva 1996:470). Thus, Blacks’ possession of political power was problematic for the White planter class because they were prevented from unilaterally asserting their interests. Disenfranchisement was a means to an end – it enabled the White planter class to “regain unchallenged political power and subsequently use it to regain their advantage in public educational opportunities” (Walters 2001:41).

The population and structural change thesis developed by sociologist Hayward Derrick Horton holds that “changes in the relative sizes of the minority and majority populations interact with changes in the social structure to exacerbate racial and ethnic inequality” (1998:9). Racism, Horton argues, is a multi-dimensional system that reacts to population and structural change (1998:11); it is the means through which majority populations respond to changes in the minority population. Majority and minority here do not refer to the absolute population size but to the relative power associated with each group – dominant and subordinate status, respectively. In this historical instance, the creation of a fundamentally inequitable school system that advantaged Whites and disadvantaged Blacks was a racist response to the freed Black population created by the emancipation of slaves. While there are many reasons why Reconstruction as a political project in pursuit of equality for Blacks failed, Fredrickson points to a fundamental ideological rupture, “emancipation could not be carried to completion because it exceeded the capacity of White Americans – in the North as well as the South – to think of Blacks as genuine equals” (Fredrickson 2002:81).

Once slavery ended and White Southerners lost their right to the automatic control of Black slaves, the size of the population of free Blacks relative to the White population became a problem. The Black population that White slave owners bred for profit now needed to be controlled. Horton argues that the question “How do we continue to maintain control over this large and increasing population?” has plagued Whites since emancipation (1998:11). The answer, he argues, has been to “utilize a racist system of oppression to eliminate Blacks as serious competitors in every aspect of American life” (Horton 1998:11).