Analysis Of Desmond King And Stephen Tuck's De-Centring The South

Desmond King and Stephen Tuck’s “De-Centring the South: America’s Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction” was focused on how white supremacy flourished in not only the South, but in the North and West as well, debunked that the North and West were much better places to live regarding racial discrimination, and how African Americans had lacking representation in the political sphere. Laura F. Edwards, on the other hand, discusses how the legal system judged certain crimes, such as rape, were affected by one’s sex, black women’s and white women’s experiences with sexual assault, the assumptions related to the lower class affected women, and misogyny in her “Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy

“[A] comparison of the likelihood of white and black people being lynched at any given year (by comparting the ratio of white and black lynchings to the size of the white and black populations respectively) reveals that black people were some ten times more likely to be lynched than white people across the Western and Southern states, but they were more than forty times as likely to be lynched as white people in Northern states” (King and Tuck 227). After reading that, I had to sit back and breathe. This passage came as a huge shock that black people were forty times more likely in the North because textbooks have always set up the North to seem like this pretty OK place to live – not necessarily the best, but so much better than the South. While the North may have seemed better than the South because of a few “better” economic opportunities – one could argue that being a maid wasn’t much better, the North clearly faltered when it came to lynchings. To think that the North was a paradise, when it fact was not, is ignorant; I’m pretty disappointed in all of my past history textbooks that spoke of the North as a “saving grace” for African Americans. Another passage in the King and Tuck article that I found intriguing was a quote about Justice Joseph Bradley and a

For King and Tuck, why did they decide to discuss black lynchings in the United States? Had they considered writing about black lynchings in other countries? We hear and read a lot about African American life in the U.S. but not much about Africans that lived in places like the United Kingdom or in the countries in Africa where slavery still existed. Maybe there’s not much data about other countries, but I’d like to know what life was like for Africans that did not live and migrate here. For Edwards, why did she decide to write about black and white women’s experiences? It was different to read from the perspective of both white and black women, but I wonder why she decided to do that instead of just writing about one or the other’s experiences. I really enjoyed this week’s readings overall, but these two articles really caught my