On racism and citizenship
In his research, Concordia sociology professor Meir Amor suggests that the racial violence of the American South post-emancipation was not a continuation of the so-called “Southern traditions” of slavery and subjugation.
Rather, the cruelty emerged due to the difficulties associated with the transformation from a rigid hierarchical social order into universalized citizenship.
Amor’s paper, “Modernity, Citizenship and Racialization: Jim Crowism and Lynching Campaigns in the Post-Emancipation Southern United States,” questions what happened to American citizenship after the Civil War ended in 1865 until the mid-1930s. He recently presented his work in a lecture to members of the Montreal Institute in Genocide Studies.
In his analysis, Amor examined three important processes and events he says require explanation to understand the violence and hatred present during that time: One was the large-scale lynching campaigns; a second was the white supremacy movement in the form of the Ku Klux Klan; third was Jim Crow legislation — state and local laws that enacted a “separate but equal” status for African-Americans that “basically established segregation between Americans of European descent and those of African descent,” says Amor.
These aspects together “tell us that American citizenship of African-Americans was subverted, maimed and almost annulled by racism,” Amor says.
“I’ve tried to figure out what was the notion of human rights in the United States after the Civil War and up to the 1960s,” Amor says. “Can we say anything about the perception of human rights in the United States vis-à-vis African-Americans if we do not integrate the country’s history of racism? For what racism did to citizenship, it essentially did the same to human rights.”
This research was published in the 2009 book Racism and Justice: Critical Dialogue on the Politics of Identity, Inequality and Change (Fernwood Publishing).
Amor, who’s been at Concordia since 2001, focuses his research and teaching on “the interdependencies and interconnectedness of status equalization, politics of inclusion and exclusion and violence in a historical and a comparative frame of analysis,” according to his biography.
Amor is the author of 13 refereed journal articles and peer-reviewed book chapters. Most recently, Amor has written a comparative study about assimilation and anti- Semitism in 15th-century Catholic Spain and Second Reich Germany.
Related links:
• Cited research: “Modernity, Citizenship and Racialization: Jim Crowism and Lynching Campaigns in the Post-Emancipation Southern United States”
• Meir Amor
• Racism and Justice