Violence

Violence has been central to the story of race in the United States. Violence permeated the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. In the colonies that became the United States, the violence that constituted a slow-motion genocide against the indigenous peoples was especially uncompromising, in part because emerging notions of race helped cement a notion of essential separatemess between the European settlers and the nations they gradually displaced.

Violence was also there in the slave trade that brought Africans to the Americas. Violence defined the daily lives of those enslaved and the laws and customs that kept them in their place. That violence persisted well after slavery in the Jim Crow laws and in the extra-judicial mechanisms of everyday terror, such as lynching and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, designed to uphold white supremacy.

Violence upheld a system of hierarchy and subordination that encompassed groups beyond "white," "black," and "red." The following slideshow invites the viewer to reflect upon the meaning of that violence - and how it might persist into this day as well, in ways not so easy to discern, but perhaps all the more powerful because they are more subtle.