Research event

The US Civil War and anti-Black narratives: The effect of war casualties on racial violence and attitudes in the US South

A presentation by Federico Masera (Senior Lecturer in Economics at University of New South Wales). This event is part of the Political Economy Lunch Seminar (PELS).

Narratives that paint minorities as dangerous to society are often used to justify the need for collective discrimination and violence. These narratives emerge after pivotal events and shape discriminatory behaviour for many generations.

Federico Masera will present a paper investigating the effects of the US Civil War on race relations in the US South from 1865 to today and the narratives used to maintain it. In the paper, Masera shows that places that lost more white men during the Civil War saw more lynchings of Black men and more people voting for racially discriminatory lawmakers. The authors claim the shock of the loss of white men in the war increased the perceived likelihood that Black men and white women could interact. This lent credibility to the narrative of painting Black men as "sexual predators" and a threat to white women, according to Masera. The authors show that in places with larger losses in white men, the "sexual predator" narrative was more often referenced by politicians, was more prevalent in newspapers, and was more often used to justify violence.