Historical Racist Violence and Intergenerational Harms: Accounts from Descendants of Lynching Victims

African Americans are disproportionately victimized by various forms of racialized violence. This long-standing reality is rooted in America’s history of racist violence, one manifestation being racial lynchings. This article investigates the long-term, intergenerational consequences of racial lynchings by centering the voices and experiences of victims’ families. The data comprise in-depth interviews with twenty-two descendants of twenty-two victims lynched between 1883 and 1972 in the U.S. South. I employed a multistage qualitative analysis, revealing three main domains of harmful impacts: psychological, familial, and economic. The findings underscore that racist violence has imposed harm beyond victims and for many decades and generations after the violent event. These long-term, intergenerational harms, especially if multiplied across countless incidents, can fundamentally impact the well-being of individuals, families, and communities as well as contribute to structural and macrolevel forces. Findings from this study have implications for research, policy, and practice, including efforts toward redress and reparations.

To Applied Theatre, with Love

A violent event in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the loss of a friend created a path for re-engaging with applied theatre and love for the field of applied theatre. In a singularly loveless world, theatre practitioners, performance scholars, and activists need to renew a sense of passion, joy, and commitment to their work.

Exposure to Violence, Firearm Involvement, and Socioemotional Consequences Among California Adults

Violence is a leading cause of injury and death, and its impacts extend far beyond physical harm to the victim. We estimated the prevalence of direct or indirect exposure to violence, factors associated with exposure, and effects of exposure on socioemotional health—with effect modification by firearm involvement during the violent event—among a state-representative sample of California adults. We also examined effects of exposure on subsequent intent to purchase firearms. The sample comprised 2,558 California adults who completed the 2018 California Safety and Wellbeing Survey. An estimated 4% of respondents—1.2 million Californians—said they or a household member were exposed to violence while living in their current neighborhood. Half of those exposed to violence reported the event was “severely” distressing, and 47% experienced social functioning problems (i.e., problems with job/school and/or family/friends); for comparison, only 12% of unexposed adults reported having such problems in the past 12 months. When the violent event involved a weapon, respondents who did (versus did not) experience severe distress were significantly more likely to report that a firearm was present (69% versus 14%); those with (versus without) social functioning problems were significantly more likely to report other types of weapons were involved (67% versus 22%). Exposed adults considered buying a gun in response to the violent event more often than did unexposed respondents in the past 12 months (33% versus 17%). These findings highlight the need to address the physical and psychological sequelae of violence exposure among direct and indirect victims and can inform violence prevention research, programs, and policies across the nation.

Der Einfluss extremistischer Gewaltereignisse auf das Framing von Extremismen auf SPIEGEL Online

In this article, we examine the representation of right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism and Islamism in the media-public discourse using the example of SPIEGEL Online, one of the leading German media. We derive four central dimensions for the conceptualization of extremisms: ideological foundation, origin of the actors, position towards society and typical actions. We observe the development of the representation of extremisms at potential breakpoints: We investigate the associative framing of the extremisms before and after a prominent extremism-related violent event, namely 9/11, the publication of the NSU scandal and left-wing extremist activities during the G20 summit. We observe changes in framing motivated by the selected events and compare the resulting framing with the current definitions of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in order to work out possible differences in the conceptualization of extremism variants with potentially different logics of action to be expected from diverging conceptualisations.

Inventing the English Massacre

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Tension at the table: 1 Corinthians 11:23–32

Paul’s presentation of the communion meal in 1 Cor 11:23–32 highlights tensions we experience as we participate in the Lord’s Supper today: situational tension in re-enacting a conflicted meal and remembering a violent event, a tension between memory and hope, a painful tension for survivors of sexual abuse with the use of “body” and “blood” language in both Scripture and liturgy, and a tension between an insistence on the egalitarian nature of the meal alongside warnings of exclusionary judgment for any who eat while “unworthy.” The first two tensions are biblical and are to be explored and embraced in sharing the Lord’s Supper. The second two tensions result from unintended consequences and misinterpretation, and should be discerned and alleviated to maintain a spiritually healthy and faithful communion liturgy.