sociology of law

Du Bois

Learning goals:

1.Understand Du Bois’ argument that US race relations contradict US democracy

2.Understand Du Bois’ argument that US race laws/policies created class divisions

Summary of relation between democracy and law

 Law = reflecting social and political power relations (slavery, jim crow, segregation)

 Democracy = aspirational ideals in constitution  Race laws undermine democratic ideals

1)US race relations contradict US democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z04KVyhZM5g

https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/text- to-text-why-reconstruction-matters-and-black- reconstruction-in-america/

“From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.”

US democracy assumes equality, why?

How did the Constitution and Bill of Rights conceive and implement equality of all people?

“So long as slavery was a matter of race and color, it made the conscience of the nation uneasy and continually affronted its ideals. The men who wrote the Constitution sought by every evasion, and almost by subterfuge, to keep recognition of slavery out of the basic form of the new government.”

Conscience = morals, right from wrong

“Slowly but mightily these black workers were integrated into modern industry. On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new and tickling luxury; but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged world. Cotton grew so swiftly that the 9,000 bales of cotton which the new nation scarcely noticed in 1791 became 79,000 in 1800; and with this increase, walked economic revolution in a dozen different lines. The cotton crop reached one-half million bales in 1822, a million bales in 1831, two million in 1840, three million in 1852, and in the year of secession, stood at the then enormous total of five million bales.”

“The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy.

“The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system… The victims of Southern slavery were often happy; had usually adequate food for their health, and shelter sufficient for a mild climate. The Southerners could say with some justification that when the mass of their field hands were compared with the worst class of laborers in the slums of New York and Philadelphia, and the factory towns of New England, the black slaves were as well off and in some particulars better off.”

“The tragedy of the black slave's position was precisely this; his absolute subjection to the individual will of an owner

The proof of this lies clearly written in the slave codes. Slaves were not considered men. They had no right of petition. They were "devisable like any other chattel." They could own nothing; they could make no contracts; they could hold no property, nor traffic in property; they could not hire out; they could not legally marry nor constitute families; they could not control their children; they could not appeal from their master; they could be punished at will. They could not testify in court; they could be imprisoned by their owners, and the criminal offense of assault and battery could not be committed on the person of a slave…

Looking at these accounts, "it is safe to say that the law regards a Negro slave, so far as his civil status is concerned, purely and absolutely property, to be bought and sold and pass and descend as a tract of land, a horse, or an ox."

It may be said with truth that the law was often harsher than the practice. Nevertheless, these laws and decisions represent the legally permissible possibilities, and the only curb upon the power of the master was his sense of humanity and decency, on the one hand, and the conserving of his investment on the other.

Thus spoke "the noblest slave that ever God set free," Frederick Douglass in 1852, in his 4th of July oration at Rochester, voicing the frank and fearless criticism of the black worker: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your

prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. . . . "

white working class in north and south had material interest in maintaining slavery

-slavery contradicted democracy -Reconstruction was project to extend democracy in the US South -Reconstruction sabotaged by Jim Crow -Race relations contradicted American democracy until civil rights movement?

2)Race laws/policies as creating class divisions

“Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance with capital, to share in their exploitation. To be sure, the black mass, developed again and again, here and there, capitalistic groups in New Orleans, in Charleston and in Philadelphia; groups willing to join white capital in exploiting labor; but they were driven back into the mass by racial prejudice before they had reached a permanent foothold; and thus became all the more bitter against all organization which by means of race prejudice, or the monopoly of wealth, sought to exclude men from making a living.”

Du Bois: Race relations determine class relations

Not: Class relations determine race relations

“Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.”

Du Bois is arguing that the racial devaluation of labor along racial lines also undermines democracy, why does he make this argument?

In class activity

Documentary: The House We Live

https://vimeo.com/133506632

Redlining and housing segregation is the origin of the racial wealth gap. Du Bois argued that a race- based class system also undermined democracy, considering the racial wealth gap, to what extent is Du Bois’ argument still true today?

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