Connections: Social Uncertainty and Its Implications for Violent Reaction

In an earlier post, I discussed remarks historian Vincent Harding made during a conversation with Krista Tippett on her radio show On Being, in which he gave his view of the origins of the growing social disruptions in the United States. His observations have significantly influenced my understanding of the present political moment, and I have repeatedly found resonances to them in other podcasts I listen to, as well as in what I’ve been reading.

One recent example of this appeared in the conclusions of historian Isabel Wilkerson in her engaging and thought-provoking book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which explores the history of the migration of “some six million black southerners” (9) to the North and West of the United States during the early and mid-20th century.


Harding, in that 2011 On Being interview, described his view that a kind of disenchantment was taking hold in the United States, particularly in the white community, regarding their place in the country, economically and culturally. “I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities, that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before.

Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color; that ... that was our realm. But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.

The resulting loss of hope for the future for themselves and their families would lead to, he argued, anger, and by implication, potentially violence. These comments from 2011 now seem prescient in light of events of the past few years.


In Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, we discover an earlier appearance of the dynamic Harding observed in our current social and political climate. As a part of her recounting of the black migration from the South, Wilkerson examines the impacts these migrants had on their destination cities, and in particular their interaction with other migrants to those same cities. In her discussion one discovers a similar “uncertainty,” and accompanying “anxiety” and “fear,” as mentioned by Harding. The causes of these feelings were again a combination of economic uncertainty and cultural difference, though in this earlier case these issues existed between the black population migrating to the North, and white immigrants arriving during the same period, from the South, as well as from abroad. (My review of Wilkerson’s book is linked to at right.)

Wilkerson notes:

Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States --- from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later --- riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.

Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of the skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving station at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.

Thus these violent clashes bore the futility of Greek tragedy. Yet the situation was even more complicated than the black migrants could have imagined. As they made their way north, so did some of the poorer whites from the South, looking not for freedom from persecution but for greater economic rewards for their hard work. Slavery and share-cropping, along with the ravages of the bool weevil and floods, had depressed the wages of every worker in the South. The call of the North drew some of the southern whites the migrants had sought to escape. (273)

Certainly the situations are not identical. Harding’s observations were about members of the “dominant … [white] society” in relation to “the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color.” In Wilkerson’s account, she describes the feeling of uncertainty not among the existing, dominant white population of Northern cities, but instead among “disaffected whites” who were poor immigrants from abroad and from the South. (The established white populations of these cities were able to maintain a situation in which they benefited from the work of all of these immigrants --- black and white --- while keeping them segregated into restricted parts of their cities.)

Nonetheless, white immigrants to northern cities experienced a similar dynamic to what Harding describes today, for, though repressed and disparaged by the established, dominant white society in these cities, they considered themselves superior to the black immigrants. But the social and economic constraints faced by all of these newcomers, as Wilkerson observes, place them in direct competition with one-another, and this competition threatened white immigrants’ view of themselves --- to reference again Harding’s words: it introduced “uncertainties about [their] role, [their] control.” And the result then, not surprisingly, was the violence Wilkerson describes, arising out of a feeling that, as Harding said, “it's got to be our way or we will all die.”