Amy Kate Bailey University of Illinois at Chicago
Intergroup conflict is typically rooted in competition for some sort of socially valued good. Community-level theories predict that conflict increases when one group threatens the status, authority, or material resources of the other group. That might suggest that the individuals selected as victims would be those whose characteristics pose the greatest threat to prevailing social arrangements -- those who are the most successful. Research on both historical lynching and contemporary bias crimes, however, tells us that it is people who have lower socioeconomic status, fewer apparent social ties, who are chosen as victims, but also tells us that people victimized by more and less severe attacks often differ from each other. This study will help to resolve this tension between theories that explain the emergence of conflict and those that explain both the selection of victims and the severity of their victimization. It will incorporate the social, policy, and economic context of intergroup conflict; the severity of victimization; and the relative and absolute characteristics of victims themselves. It will expand understanding of the role of victim characteristics by allowing the researcher to identify how individual traits are related to victimization itself as well as the severity of attack, once a person has been selected as a potential target of intergroup violence. While lynching is largely an historic practice, victimization based on gender, perceived sexual identity, race/ethnicity, religious adherence, and economic status continues to plague societies around the globe. This project will help reframe our understanding of the dynamics of victimization in multiple ways. The researcher will use historical census records to locate individuals who were threatened with lynching, but not killed, in ten Southern states across a span of 50 years (1882 - 1930). Records for these intended victims, and all other people in their households, will be merged with existing data on people who were lynched, as well as on nonvictim members of their communities. Comparing these groups will allow the researcher to identify the characteristics that put individuals at risk of various levels of victimization. The investigator will also incorporate county-level social, demographic, economic, and political data to determine which community factors placed high and low status people at elevated risk of victimization. Data, including a database and "case files" with research notes and historical documents for each case, will be distributed via a public web site.
Broader Impact
This project will promote training and learning by incorporating graduate and undergraduate students at an urban, public university in the conduct, presentation, and publication of research. The quantitative analyses, identifying the characteristics that predicted victimization and its severity, as well as the contextual factors that put individuals with particular characteristics at risk, will help us better understand contemporary bias crime and ethnic conflict. Finally, the interactive elements of the website develops and implements a new model of incorporating broader public participation in the collection of social scientific data, allowing members of the public to conduct their own archival research and contribute to the development of our data. The publicly-available website will allow academics, amateur researchers, and genealogists to access information on lynched and intended victims, and help improve the quality of the data.
