In the United States, Jim Crow designates a set of customs and laws which made blacks a sub-skate of “untouchables” in southern states for 70 years. From the abundant historical literature over the period, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant forges a model of this regime in order to extend it to other systems of racial domination.
In the United States, Jim Crow designates a set of customs, devices and laws which, from 1890 to 1960, held the blacks, descendants of slaves, under his ferocious grip, reducing them to the status of an “untouchable” subcaste subject to protean and omnipresent violence. Passing the abundant historiographical literature to the period, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant forges a model of this regime which makes it possible to understand its specificity but also to open a comparative focal point on other forms of racial domination, including in contemporary post-imperial societies.
Shooting & editing: Ariel Suhamy.
Loïc Wacquant is a professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley and member of the European Center for Sociology and Political Science (University Paris 1/Ehess). His research, which endeavors to hold ethnography, institutional comparison, epistemology and theory, relate in particular to urban marginality, the criminal state, the body and racial domination. To find out more, see: Loicwacquant.org.