Multiple Traditions &
12 Years a Slave

PS140O: Projecting Power

Prof Wasow

2026-02-03

Housekeeping

• Everyone is assigned a Video Essay group

• For Section, just read 198-201 of Smooha

Quizzes

• Quizzes

  – Week 2, Tues 1/27

  – Week 4, Tues 2/10

  – Week 6, Tues 2/24

  – Week 8, Tues 3/10

  – Week 10, Tues 3/31

  – Week 12, Tues 4/14

How should we think about slurs, violence, etc?

• What is the intent?
• Is the use gratuitous?
• What is the context?
• It’s okay to be upset sometimes
• Let’s talk

King & Smith

What is a social order?

• Formal and informal institutions that structure society
  • Who is allowed to do what?
• Formal
  • Laws, courts, police, military
  • Religious and educational institutions
• Informal
  • Norms, codes of conduct, status hierarchies
• Rules of the game

Can we measure informal norms?

What is a “racial institutional order”?

• “American politics has historically been constituted in part by two evolving orders”
  • “White supremacist” order
  • “Transformative egalitarian” order
• Cross-nationally, perhaps
  • Ethno-nationalist order
  • Egalitarian order

K&S: Political Institutional Orders

• “We see all political institutional orders as coalitions of state institutions and other political actors and organizations that seek to secure and exercise governing power in demographically, economically, and ideologically structured contexts that define the range of opportunities open to political actors.”

K&S: Political Institutional Orders

• “We see all political institutional orders as coalitions of state institutions and other political actors and organizations that seek to secure and exercise governing power in demographically, economically, and ideologically structured contexts that define the range of opportunities open to political actors.”

What are “racial projects”?

• “By presenting racial orders as political coalitions, we build on Omi and Winant’s (1994) depiction of ‘racial formation’ as a product of many elite-led ‘racial projects’ (53–76)…”

• “Like many other scholars of American political development, we treat political entrepreneurs and the preexisting institutional orders in which they operate as the key independent variables shaping all political change, including racial development.”

Racial Projects:
Evidence from the NLSY

The NLSY: A Natural Experiment

• National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-1992)
  • Same 12,686 respondents interviewed repeatedly over 13 years
  • Each year, interviewers classified the respondent’s race

Racial Classification Inconsistency

Ethnoracial Group	N	% Inconsistent
Asian	249	45.5%
Hispanic	2,276	38.3%
European (White)	7,471	15.7%
Black	3,174	10.2%

Discussion:
Why is “Asian” so inconsistently classified?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

The Measurement Mismatch

	Self-Report (1979)	Interviewer Form
Categories	28 ethnic origins	3 options
Examples	Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Polish…	White, Black, Other
Asian option?	Yes (6 categories)	No
Hispanic option?	Yes (7 categories)	No

Asian Respondents x Interviewer Race

Hispanics x Interviewer Race

Discussion:
Why didn’t interviewers use “Other” more often?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

A Puzzle: Why White as the Default?

• The results suggest interviewers think in a Black / Not-Black binary
  • “White” = not Black
  • “Other” = residual category, rarely used
• This reflects the American racial order: the central divide is Black vs. everyone else

How durable are “racial orders”?

• “The balance of power in those interactions has shifted over time in part because, like most politically constructed coalitions, America’s racial orders have been complex and breakable. Most political actors possess partly conflicting identities and interests, and there are always many goals they might like to pursue.”

What about important complexities?

• “Despite these complexities… Scholars can recognize that issues such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and racially targeted aid programs have at different times been the central disputes around which political battle lines have formed. Hence in each era scholars can identify empirically the main institutions and actors allied to sustain the then-dominant forms of white supremacy, thereby comprising that period’s ‘white supremacist’ order, and the leading institutions and actors working for more egalitarian racial conditions, its ‘transformative egalitarian’ order.”

Not only Black and White

• “Both evidence and parsimony lead us to posit two potent, evolving racial systems at work: first, the set of “white supremacist orders” created to defend slavery and also the displacement of the tribes. Even the Declaration of Independence sought to justify tribal subjugation (by denouncing ‘merciless Indian Savages’) and to avoid criticism of chattel slavery (by excising Jefferson’s language attacking the slave trade).”

Made racial identities seem natural

• “This white supremacist order made explicitly racial identities seem natural and vital to millions. It habituated many it privileged as ‘white’ to think of their racial status as a primary feature of their lives (Du Bois 1992, 700–01). Its imposed inequalities gave many white farmers and workers as well as slaveholders a sense of economic dependency on the maintenance of racial restrictions that seemed to make their lands, jobs, and wages more secure. It also generated in many a sense of racial entitlement, which most defended in religious and biological terms.”

Multiple Traditions

• “Yet U.S. history displays a rival, expanding ‘transformative egalitarian racial order’ that built on doctrines and institutions of equal rights also present from the nation’s inception. The American revolutionaries rejected monarchy and aristocracy for democratic republics, and systems of primogeniture and entail for greater individual powers over property. Then they created many new political, economic, and cultural institutions to pursue the broad goals of ‘equal rights’ and ‘equality before the law,’ and that provided greater equality to European-descended men than ever before.”

Egalitarian order rules during Reconstruction

• “After the fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the expanded egalitarian order centered on new constitutional guarantees of formal racial equality in political as well as economic and civil rights. Its propo- nents included many congressional Republicans, new Reconstruction agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Freedmen’s Saving Bank, many Republican state officials including black officeholders, religious reform groups, and the numerous new black schools and civil groups they helped create.”

Discuss: Where do we see the egalitarian tradition in 12 Years a Slave?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Racial orders keep swapping power

• Yet just as the Civil War egalitarians did not succeed in removing all institutional bases for the resurgence of the white supremacists, so their new system did not eradicate the postwar egalitarian racial order.

• The constitutional provisions and some national and state statutes remained available for judges willing to apply them.

Racial orders keep swapping power (cont.)

• Often dissenters and sometimes even majorities did so, as when the Supreme Court:
  • Upheld birthright citizenship for Chinese Americans (U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898)
  • Struck down laws that overtly banned Blacks from juries (Rogers v. Alabama, 1904)
  • Prevented whites from selling housing to Blacks (Buchanan v. Warley, 1919)

Does this apply to the present?

• “We hope it is clear at this point that, just as a racial orders framework helps explain much about America’s past, many key features of what analysts have deemed today’s ‘postsegregation era’ (Reed 1999) or period of ‘advanced marginalization’ of African Americans (Cohen 1999) can be illuminated by viewing them as clashes between the modern, internally conflicted ‘transformative egalitarian’ racial order and the resurgent ‘antitransformative’ racial order.”

A Racial Project Today?

National Park Service Removals

• Philadelphia: Plaques about Washington’s enslaved people removed from President’s House site

• California: Climate change exhibit removed from Muir Woods

• Massachusetts: Films about mill workers’ labor conditions stopped at Lowell

• Trump directive: Remove content that may “disparage Americans” or promote “corrosive ideology”

Military Base Renamings Reversed

2023: Bases renamed to remove Confederate honors

Old Name	New Name	Honored
Fort Bragg	Fort Liberty	Fallen service members
Fort Benning	Fort Moore	Lt. Gen. Hal Moore

2025: Trump administration reverses changes

• Claims “Bragg” now honors Pfc. Ronald Bragg (WWII), not Gen. Braxton Bragg (Confederate)
• Original renaming cost taxpayers $9.3 million

Two Racial Orders in Conflict

• 2020: Bipartisan law prohibits honoring Confederates on military bases

• 2023: “Transformative egalitarian” order renames bases

• 2025: “White supremacist” order reverses changes via technicality

• Retired Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule: Confederate figures “killed U.S. Army soldiers”

Discussion:
How does K&S’s framework help us understand these changes?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Break

Video Essay: 12 Years a Slave

• Anais Shergill, Jocelyn Lopez, Jocelyn Campos, Genevieve Burns

Worgs: “Beware of the Frustrated…”

“As American as Apple Pie”

• Violence is central to founding of America

• African Americans have engaged in an ongoing struggle for liberation—from slavery, discrimination, and the various manifestations of racial oppression

• In this struggle for liberation, African Americans have often used violence as a tactic or strategy

• Worgs “examines the phenomenon of fantasies about violent revolt to expand the understanding of why such incidences occur”

Four Themes of Violent Revolt

• Violent revolt is understood by many as both instrumental (a means to a desired end—usually freedom) and cathartic

• Themes:

  1. a justification of violence
  2. need to fight to gain the “respect” of the oppressor
  3. the rage of the oppressed as well as yearning for retribution
  4. the humanizing or transformative effect of participating in a violent revolt against an oppressor. Move from object to subject

History of Violent Revolt

• Evidence of hundreds of incidents where enslaved Africans engaged in or plotted to engage in violent uprisings

• Including “plots of Gabriel Prosser in 1800 and Denmark Vesey in 1822, as well as extensive violent clashes such as Stono Rebellion of 1739 or Nat Turner–led uprising in 1831”

• Enslaved Africans seizing control of slave ships

• Under Jim Crow, African Americans often took up arms to defend themselves, friends, elected officials, schools, churches

• “Most familiar form of Black violent revolt is the mass riot”

Discussion:
What examples of possible revolt do we see in 12 Years a Slave?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Social Dominance

“Oppression is a Cooperative Game”

• Within SDT, we do not regard subordinates merely as objects of oppression, but also as people who usually retain some agency and actively participate in the oppressive exercise

• In other words, within SDT, group oppression is very much a cooperative game

• Subordinates do resist their own oppression but…

• Successful social revolution is a rare event and most group-based systems of social hierarchy remain relatively stable over long swaths of time

Discussion:
What are examples of “cooperation” in 12 Years a Slave?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Show clip: Mistress Shaw

Schematic Overview of SDT

Institutional-level SDT

One Institutional Dynamic: Systematic Terror

• Use of violence or threats of violence disproportionately directed against subordinates

• Systematic terror functions to maintain expropriative relationships between dominants (ie, members of dominant groups) and subordinates (ie, members of subordinate groups)

• Enforces the continued deference of subordinates toward dominants

Three Types of Systematic Terror

• Official terror is the public and legally sanctioned violence and threat of violence perpetrated by the state

• Semiofficial terror is the violence or intimidation directed against subordinates, carried out by officials of the state (eg, internal security forces, police, secret police, paramilitary organizations) but not publicly, overtly, officially, or legally sanctioned by the state

• Unofficial terror is that violence or threat of violence perpetrated by private individuals from dominant groups against members of subordinate groups

Discussion:
What are examples of systematic terror in 12 Years a Slave?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Show clip: Lynching scene

Ideological-level SDT

Legitimizing Myths

• Two functional types: Hierarchy Enhancing (HE) and Hierarchy Attenuating (HA)

• Hierarchy Enhancing Legitimizing Myths (HE-LMs)

• “What all these ideas and doctrines have in common is the notion that each individual occupies that position along the social status continuum that he or she has earned and therefore deserves. From these perspectives then, particular configurations of the hierarchical social system are fair, legitimate, natural, and perhaps even inevitable.”

Discussion:
What are examples of legitimizing myths in 12 Years a Slave?

Let’s hear from: [Selected students]

Questions?