How events in the 1960s and 1970s altered American national identity

Nationalization Era

3. What was "white backlash"? Give an example of an event that demonstrates "white backlash" and why.

“White backlash” refers to the antagonistic, often violent response of white supremacists to civil rights and social justice. Although the term might apply especially well to the 1960s, the era in which President Johnson passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, white backlash can easily be traced back to the Reconstruction Era and the rise of the KKK. Rather than welcome the potential for an egalitarian and harmonious society, white supremacists clung to racist beliefs and used whatever means possible to retain political and social hegemony. Any resistance to positive social change related to racial parity, social justice, and civil rights can be considered “white backlash.”

In the 1960s, white backlash took on new forms. As legislation at the federal level turned the tide against white supremacy throughout the nation, groups like the KKK once again used violence to assert their racist beliefs. The Mississippi Burning incident of 1963 and the assassination of Medgar Evers that same year are just a few of numerous cases in which peaceful civil rights activism ended violently because of white backlash. Likewise, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. can be framed as white backlash. The prevailing negative rhetoric about civil rights leader Malcolm X shows how white backlash was often ideological and discursive in addition to being physically aggressive.

Were it not for white backlash, Reconstruction would have worked to dismantle systematic and institutionalized racism at its root and offer reparations, helping to pave the way for social justice. Instead, generation after generation of African Americans have had to fight for basic human rights and continue to do so until this day.

Post Modern

2. How did the end of the Cold War impact perceptions of ordinary crime as well as crime spending?

The Cold War allowed Americans to focus their attentions on a simple bogeyman: Communism. With communism framed as “public enemy number one,” politicians could easily market themselves to Americans as being the best leader to protect them from the fearful red menace. The Cold War also enabled a relatively bloated defense budget. When the Cold War ended, there was a sort of reverse power vacuum. Now without its primary nemesis, the United States needed a new enemy to engender fear in the mind of the public. Fear motivates consumers to spend money on things that presumably protect them, like guns, and fear motivates voters to select politicians who promise to protect them too. Likewise, fear enables government allocation of resources to things like criminal justice.

In the absence of the Cold War, the media also had a vacuum to fill and filled it promptly with imagery of ordinary crime. Without communism as the enemy, Americans turned to ordinary crime as the new focal point. It was as if Americans genuinely wanted something to fear, and their attention was easily fixated on the news media and its portrayal of rising crime rates. If the public believes that crime is on the rise, citizens start to demand aggressive criminal justice policies. From the media and politicians, the public received rampant imagery related to the criminals out there, leading to the perception that crime rates were actually a lot higher than they were. Perception is reality, so when it came time for politicians to frame their new domestic and foreign policy platforms, they could easily turn to crime to sway the public. “Tough on crime” policies rose in popularity in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War because politicians needed new platforms to seduce the public, because the government needed to justify expenditures on criminal justice, and because the media also needed to profit off of consumers tuning into the latest fear-mongering newsfeed.