This book explores the complex ways in which political debates and
legal reforms regarding the criminalization of racial violence have
shaped the development of American racial history. Spanning previous
campaigns for criminalizing slave abuse, lynching, and Ku Klux
Klan violence and contemporary debates about the legal response
to hate crimes, this book reveals both continuity and change in
terms of the political forces underpinning the enactment of new
laws regarding racial violence in different periods and of the social
and institutional problems that hinder the effective enforcement of
these laws. A thought-provoking analysis of how criminal law reflects
and constructs social norms, the book offers a new historical and
theoretical perspective for analyzing the limits of current attempts
to use criminal legislation as a weapon against racism.