From Reconstruction to DEI: Historical Attunement and the Adaptability of Anti-Blackness

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Unpacking Bureaucratic "Domination"

Abstract

This paper argues that historical attunement is necessary to understand the adaptability of anti-Blackness across time, tracing how its governance recalibrates in response to challenges. While anti-Blackness is foundational, its mechanisms are not seamless; rather, they must be continuously reconfigured to sustain racial order. To demonstrate this, I examine two historical moments—Reconstruction and contemporary DEI initiatives—as regulatory projects designed to manage Black political and economic agency rather than dismantle racial hierarchy. Reconstruction, often framed as a transformative era of racial and economic justice, was from the outset a project of racial management, ensuring that Black political and economic empowerment remained contained. White elites, in conjunction with white labor, swiftly dismantled Reconstruction’s limited reforms, reinforcing Blackness’s exclusion from full personhood. Similarly, DEI initiatives emerged not as a genuine challenge to racial hierarchy but as institutional mechanisms to absorb demands for racial justice without redistributing power. Like Reconstruction, DEI was tolerated only insofar as it posed no fundamental threat to racial governance, and its dismantling reflects a familiar pattern in which even symbolic concessions become intolerable once perceived as disruptive. Unlike approaches that see racial capitalism as the primary force structuring anti-Blackness, historical attunement builds upon, yet moves beyond, scholarship that emphasizes its ontological permanence. While I take seriously the foundational positioning of Blackness as abjection (Wilderson 2020; Marriott 2023), I argue that tracking how anti-Black governance recalibrates in response to challenges reveals not its erosion, but its ongoing need for adaptation. This methodological approach does not seek resolution but insists on examining the contradictions that arise within anti-Black governance itself. Rather than assuming progress or rupture, historical attunement engages with the ways racial containment strategies shift, offering a critical intervention within historical sociology to refine how we understand the structural durability—and contradictions—of anti-Blackness.

Author

• Jae Kyun Kim, Russell Sage College