In volume 694 of The ANNALS, “Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past,” special editors David Cunningham, Hedwig Lee, and Geoff Ward bring together a group of scholars to contemplate how histories of racial violence impact and relate to contemporary patterns of conflict and inequality.
As the editors say in their introduction to the volume: “If there is a ‘settled science’ about legacies of racial violence, it is that our violent national history remains relevant to contemporary social relations and outcomes.” But what is less clear, say Cunningham, Lee, and Ward, is the “theoretical and empirical bulwarks of these legacies.…” This volume of The ANNALS addresses these theoretical and empirical gaps through a discussion of racial violence as it relates to, for example, health equity, anatomical collections of human remains, lynchings (both attempted and achieved), and police brutality.
