Mobilizing Ethnic Competition - Arts & Sciences Pages

Theor Socmeasurement of the locale” and focus on the neighborhood level, where local politicaldecisions are forged and residents’ social networks are most dense. Still, these moreprecise analyses maintain the usual logic of relating competition to the overallcomposition of the unit in question, and do not address how the broad makeup ofparticular locales is reflected in social life, through the organization of associations—i.e., schools, businesses, religious centers, civic organizations, and so on. Similarly,efforts to link individual locations within these settings to propensities to engage inethnic conflict (Aguirre et al. 1989; Coenders and Scheepers 2008; Scheepers et al.2002; Tolsma et al. 2008) generally focus on rough proxies of competition—such aswhether persons hold a “low social status” or reside in an urban area (Schneider 2008,p. 55)—rather than capture precisely the degree to which individuals overlap economically, politically, and socially with ethnic others.Regardless of the unit of analysis employed, there is broad implicit agreement thatcontextual conditions translate into ethnic conflict or exclusion through their impacton individual grievances, i.e., people’s perceptions that they are threatened bymembers of competing ethnic groups. While the relationship between contexts andgrievances is often assumed rather than demonstrated, it is clear that competitivecontexts do not translate into ethnic grievances in a straightforward and invariantmanner. Belanger and Pinard (1991) have found that active contention emerges insettings conducive to inter-group competition, but only when associated conditionsare perceived as unfair. Such perceptions, they observe, do not uniformly follow fromthe presence of competition for finite resources. Soule and Van Dyke (1999) likewisenote the possibility of mismatch between “objective” levels of competition andindividuals’ sense of perceived threats. Scheepers et al. (2002), employing a combination of demographic and individual survey data, show that socioeconomic conditions and residents’ perceptions interact to increase the likelihood of individuals’support of ethnic exclusionism. Bobo and Hutchings (1996) focus on the processesthat underlie such interactions, by extending Blumer’s theory of group position tohighlight the historically, materially, and socially contingent manner in which“threats” come to be perceived and encoded as inter-group prejudice.Accounting for mechanisms that mediate relationships among structural contexts,individual perceptions, and contentious outcomes seems especially important whenconflicts involve sustained mobilization. As these settings require more from aggrieved individuals than an expression of anti-ethnic attitudes or electoral support forin-group candidates, they should more durably reflect competitive settings. The factthat grievances are marshaled toward collective ends also points to processes welldocumented in the social movements literature, involving the mobilization of resources required for organizational coordination and the “frame alignment processes” thatchannel grievances toward movement action (Edwards and McCarthy 2004;McAdam 1999; Benford and Snow 2000; Okamoto 2003; Tarrow 1998).While the majority of existing applications of ethnic competition theory focus onexclusionary attitudes or discrete actions, Olzak et al. (1994), Cunningham andPhillips (2007), and Van Dyke and Soule (2002) deal with these sorts of durablemovement organizations and protest campaigns. The latter two of these studiesexplicitly seek to integrate competition and social movement approaches to ethniccontention. For Van Dyke and Soule, the key insight is for social movement theorists,who frequently discount or neglect entirely the mobilizing power of grievances.

Theor Soc“Theories of social movement emergence,” they assert, “should include structuralsocial change and the threat it engenders as important mobilizing conditions”(p. 513). Cunningham and Phillips seek to demonstrate the converse, applyinginsights related to social movement diffusion to threat-based ethnic contention. Inparticular, they show that the diffusion of “reactive mobilization,” strongest incounties that are most closely tied in a social and economic sense, point to the factthat threats are necessarily constructed and mobilized through existing social channels. In each case, however, these analyses adopt the established logic, focused onhow mobilization is patterned across large municipal units (SMSAs and states), andthus are not concerned with the mobilization processes that follow from the imposition of competition-induced threats.To interrogate these mediating processes, I examine a case of sustained ethnicmobilization, associated with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina between1964 and 1966. Specifically, I examine why the KKK had uneven success mobilizingworkers across the North Carolina Piedmont, a region marked by a moderate, andrelatively homogeneous, degree of racial competition in the labor market. Through acomparative focus on Greensboro, a Klan hotbed, and Charlotte, where the KKK waslargely rebuffed, I demonstrate how differences in the associational makeup of thesecommunities shaped the degree to which racial overlap in the labor force translated intoresonant anxieties over competition in the face of looming desegregation policies.The rise of the civil rights-era United Klans of AmericaTo assess how the dynamics of competition are shaped within communities, I draw ondata associated with the United Klans of America (UKA), the pre-eminent Ku Klux Klanorganization of the civil rights era. Formed in 1961, in the wake of the Brown schooldesegregation decision and burgeoning civil rights challenges, the UKA quicklybecame by far the largest of the 17 KKK organizations identified by the FBI duringthe mid-1960s (Cunningham 2004). Led by its “Imperial Wizard” Robert Shelton, thegroup was headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but established hundreds ofaffiliated chapters (referred to as “klaverns”) across the South. The group’s greatestrecruiting successes occurred in North Carolina. By 1965, the Tar Heel State boastedmore than 12,000 dues-paying members, a number that exceeded the UKA’s membership in the rest of the South combined (US House of Representatives 1967).Similar to the Citizens’ Councils and the many self-styled segregationist organizations that emerged in particular states or local communities during this period, theUKA sought to maintain the racist status quo in the South, embodied by Jim Crowstyle segregation. Couching their defense of white supremacy as a form of “Christianpatriotism” in the face of a growing challenge by communist-influenced civil rightsorganizations and the federal government, Klan members adopted a highly militantanti-civil rights stance (Chalmers 1981; Rich 1988). Most nights of the year, the UKAwould host a rally somewhere in North Carolina, featuring refreshments, souvenirs,raffles, music, and prayer as a prelude to a two-hour slate of fiery segregationistspeeches by Klan leaders. The night would climax with the burning of a thirty-toseventy foot tall cross, which robed Klan members ceremoniously encircled while“The Old Rugged Cross” played over the sound system (Cunningham 2008).

Theor SocBy the end of 1965, tens of thousands of North Carolinians had attended theserallies, with several thousand paying a ten dollar initiation fee—along with another 15 for robes—to join one of the nearly 200 klaverns organizing throughout the state(Williams 1964). Not surprisingly, this rapid upswing in Klan activity increasinglydrew the attention of the local media, which eagerly covered the Klan’s rallies, as wellas their periodic street walks (i.e., daytime marches by robed Klansmen and helmetedmembers of the UKA “security guard”) and frequent attempts to intimidate blackresidents or white liberals through cross burnings, beatings, and shotgun fire.While these acts of violence tended to be perpetrated by a small militant core, thebroader membership engaged in a number of more above-board activities. Eachklavern held weekly meetings and encouraged attendance at rallies. Members paidmonthly dues and sponsored turkey shoots and fish fries on weekends. Manyklaverns organized parallel “Ladies Auxiliary Units” to support UKA social eventsand pursue Klan-centered charitable works. The organization offered its own grouplife insurance plan and also made forays into Klan versions of more formal ceremonies, including church services and weddings (Cunningham 2008). For most members, UKA membership required a significant outlay of both time and materialresources.Related earlier research on United Klans established that the uneven patterning ofthe UKA’s mobilization across North Carolina’s 100 counties can be explained by thediffering degree to which desegregation posed a threat to the white supremacist statusquo. In particular, Klan presence was higher in areas characterized by threats posedby demographic, economic, or political forms of racial competition—i.e., countieswith large African American populations, relatively high proportions of non-whitesemployed in the manufacturing sector (where workplace competition was mostpronounced), and increasing NAACP activity.Cunningham and Phillips (2007) marshaled evidence that Klan presence could beexplained more fully by considering these structural features alongside basic socialfeatures of the counties targeted by the UKA’s mobilization efforts. Specifically,controlling for racial competition, the level of Klan activity in any given countyexhibited a significant contagion pattern, with nearby UKA klaverns increasing thelikelihood of Klan presence. This contagion effect was most powerful in countieswith dense connections to regional social and economic networks, suggesting that thediffusion of UKA activity was rooted in social processes as well as the co-presence ofracial competition for economic and political resources.The diffuse nature of threats was also evident in the fact that, while the UKA wasstrongest in counties characterized by overall levels of racial competition, the Klan’srecruits were not disproportionately drawn from workplace or industry settings wherewhite and black workers were likely to compete for jobs (Cunningham, forthcoming).Instead, perceptions of racial threat tended to spread widely within aggrieved groups,echoing Blumer (1958) and Bobo and Hutchings’s (1996) argument that ethnicantagonism emerges broadly within competitive contexts (see also Bonacich 1972;Olzak et al. 1996). Further, as social movement theory would predict, Klan mobilization tended to occur among aggrieved individuals who were biographically available, or free from personal constraints that raise th

Ethnic competition theory builds on Barth’s(1969) emphasis on the socially-constructed boundaries through which ethnic groups ascribe difference. Competition, stemming from overlap in the economic or political activities of multiple ethnic groups,2 becomes a key mechanism through which particular bound-aries are reinforced.