Economics and Racial Inequality: Historical Regimes, Civil Rights, and Segregation

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the economic disparities, historical racial regimes, civil rights campaigns, electoral redistricting, and residential segregation topics from the lecture.

Historical Racial Regime (HRR) scale

A scale developed by Baker (2022) that measures state-level manifestations of the U.S. racial regime during slavery and Jim Crow using four indicators: the proportion of the population enslaved in 1860, the percentage of sharecroppers who were Black in 1930, the total number of disenfranchisement devices, and the percentage of Black children attending majority-Black schools in 1968.

The New Deal

A collection of federal social programs addressing welfare, work, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, workday limitations, and veterans assistance, from which many people of color were excluded due to political pressure from Southern Democrats.

GI Bill of Rights (1944)

Federal legislation that fostered the growth of the American middle class by providing educational and economic benefits to military veterans, though most non-White veterans were excluded from receiving these benefits.

Politics of Austerity

A political and economic approach in the 1980s characterized by the rollback of New Deal welfare spending, disproportionately impacting poor people of color and halting economic momentum.

Supply-Side Economics (Reaganomics)

An economic strategy asserting that lowering taxes on the wealthy encourages capital ventures, lowers production costs, creates jobs, lowers consumer prices, and stimulates overall economic expansion.

Income

Money received on a regular basis from sources such as employment, retirement investments, or government aid.

Wealth

Owned assets that yield monetary returns over time, such as stocks, bonds, savings accounts, residential real estate, and business or farm equity.

Occupational Segregation

A structural labor dynamic where demographic groups are disproportionately concentrated in specific jobs, causing fields associated with marginalized groups to suffer declines in status, wages, and collective bargaining power.

Thirteenth Amendment

A Reconstruction amendment to the United States Constitution that officially abolished slavery.

Fourteenth Amendment

A Reconstruction amendment guaranteeing citizenship rights and equal protection under the law to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.

Fifteenth Amendment

A Reconstruction amendment establishing that the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied or abridged based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Civil Disobedience

A strategy of nonviolent resistance that seeks to win understanding, attack structures and systems of oppression rather than individuals, accept suffering without retaliation, and operate on the conviction that justice will ultimately prevail.

Freedom Rides of 1961

Civil rights actions organized by CORE (supported by SNCC) in which activists rode buses to test federal rulings outlawing segregation in interstate bus terminals, drawing national attention after facing bombings and violent assaults.

Birmingham Movement (1963)

A campaign organized by local Birmingham residents and the SCLC using boycotts and nonviolent student protests against segregation, which provoked violent responses by Bull Conner and pressured Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Freedom Summer (1964)

A campaign organized by SNCC and the SCLC in Mississippi aimed at expanding Black voter registration and establishing Freedom Schools for over 3,000 students in impoverished areas.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Federal legislation signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson that prohibited racial segregation in public accommodations and schools.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Federal legislation that outlawed literacy tests and other discriminatory voter registration barriers while establishing oversight provisions for jurisdictions with documented histories of race-based voter discrimination.

Southern Strategy

A coordinated Republican electoral strategy begun in the late 1960s to court White voters by manufacturing and appealing to anti-Black sentiment and opposing racial justice initiatives without using explicit White supremacist language.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013)

A landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated key portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, leading to the enactment of strict voting restrictions across multiple states.

Gerrymandering

The process by which elected politicians redraw and manipulate the geographic borders of political districts to secure an electoral advantage for their party.

Packing

A gerrymandering strategy that concentrates voters of a specific political or demographic type into as few districts as possible to diminish their influence across surrounding districts.

Cracking

A gerrymandering strategy that spreads out and fragments voters of a specific demographic or political group across multiple districts to prevent them from achieving an electoral majority in any single district.

Gill v. Whitford (2018)

A Supreme Court case ruling that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, while concluding that the Court had no established legal precedent defining what qualifies as unconstitutionally extreme.

Rucho v. Common Cause (2019)

A Supreme Court ruling establishing that partisan gerrymandering represents a non-justiciable political question outside the jurisdiction of the federal judicial system.

Allen v. Milligan (2023)

A Supreme Court decision striking down Alabama's congressional map for providing only one majority-Black district out of seven despite a 27% Black state population, affirming that the Voting Rights Act covers discriminatory effects as well as intent.

Louisiana v. Callais (2026)

A Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the intentional creation of majority-minority districts and established a requirement to prove discriminatory intent rather than solely discriminatory effect in voting rights challenges.

The Great Migration

The mass demographic movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North and West between 1910 and 1960 to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence and to access industrial employment.

Ghetto

A designated section of a city that is inhabited almost exclusively by members of one racial or ethnic group and to which members of that group are largely restricted by systemic barriers.

Advanced Marginality

A condition of severe residential deprivation characterized by spatial segregation, social isolation, exclusion from economic opportunities, and restricted access to state public services and consumer goods.

Redlining

The systemic institutional practice by banks and financial institutions of refusing mortgage loans or financial investment for properties situated in predominantly non-White neighborhoods.

Race-Restrictive Covenants

Contractual clauses embedded in real estate property deeds that legally prohibited non-White individuals from purchasing, leasing, or occupying specified parcels of land.

White Flight

The mid-20th-century demographic trend beginning in the 1950s wherein White urban residents relocated to newly developed suburbs as non-White residents entered urban centers and cities deindustrialized.

White Fight

The direct resistance mounted by working-class and immigrant White residents who lacked the economic means to relocate to suburbs, using neighborhood defense associations, intimidation, vandalism, and physical violence to resist racial integration.

Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act)

Federal legislation prohibiting racial, religious, and national origin discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of residential housing, later amended to cover sex, disability, and familial status.

Environmental Racism

Spatial policies, public laws, and industrial practices that disproportionately impose environmental hazards and burdens on communities of color, regardless of whether discriminatory intent is present.

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard)

A common pattern of community opposition objecting to the construction of unpleasant or hazardous infrastructure near one's own residence while demonstrating indifference to its placement elsewhere.

Environmental Justice

A civil and environmental movement advocating for the fair treatment and meaningful participation of all individuals regardless of race, national origin, or income in the enforcement and development of environmental regulations and policies.

Racial Threat Hypothesis

A sociological theory articulated by Blalock (1967) proposing that formal and informal social control mechanisms are intensified against minority populations when dominant White populations perceive threats to their social, economic, or political standing.