Reconceptualizing Historic and Contemporary Violence Against African Americans as Savage White American Terror (SWAT)

This work seeks to challenge the benign language employed in the discourse surrounding historic and contemporary white violence, particularly against African Americans. In so doing, this work develops language that more adequately captures the genocidal social control mechanisms designed to create terror through the physical and psychological brutality of white violence. Specifically, this work introduces the theoretical construct of Savage White American Terror (SWAT) which we correlate to historic patterns of violent atrocities such as lynching to contemporary police violence against African Americans.