Participants in the "Antilynching West" research cluster will begin building the conceptual, creative, and human infrastructure for a public reckoning with California’s occluded contributions to U.S. lynch law and culture. Popular discourses of lynching often frame the violence as a predominantly southern phenomenon in which racist mobs tortured and murdered Black men in the name of white supremacy. Yet, Critical Ethnic Studies scholars and artists have broadened limiting regional frameworks that obscure lynching’s work as a technology of settler colonial and imperial violence whose racializing force has differential and interanimating impacts on people of color nationally. Black feminists, meanwhile, continue to underscore the necessity of looking beyond lynching's singularizing photographic frame to advance a critical understanding of the effects of the violence on the living. Guided by these critical frameworks, this cluster will shine a light on the history and presence of racial terror lynchings in occupied California.
We welcome students and faculty from UC Davis and other educational campuses in the region, as well as community members not affiliated with an institution, to join any of these activities. The organizers of "Antilynching West" are treating the research cluster as the seed for a larger antilynching counter-archive that will continue to take shape next year through a national praxis conference, the expansion of the website, and the collection of oral histories with lynching survivors in California.