Occupation, injustice, and anti-Black racism in the United States of America

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2020, the death of George Floyd – yet another unarmed Black man killed at the hands of police – thrust race and racism to the forefront of public attention in the United States. Across the country, demonstrators and protestors mobilized to end police brutality, one mechanism of systemic racism in this country’s history and present. As this paper explores, occupation too has played a role in the systemic racism against Black people in the United States. In recent years, occupational scientists have critiqued tacit assumptions regarding the qualities and effects of occupation. The following examination contributes to this growing body of critical literature and considers that occupation can be a vehicle for injustice as much as justice. By investigating the construction of race and the dissemination of racism, including its propagation through everyday living, the role of occupation in community formation and development is more fully understood. In pursuing this goal, we hope to reveal the real and often unacknowledged history of racism in the United States that must be recognized and confronted to move toward reconciliation, healing, and social transformation. This exploration uncovers powerful moments when occupation and everyday doing were conduits through which racism was constructed and calls upon occupational scholars to be reflective and critical in their research and practice in order to optimally support the people they serve.

2020年夏天，乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）的死---另一名手无寸铁的黑人丧生于警察手中---将种族和种族主义推向了美国公众关注的最前沿。全国各地的示威者和抗议者动员起来，以制止警察的野蛮行径。警察施暴是该国历史上和现今的系统性种族主义机制之一。正如本文所探讨的，活动在美国针对黑人的系统种族主义中也发挥了作用。近年来，生活活动科学家对有关活动的质量和影响的默认假设提出了批评。下面的研究就是不断增长的批评性文献的一部分，并认为生活活动不仅是正义的，而且也可以成为不公正的手段。通过调查种族组成和种族主义的传播，包括其在日常生活中的传播，人们更加了解了生活活动在社区形成和发展中的作用。为了实现这一目标，我们希望揭露美国在种族主义方面的真实的且往往未被承认的历史。为了实现和解、康复和社会转型，必须承认和面对这一历史。这项探索暴露出生活活动和日常工作成为构建种族主义的渠道的一些时刻，并呼吁生活活动学者在研究和实践中具有反思性和批判性，以便为所服务的人们提供最佳支持。

En el verano de 2020, la muerte de George Floyd —otro hombre negro desarmado asesinado a manos de la policía— puso la raza y el racismo en el centro de la atención pública de Estados Unidos. En todo el país se movilizaron manifestantes para poner fin a la brutalidad policial, un mecanismo de racismo sistémico en la historia y el presente de ese país. Este artículo da cuenta de que la ocupación también ha desempeñado cierto papel en el racismo sistémico contra los afroamericanos de Estados Unidos. En los últimos años, los científicos ocupacionales han criticado las suposiciones tácitas sobre las cualidades y los efectos de la ocupación. El análisis realizado aquí contribuye al creciente conjunto de literatura crítica, planteando que la ocupación puede ser un vehículo de injusticia o de justicia. Al investigar la construcción del concepto de raza y la difusión del racismo, incluida su propagación en la vida cotidiana, puede comprenderse mejor el papel desempeñado por la ocupación en la formación y el desarrollo de la comunidad. En busca de este objetivo, esperamos dar a conocer la historia real y a menudo desconocida del racismo en Estados Unidos, la cual debe ser reconocida y confrontada en aras de avanzar hacia la reconciliación, la sanación y la transformación social. Este examen descubre momentos álgidos en que la ocupación y el quehacer cotidiano fueron conductos a partir de los cuales se construyó el racismo. En consecuencia, el artículo apela a que los estudiosos de la ocupación sean reflexivos y críticos en sus investigaciones y prácticas, a fin de apoyar de manera óptima a las personas a las que sirven.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational science
• Injustice
• Racism
• History

The United States of America (US) has a particularly extensive and atrocious history of racism. Everyday life, policies, spaces, economic systems, and social norms have been steeped in racism since the nation’s conception. Derivative of European religious and capitalist roots, the original colonies of the US employed fabricated racial labels (i.e., white and non-white) to maintain an economic system that used enslavement and bond workers as capital (Allen, 2012b). The wealthy class used race to implement social control over the residents of the English colonies while also displacing and committing genocide of indigenous peoples, leading to the construction of the hegemonic social reality of the future US (Allen, 2012a). The ‘white’ label emerged to specifically privilege European-American residents while excluding non-European-Americans from upward social mobility. This structure maintained the ‘necessary’ slavery system until the Civil War (Allen, 2012b) and supposed emancipation of Black Americans (Blackmon, 2009). Governmental policies and legal precedents fashioned social structures, especially around citizenship and its associated rights, based on ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’ (Haney-López, 2006; Rothstein, 2017). Nearly every aspect of everyday life emerged through structures of racial identity and racism.

These structures have persisted across the country’s history, imbued in every economic, social, political, scientific, judicial, healthcare, and religious system in the nation. Voting laws (Jones & Williams, 2018), educational systems (Kozol, 1991), housing policies (Gonda, 2015; Rothstein, 2017), judicial and penal systems (Cole, 1999), healthcare systems (Hoberman, 2012), labor markets (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004), deep social prejudices (Greenwald et al., 2009), and countless other everyday instances of racism (Kendi, 2019) systematically oppress people of color. This reality affects all people who are not considered ‘white’, including Latinx and Asian people (Garcia-Hallett et al., 2019; Tawa et al., 2012), yet Indigenous and Black Americans have faced the most severe oppression and repression in the US.

The beneficial role of occupation in relation to social collectivity, well-being, health, and justice is well documented. However, little research—theoretical or empirical—within occupational science has investigated the role of occupation in the formation of injustices such as racist social norms and structures. Racial norms construct continued racial disparities and foster distinct racial tension within US culture. In this paper, we argue that everyday occupation and ways of doing are consistently emerging through a racialized reality in the US, influencing allocation of resources, access to opportunities, communication, habits, policies, language, and beliefs of society. Histories of race are deeply ingrained in the everyday thinking and doing of people living in the US. These pervasive histories continue to shape the societal climate around racial justice. We examine the racialized nature of everyday living in the US and contend it is inseparable from the unfolding of occupation.

Politicizing Occupation

In the past 10 years, occupational scientists have come to understand occupation at a societal level and are studying its use to promote justice and equity. At the foundation of this shift toward communal and community level thinking are theoretical perspectives such as occupational justice (Wilcock & Townsend, 2000), the transactional perspective of occupation (Bailliard, 2013; Cutchin et al., 2017; Lavalley & Bailliard, 2020; Thibeault, 2013), the capabilities approach (Bailliard, 2016), and critical theory (Laliberte Rudman, 2013). The emergence and development of the occupational justice framework (Stadnyk et al., 2010) and the use of critical theory (Huot et al., 2013; Laliberte Rudman, 2010; Silva et al., 2017) signal awareness that considering societal power structures is necessary within occupational science. Recognizing the communal and transactional relationships among communities encourages occupational scholars to consider when and how ‘doing together’ in community creates social structures, justice, and injustice (Lavalley, 2017; Lavalley & Bailliard, 2020). These theoretical perspectives propel our investigation of racialized occupation in this paper.

Relationships among occupation, societal structures, social politics, and community development are being more clearly revealed (e.g., Angell, 2014; Bailliard, 2016; Benavides, 2020; Laliberte Rudman et al., 2018; Morrison et al., 2011). Occupation and participation are understood as issues of justice and political structures, influencing populations far beyond those traditionally studied by the discipline (Wilcock, 1998). Occupational injustices are often conceptualized in terms of restriction from or forced participation in occupation (Stadnyk et al., 2010). However, structural injustices such as homelessness, poverty, and racism cannot be fully understood without examining the role occupation has in perpetuating them in community dynamics (Angell, 2014; Lavalley, 2017).

We contend that if occupation is inherently political, then it may contribute to both justice and injustice. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to excavate the social formation of anti-Black racism within the US in order to examine the role occupation may have played in its construction. In pursuing this goal, we also hope to make visible the real and often unacknowledged history of racism in the US, that must be recognized and confronted—especially by White Americans—to move toward reconciliation, healing, and social transformation. The examination within this paper uncovers potent moments when occupation and everyday doing were vehicles through which racism was constructed.

An Occupational Perspective on the History of US Racism

The emergence of race as a construct and slavery as an institution in the US is rooted in the religious and economic motivations of the transatlantic slave trade (Cannon, 2008). However, race has no basis in biologic or genetic origins (Lang, 2000). European ancestors—now all ‘white’ in a US racial context—previously made arguments that various populations among their countries were different ‘races’ (Allen, 2012a). Today, though, it is an arbitrary hierarchical categorization of humans based on skin tone, even though that physical feature is as inherently meaningless as the color of the eyes (Allen, 2012b; Lang, 2000). While this idea of race is a complete social construction, its application and use in society has had real impacts.

During the English colonization of North America, European and Christian powers originally professed a racial categorization that was based on skin color and Christian-status (Cannon, 2008). Before this categorization became prevalent across the US, multi-racial lower and middle class groups, including enslaved Africans, European servants, and indigenous people, had cooperated to challenge upper class English power; one instance of this class unity was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Deploying this construct of race functioned to broadly socially divide previously cooperative lower and middle class groups in the colonies and stoked the long history of racism within the US (Allen, 2012b). Evolutions of this categorization have been used to justify dehumanization and continued enslavement of Black people in the US for centuries (Cannon, 2008; Kendi, 2016). Therefore, for the purposes of this paper, we define racism as the deployment—intentionally or unintentionally, individually or structurally—of a categorization based on skin tone to place humans in a false hierarchy. Racist ideas and policies are those that support and contribute to a society that functions on this false hierarchy (Kendi, 2019). As this examination will demonstrate, race and racism became integral components of occupation in the US.

Associating Dark Skin with Slavery and Inferiority

In the first years of the colonies, slavery was not an indisputable status for Africans. While there were many enslaved Africans, it need not be assumed that Africans always held a slave status (Harris, 1993). Rather, Christian or non-Christian status was the more prominent distinction among unfree labor servants (Diamond & Cottrol, 1983) as colonial law prevented a Christian from owning another Christian as a slave (Allen, 2012b). As the colonies developed and White laborers gained freedom and became more difficult to control, labor was still needed and shifted to prioritize enslavement of Africans (Allen, 2012b). The religious distinction between races merged with the physical one on the assumption that Africans were non-Christian, further justifying association between enslavement and darker skin (Allen, 2012b; Harris, 1993; Kendi, 2016).

Legal historians theorize that this loose, yet convenient logic was utilized during the milestone case of John Punch. In 1640, John Punch, an African servant in the Virginia colony, escaped from servitude with a Dutchman and Scotsman. The Europeans were given increased years of indentured servitude. John Punch was sentenced to servitude for life. The court justified different sentences based on John Punch’s skin tone but had no explicit precedent in English or Virginia common law to do so. An implicit assumption by the court that he was non-Christian may have contributed to their decision toward enslavement. Additionally, the court may have been replicating precedent for lifetime indentures of enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and South American colonies to meet growing labor demands while also avoiding diplomatic friction that would be caused by enslaving non-English Europeans (Allen, 2012b). Other colonies followed suit in applying similar arguments and decisions regarding the status of Black individuals (Sirmans, 1962). While not the first incident of slavery, the case of John Punch was the first legally sanctioned incident of enslavement based on categorization by skin tone in the English colonies, codifying in law a White supremacist hierarchy among the ‘races’. Indigenous, mixed, and any other non-fully European people were then classified under this racialized hierarchy (Allen, 2012b; Harris, 1993).¹ This also could be argued as the original legal manifestation of occupational apartheid—the systematic and often legalized integration of occupational injustices across a community, culture, or nation (Kronenberg et al., 2005)—for the ancestors of Black Americans.

Development of Occupational Apartheid for Black Americans

Following the manifestation and legal sanctioning of association between dark skin and slavery, policy and social structures evolved to further control the everyday lives of Black people. Occupation is deeply associated with the development of social meaning and narratives that people understand about themselves and others; as individuals do together in community they create social norms and expectations (Hammell, 2009; Ulfseth et al., 2015). Therefore, as the chattel slavery system promoted White economic and cultural domination throughout the colonies, participation in slave labor became legally and societally expected for African individuals and their descendants (Harris, 1993).

The justification to enslave Black people became less dependent on religious logic; being a Black person and being a slave became both socially and legally synonymous (Harris, 1993). It is important to note that many slaves outside the North American context were considered ‘freehold’ property, a designation similar to a serf and tied to the land on which that person resided. This status afforded the land owner the right to the services and occupations of the slave, but not the slave him or herself. Unique in the colonies, though, slaves were designated as ‘chattel’ property, a status that tied them to the master as personal property (Sirmans, 1962). This meant that not only were the services and occupations of the enslaved under the control of the owner, but the bodies and their descendants were as well. This status inflamed a culture² of dehumanization and exacerbated historical US violence against Black people.

In a racist system of governance, authorities intensively monitored and restricted the occupations of all Black people as a means to maintain power derived from the systemic utilization of enslavement and meet labor demands of their own economic interests (Allen, 2012a; Harris, 1993). While laws and policies varied across North America, slave codes pervasively sanctioned this control throughout the nascent US (Harris, 1993). These statutes generally restricted the ability for Black people to gather in public, sometimes specifically on Sundays; to read or write; to travel without permits; to participate in any sort of education (and barred White people from providing them with education); to possess loosely defined ‘inflammatory’ literature (Forte, 1997); testify in relation to White people (California State Statutes, 1854); and participation in many other occupations (Harris, 1993; Sirmans, 1962). These codes also affected women and men differently, fostering not only norms of White superiority but also feminine inferiority (Kendi, 2016). Implemented prior to the codification of chattel enslavement of Black Americans in colonial law, these sets of laws continued to dehumanize Black people, restrict what they could do, and cultivate racism in everyday life long after their enactment (Sirmans, 1962).

Slave codes far surpassed managing the interactions among White and non-White people; rather they directed the intimate realms of the personal and mundane life of Black people (Harris, 1993; Sirmans, 1962). The collective conscious of the US today still holds many of these codes as unspoken norms in countless societal systems. By forcing Africans and their descendants to participate in slave labor and other demeaning occupations or restricting them from participation in others as described above, structural racism was fortified through participation in occupation. Consequently, these racially imbued social and occupational norms reinforced the hegemonic structures for both Black and White Americans. For example, as the enslavement of African people grew in the US, slave patrols emerged as a mechanism to control and recapture fugitive slaves. These slave patrols are a historical precursor to the modern-day US police and to its often violent tools and approaches used against people of color (Reichel, 1988). These patrols are also a root of the vigilantism and lynching still perpetrated by some White Americans who monitor and sometimes violently intervene in the lives of Black Americans (Berrey, 2015).³ The specter of these regulations loom over the collective shoulder of US everyday life, continuing to influence how, where, and when Black people can occupy their time. As justice manifests through the vehicle of occupation, so does injustice (Angell, 2014).

Injustice perpetuated through occupation can be seen in the US struggle to legally free enslaved Black Americans. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed slaves only in the confederate states, and only if they were not later convicted of any crime. A revival of slave codes, Black codes emerged in the South to subjugate and maintain control over Black Americans; in this form, the codes explicitly referred to skin color rather than the status of ‘slave’. The codes invented easily committable crimes that were used to legally re-enslave emancipated slaves or previously freed Black people, demonstrating prominent and direct control over Black lives (Forte, 1997).

The 13^th Amendment finally legally abolished slavery in all states in 1865, however still permitted legal re-enslavement as a sentence for crimes. Black codes flourished across the nation; they are the roots of systemic and disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans and involuntary servitude that continue in the US prison system (Alexander, 2010). These codes, further immersed US culture in the fabricated idea that people with darker skin were naturally subservient, inferior, and more criminal to their lighter skinned counterparts. Rules of everyday interactions and doings remained as de-facto regulations based on racist logic, despite no longer having association with the abolished ‘slave’ status. White supremacy was accepted without question by many Americans because the everyday life and routines of those Americans reinforced the idea that lighter skin was superior, even though that false idea was originally invented for the purpose of maintaining slavery and power. This further integrated a tacit racism into the everyday American life.

Even after the abolishment of slavery in 1865, this tacit racism permitted that Black Americans be convicted and tried for actions that were unreasonable and maliciously designated as ‘crimes’ (Forte, 1997) in order to return them to their ‘rightful’ yet fabricated place as inferior. For example, code in Mississippi after 1865 directed authorities to seize any Black child whose parents—who were previously enslaved—the authorities deemed unfit or ‘without means’ to care for the child. The previous White owners of the parents had first preference to ‘apprentice’ the child. It became illegal for that apprentice to leave his master’s ‘employ’ or for anyone to entice him to leave, ostensibly manifesting enslavement once again. If said apprentice escaped and did not return willingly, he was to be arrested and imprisoned (Forte, 1997). Thus, long after the 13^th Amendment was ratified, nearly every aspect of Black Americans' daily lives was controlled through this oppressive structure of racism and policing. Control and oppression were permitted because White supremacy was reinforced again and again in the occupations and daily interactions of Americans.

Continued Occupational Apartheid in the Era of Jim Crow

Throughout US history and into today, challenges to social and cultural norms fostered by the slavery system and Black codes have been met with violence—both sanctioned and unsanctioned—from racist authorities. While the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) policies provided some attempts at building opportunities for Black Americans, they neglected to deconstruct racist policies and ideas and instead focused on reintegrating states—without the institution of slavery—that had seceded during the Civil War (Kendi, 2016). In 1877, after Southern states had successfully rejoined the Union, the North pulled all troops out of the South, abandoning ‘freed’ slaves in communities that did not want to free them in the first place (Alexander, 2010). This era addressed freeing the enslaved, but failed to protect the rights of Black people in general (Kendi, 2016). Slavery was confronted, yet White supremacy remained in the fabric of American society. As many laws and policies were now tied to skin color—rather than to slave status—racism was permitted to remain both legally and socially across both the North and South of the US (Kendi, 2016; Rothstein, 2017).

Following Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, which began in 1877, launched racist policies and laws sanctioning the separation and mistreatment of Black Americans until the mid-20^th century. The popular name for the laws that created a legalized caste system within the US until 1964, ‘Jim Crow,’ was derived from racist minstrel shows and was considered a pejorative for Black people (Kendi, 2016). Serving as the children of Black codes and grandchildren of slave codes, Jim Crow laws continued to manage and control the daily lives of Black Americans with permission from White supremacy (Kendi, 2019). While the ‘separate but equal’ approach emerged, Black Americans never saw this tenet realized; in reality, they received significantly inferior services, institutions, and opportunities, in no way achieving this idea (Kendi, 2016; Rothstein, 2017). The specific roles and everyday routines of Black and White Americans were inherently moderated by historically racialized ideas and policies of how contact and occupation should unfold, to the depth of how happy Black people should look and seem while around White people (Berrey, 2015).

As the Jim Crow era unfolded, White and Black everyday lives were continuously and highly structured through racism, yet often still doing in parallel. Occupations, such as going to bars separated into two spaces by a line of stools or riding buses where Black people were forced to sit in the back and sometimes move for White bus riders, were bathed in structural, political, and cultural norms that reinforced White supremacy and Black oppression during everyday communal occupation (Berrey, 2015). In government agencies, curtains were hung to physically separate Black and White employees, and some Black employees were demoted so that no Black employee was supervising a White employee (Rothstein, 2017). These everyday life experiences continued to reinforce that Black people were meant to serve White people and, in fact, preferred segregation. Being forced to use inferior bathrooms, being educated in inferior schools, participating in inferior recreational facilities, and living in inferior areas, as only a few examples, reinforced for Americans the racist idea that Black Americans were inherently inferior humans, continuing to foster deep and long-lasting effects in US culture (Berrey, 2015).

Racist logic utilized skin color as the root of disparities experienced in everyday life between Black and White Americans. Racism purported, and still purports, that disparities were either an inherent biologic symptom of Blackness or a symptom cultivated through their internalization of oppression, either way a fault held in Black people. In reality, the roots of these disparities are neither biologic nor cultivated through internalization – both ideas have been repeatedly proven false. Rather, the roots and symptoms of racism lie in US systems, routines, and histories built through racism that sanctioned oppression of Black Americans (Kendi, 2019). These systems that carried and reinforced racism pervasively sculpted experiences throughout the everyday routines of Americans while dining out, grocery shopping, mailing packages, being educated, bathing, dating, having sex, and even living in their own homes (Berrey, 2015; Kendi, 2019). Often, racist legislators utilized what was already happening in the everyday lives of Americans to justify further racist statutes, reifying White supremacy logic in the core of American law (Berrey, 2015).

Broad federal, state, and local policies managed these everyday interactions. As part of a large-scale economic reform in response to the Great Depression (i.e., the ‘New Deal’), Black workers were systemically excluded from welfare packages that assisted White Americans (Kendi, 2016). A simple example is that the Social Security Act of 1935 excluded farm and domestic workers—disproportionally Black Americans—from its benefits (Kendi, 2016). A more comprehensive and multi-layered example of this systemic process lies in housing. Federal incentives in the Federal Housing Act (1934) encouraged and sometimes forced segregation, even in communities that had already fostered some successful integration (Rothstein, 2017). Further, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, sponsored by New Deal legislation, deemed specific geographical areas and neighborhoods as ‘undesirable’ based on racial makeup and drew red around these areas on maps; this process is now known as ‘redlining’ and formally and informally continued through the 1900s and into today (Coates, 2017; Rothstein, 2017). These policies greatly impacted where and in what quality homes Black Americans lived out their everyday lives as well as the economic value of those homes. Banks were legally restricted from providing loans to developers who proposed integrated housing complexes and therefore legally and systematically pushed Black Americans into concentrated areas of poverty (Rothstein, 2017).

Real estate agents often used racial fear to encourage White homeowners to sell their homes as soon as Black families moved near, then resold homes that became available because of this ‘White flight’ to Black families for much higher prices. This practice was called ‘blockbusting’ and continued the everyday separation of White and Black Americans while also unequally burdening Black Americans economically with higher mortgages (Rothstein, 2017). The socio-economic, religious, educational, judicial, and political systems of the US oppressed Black Americans; yet based on everyday experiences imbued with racist logic, many Americans blamed skin tone for this disparity.

As World War II instigated the development of factories and desirable jobs across the nation, homes were needed nearby for workers. White families were often provided homes that were close to factories, while Black workers were required to spend hours traveling (Rothstein, 2017). Convenience for White families was almost always prioritized over equity in services or opportunities, albeit still separate, for Black Americans (Berrey, 2015). Interestingly, in some cases where factories and their housing were quickly built in response to war needs, they did not take the time to create segregated housing. In these instances, there were few problems between the integrated individuals working and living together (Rothstein, 2017).

Yet, across the US, Jim Crow policies encouraged White people to oppress and surveil Black community members, offering skin color as justifiable evidence to report a ‘suspicious’ person in their neighborhood. This was a continuation of the long history of enabling White people to wield power over the everyday lives of Black Americans. The scripts of everyday life in the Jim Crow era conditioned many White people to monitor, demean, and be suspicious of Black people, while they required Black Americans to navigate and negotiate countless structures of White supremacy and violence (Berrey, 2015). For example, during World War II, Black American workers were only permitted to migrate to certain cities for essential war-related employment and once there, could be stopped on the street by police and required to prove current employment, facing arrest and jail if found to be unemployed (Rothstein, 2017). Because of these racist norms and policies, the simple occupation of walking on the street became a potential incidence of violence and injustice, an ancestor to the systemic crisis of police violence that Black people still face in the US today. Again, everyday occupation was a locus for the continuation and management of racist ideas and policies.

We end our account of the role of occupation in the construction of racism at the end of the Jim Crow era, even though it continues long after. We believe we have offered sufficient evidence for the argument; even without White supremacy explicitly codified in the text of US law, racism was insidiously injected and maintained in the routines and daily occupations of American people. Across US history, beauty standards, dress decisions, educational opportunities and expectations, cooking, language, using the bathroom, and grooming are all deeply influenced by and often carry forward racist ideas and structures (Kendi, 2019). Countless federal, state, local, and unwritten policies encourage racism and inequities in occupation against Black Americans. Racial hegemony in US culture is reinforced by experiences of everyday living wrought with racist ideas and further racist policies codifying those experiences. Occupation continues to be a vehicle emerging through and carrying racist culture, policy, habits, and ideas. Routine daily living thus contributes to the continuing subjugation of Black Americans. Yet, occupational scholars cannot neglect that occupation simultaneously offers opportunity to rebel against this oppression, as Black Americans clearly demonstrate in the era following Jim Crow (Berrey, 2015).

Civil Rights and Reconstruction through Everyday Living

Throughout the Jim Crow era and into the Civil Rights movement, everyday life was a space of negotiation among White and Black Americans. Additional rights afforded to Black Americans facilitated interesting daily situations that fostered growth and change as community members negotiated new routines and roles (Berrey, 2015; Frank & Muriithi, 2015). Many Black Americans demonstrated a deep resilience against the historical oppression of US law and culture, taking opportunities to assert humanity and equality (Berrey, 2015; Kendi, 2019). For example, because Black Americans could own and drive cars during Jim Crow, and vehicle design sometimes visually obscured the race of the person behind the wheel, there was potential for more liberated interactions with White drivers. Yet, racism was still present in the expectations of this occupation. Black drivers were not permitted to pass White drivers and could face violence from police or vigilantes if they did so (Berrey, 2015).

Nevertheless, many Black Americans—like many of their ancestors—found ways in their everyday lives to create spaces where the domineering White supremacist culture of the US was not supreme, challenging the nation not to accept racism as a given (Berrey, 2015; Frank & Muriithi, 2015). Prominent examples of these efforts manifested in the organization of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), various court cases won for Black student rights, voting rights, protests (Frank & Muriithi, 2015), art, music, dancing, and more (Berrey, 2015). As challenges to segregation grew and the movement for Black American civil rights gained momentum, occupation became an important locus through which this struggle for liberation could unfold (Frank & Muriithi, 2015). Following the landmark 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of schools—even if considered equal in quality—was unconstitutional, movements to desegregate more systems and spaces outside of education began to emerge across the US (Berrey, 2015). Because Black Americans were allowed little access to policy-making and formal political power, mechanisms of everyday life became formidable tools to exert resilience and change (Berrey, 2015; Frank & Muriithi, 2015).

Drawing on American pragmatism, Frank and Muriithi (2015) described the Civil Rights Movement as an occupational reconstruction, a complex social process that leveraged problematic situations through meaningful, participatory, embodied, and exploratory means to create change. Examples of such processes include when activist and community leader Rosa Parks sparked national bus boycotts in 1955 by strategically refusing to move for a White person while riding a segregated bus. Black communities organized to boycott riding buses which relied heavily on their fares to function (Berrey, 2015). Continuing throughout US history, both activists and non-activists have pushed against racist policies and culture through everyday occupations such as waiting in the train depot, sitting at lunch counters (Frank & Muriithi, 2015), hosting White visitors overnight, walking to school, marrying interracially, and living together (Berrey, 2015), wearing natural hair, creating music and art, dancing, having sex, and simply thriving (Kendi, 2019). While policy still reflected the racism of previous years, occupation became the instrument through which these realities might change (Frank & Muriithi, 2015).

Policing of Black people in response to this struggle became even more severe and legislatures across the South began a wave of policy making that specifically attempted to restrict and respond to the integration of the everyday lives of Black and White Americans. Policies in the US were used as a mechanism to maintain and reproduce racism in the face of a populace that was challenging the status quo through their everyday actions. The US citizenry, now legally including Black Americans, struggled to transform culture and laws that were born from the racism that its citizens had originally invented and was now the foundation on which power and authority in the nation was built. These moments have often led to negative consequences, less opportunity, arrests, violence, and sometimes further legislation of restrictive policies that deemed these incidents an illegal public ‘disturbance’ (Berrey, 2015). Yet, many communities, especially communities of color, persist in an unending pursuit of justice and liberation, cultivating power, and continuing to use occupation as a powerful tool for antiracism even today.

This Struggle Continues

Today, US activists continue to dig at the vestiges of this history that remain in the everyday life of all Americans. While the civil rights movement offered a powerful example of liberation and social change—especially one that leverages occupation—the US is far from freeing itself from the remnants of slavery and racism. New and often surreptitious policies and cultural norms (e.g., the war on drugs, the prison industrial complex, voting restrictions) continue to police, monitor, and control the everyday lives of Black Americans (Alexander, 2010).

Dehumanization of and violence against Black people continue to plague the US (Alexander, 2010), manifest in the highly publicized and unjust deaths of George Floyd (Hill et al., 2020), Breonna Taylor (Oppel, 2020), Ahmaud Arbery (Fausset, 2020), Trayvon Martin (CNN Editorial Research, 2020), Monika Diamond (Kozuch, 2020), and countless more, seen and unseen. US residents often assume higher crime rates are directly correlated with higher numbers of residents of color, but there is no such correlation; in fact, unemployment is a much more accurate predictor of crime (Kendi, 2019). And even then, racial discrimination against Black Americans seeking employment is prevalent (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). These issues are systemic. Black communities are regularly displaced for White real estate needs (Alexander, 2010). Black students are disproportionately disciplined compared to White peers who commit similar infractions (Angell, 2014; Edwards, 2016) contributing to a school to prison pipeline (Alexander, 2010). Black Americans disproportionally receive inappropriate diagnoses and treatment of autism spectrum disorders (Burkett et al., 2015) and have lower survival rates of breast cancer than White peers (Curtis et al., 2008). Recently, racism has manifested in various controversies regarding confederate monuments (Svrluga, 2018), and an exacerbation of anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments through the resurgence of white nationalist movements following the 2016 US presidential election (Tenold, 2018). Racism is still alive in the US and is a public health crisis.

Occupational science is not immune to racism. Data for the racial make-up of US occupational scientists were not available; the authors are aware of only two Black graduates with Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Occupational Science in the US. However, in 2014, 82% of occupational therapists in the US were White and 4% Black, a decrease from 8% in 2004 (American Occupational Therapy Association, 2014). Yet, Black Americans were estimated to make up 13% of the population in 2019 (US Census Bureau, 2020). Black Americans continue to face inequality and disparities across US socio-economic and political systems. Racism has nurtured deep inequities that require profound and systemic transformation to resolve. As a predominately White profession in the US, acknowledging the historical realities through educating students and practitioners is integral in dismantling these racist inequities. Occupational scientists and therapists have a great capacity and duty to address the ways in which racism has been integrated into and facilitated through the daily lives of the people they serve. The tools of the discipline and profession, such as strengths based frameworks and systems thinking, are remarkable in fostering social transformation (Benavides, 2020; van Bruggen et al., 2020; Frank & Muriithi, 2015; Laliberte Rudman et al., 2018). To realize a full vision of a socially responsive occupational science and a justice-oriented occupational therapy, antiracism work must be integral in research, therapeutic approaches, and institutions.

Implications for Occupation

At the beginning of US history, dark skin was associated with enslavement and inferiority through strategic and fabricated mechanisms. Everyday occupations were infused with these racist ideas and continued to be racialized in order to further reinforce structural racism and White supremacy in the US. Everyday occupations were tools of oppressors to construct a society built on control of and violence against Black people. Mundane life is political and can contribute to the liberation or degradation of communities (Bayat, 2013). Social relationships and occupation transactionally emerge and re-emerge through one another (Aldrich, 2018; Lavalley, 2017; Silva et al., 2017). These social processes churned racism into everyday US life. Occupation and daily life manifested policies and structures that were derivative of the racist meanings and routines imbued in them. Racist policies then fortified occupational injustices across society, reinforcing White supremacy in everyday life even when later challenged through occupation-based rebellion. The construction of racism in the US is an example of occupation leveraged, whether intentionally or unintentionally, as a destructive tool.

This perspective challenges the long-held assumption within occupational science and therapy that occupation is always beneficial. In recent years, critical examination of the underlying assumptions and theories from which the construct of occupation was developed has revealed deep assumptions regarding individualism (Dickie et al., 2006; Laliberte Rudman, 2013), choice, agency, meaning (Hammell, 2009), and its roots in a North American and European worldview (Algado et al., 2016; Morrison et al., 2011). Personal and environmental factors that contribute to occupational injustices have been identified (e.g., Hocking & Mace, 2017; Silva et al., 2017; Stadnyk et al., 2010), and studies of social structures that restrict occupational opportunities for various communities have been published (e.g., Bailliard, 2016; Braveman & Bass-Haugen, 2009; Galvaan & Peters, 2017; Guajardo Córdoba & Mondaca, 2017; Huot & Veronis, 2018). Yet, attending to occupation itself as a potential contributor to injustice has been rare. Our historical analysis is one example, and critiques similar to this paper (e.g., Angell, 2014), provide concrete examples of the role occupation can play in the promotion and reproduction of injustice.

Without negating the great potential for occupation to promote justice and social transformation—which can be seen in the prevailing resilience and constant pursuit of justice from many Americans, particularly many Black Americans—our examination reveals a need to recognize the potential for occupation and everyday living to be a vehicle for prejudice, social inequality, and at an extreme, violence. This argument is in no way meant to discredit the value and rich benefits of human occupation. Rather, it is a response to Angell’s (2014) charge to occupational scientists to pursue “a more socially responsive, critical, reflexive discipline” (p. 113) by recognizing the complex emergence of injustice through an occupational lens. This example offers evidence that occupation can play a role in just or unjust formation of doing, being, becoming, and belonging among communities. This revelation encourages occupational scientists and therapists to remain alert in research and practice for potential spaces and mechanisms where this injustice may unfold, offering even more potential for positive transformation and change.

Conclusion

Occupation is a powerful tool. In this example, we have argued that it was a tool for injustice as much as it has been shown to be a tool for justice. This recognition challenges occupational scientists to be vigilant in reflection and examination of assumptions regarding concepts, practice, and values. For US occupational scientists, it is essential to recognize the profession and discipline emerged from this history and is not immune from the effects of racism. Globally, occupational scientists must recognize the histories from which practices and theories emerge in order to root out bias, prejudice, and unintentional harm. That requires close consideration of the ways in which occupation may be reinforcing injustice for community members, research participants, and even colleagues. Continual attentiveness to the potential for occupation to contribute to injustice calls for a more informed and conscious practice. Yet, the potential for occupation to liberate and promote health is not diminished, and it remains a potent instrument for responding to these injustices across the world.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Racial Equity Institute for facilitating our deeper understanding of US history through their trainings and workshops. We also thank Morgan Cooper for her assistance and feedback in clarifying and exploring the ideas within this paper.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflict of interest regarding the contents of this article and will not receive any financial or other benefit from the publication of this article.

Notes

1 John Rolfe, Pocahontas, and their family were legally determined ‘white’ (the Pocahontas Exception) by this law due to the position of power John Rolfe held (Harris, 1993).

2 A notable instance of this dehumanization occurred in 1787, when southern politicians advocated for the 3/5ths compromise—counting only 3 out of every 5 slaves as part of the constituency—to strategically increase representation and power in congress.

3 As was seen in the case of a bird watcher, Christian Cooper, in New York City (Vera et al., 2020) and more severely in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery (Fausset, 2020).