Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior) - Hardcover

Acharya, Avidit; Blackwell, Matthew; Sen, Maya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691176744 ISBN 13: 9780691176741

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South

Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved or changed? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched political and racial views of contemporary white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history, which continues to shape economic, political, and social spheres. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery—compared to areas that were not—are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress.

Highlighting the connection between historical institutions and contemporary political attitudes, the authors explore the period following the Civil War when elite whites in former bastions of slavery had political and economic incentives to encourage the development of anti-black laws and practices. Deep Roots shows that these forces created a local political culture steeped in racial prejudice, and that these viewpoints have been passed down over generations, from parents to children and via communities, through a process called behavioral path dependence. While legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made huge strides in increasing economic opportunity and reducing educational disparities, southern slavery has had a profound, lasting, and self-reinforcing influence on regional and national politics that can still be felt today.

A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated.

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Avidit Acharya is assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Matthew Blackwell is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Maya Sen is associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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"In this major new interpretation of southern politics, Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen provide important evidence demonstrating that present-day racial and partisan cleavages among southern whites can be traced directly back to the legacy of slavery. The authors’ skillful use of a wide range of data sources offers rich insights into the connections between historical institutions and contemporary political attitudes."--Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley

"Presenting a compelling explanation for why areas of the American South have been left behind, Deep Roots is a salutary challenge to those of us who complacently celebrate changes wrought in the region since the 1960s. A must-read for those who seek to understand the modern South."--Anthony J. Badger, author of FDR: The First Hundred Days

"Deep Roots provocatively argues that the shock of emancipation and its aftermath triggered broad social and political changes in parts of the American South that were most heavily dependent on cotton production, and therefore needing cheap labor. Those areas today remain the most racially conservative among southern whites, with continuing political effects. This is a gripping book."--David O. Sears, University of California, Los Angeles

"This book conveys a powerful message: the influence of chattel slavery is deeply--but variably--embedded in the contemporary political landscape of the American South. Communities where slavery once flourished now are especially conservative, hostile to African Americans, and opposed to race-based policies. Communities with weaker ties to slavery, by contrast, look very different today. Written by a first-rate team of scholars, Deep Roots is a model of theoretically informed historical scholarship."--William Howell, University of Chicago

"As our nation confronts the continuing role of white supremacy, Deep Roots argues that slavery was not only a peculiar institution, it was also a persistent one, its effects reverberating over time. This convincing and carefully researched book shows that contemporary political orientations in the white South are rooted in the political geography of slavery, its political economy, and its evolving system of racial domination. Deep Roots represents a defining moment in the field of American politics."--Vesla Mae Weaver, coauthor of Arresting Citizenship

"A seminal look at how America’s extractive past has fundamentally determined its current politics. Deep Roots will resonate with what you know and reshape how you think."--James Robinson, University of Chicago

"This book's arguments can't be right, can they? But the authors bring evidence to bear so well that they have knocked the ball back into the skeptics' court. Deep Roots will be enormously productive in advancing knowledge--it is what we want books to be."--Robert Mickey, author of Paths Out of Dixie

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Deep Roots

How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics

By Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, Maya Sen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17674-1

Contents

List of Tables, ix, 
List of Figures, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2 A Theory of Behavioral Path Dependence, 24, 
I Slavery's Contemporary Effects, 47, 
3 How Slavery Predicts White Political Attitudes Today, 49, 
4 An Alternative Account: Contemporary Demographics and Racial Threat, 76, 
II The Origins of Divergence, 103, 
5 Antebellum Politics of Slavery and Race in the South, 105, 
6 Emancipation as a Critical Juncture and the Timing of Divergence, 127, 
III Mechanisms of Persistence and Decay, 157, 
7 Persistence and the Mechanisms of Reproduction, 159, 
8 Interventions and Attenuation, 182, 
9 Conclusion: What Lessons Can We Draw from Southern Slavery?, 203, 
Appendix, 217, 
Notes, 221, 
Bibliography, 251, 
Index, 273, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

"98% probably of white people in Mississippi were segregationists. My family was, my father was, I was, everybody was. Everybody that I knew was for segregation."

Greenwood, Mississippi, resident

Greenwood, Mississippi (2010 pop. 15,205), is, by all accounts, a typical town in the Mississippi Delta. It isn't big, but it is bigger than many others in the area. The town's gridded streets line up in a roughly north-south direction, and its two rivers — the Tallahatchie and the Yazoo, parts of the web of smaller rivers forming the Mississippi flood plains — roughly encircle it. North of the Yazoo, historic mansions line Greenwood's "Grand Boulevard," and cotton and corn fields dot the roads leading away from the city. South of the Yazoo, in the historic city center, longstanding restaurants and shops — some of which have been in existence for decades — continue to serve Delta specialties like broiled shrimp and crabmeat. But perhaps Greenwood's greatest claim to fame, at least today, is serving as the birthplace and former home to a number of great blues artists, including Robert Johnson.

Looking around the town — and elsewhere in the broader Mississippi Delta region — it is easy to see remnants of older, different times. The Mississippi Delta is an alluvial plain, and its system of rivers have provided rich, fertile soil for agricultural use for two centuries. To cultivate these lands in the early 1800s, white entrepreneurs forced the transportation of enslaved African Americans westward into this region. The area is part of the broader hook-shaped region of the South known as the Black Belt, due to the rich color of the soil. Together, the fertile land, the "inexpensive" enslaved labor force, and the area's navigable rivers made cities like Greenwood the engines behind "King Cotton," with Mississippi providing roughly 480 million pounds of ginned cotton in 1859 — nearly a quarter of all cotton production in the United States that year. In turn, this production helped to propel the nation through the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. This past is evident today in Greenwood's Grand Boulevard district, with its mansions and wide, tree-lined streets. A sign on the outskirts of town still proudly welcomes visitors to "Greenwood, Cotton Capital of the World."

But, as in many cities across the Mississippi, these economically rich times did not last. Starting in the 1940s, the mechanization of cotton production dramatically reduced the need for agricultural labor; in tandem with the Great Depression and the migration of African Americans out of the rural South, cities like Greenwood fell into cycles of recession, further exacerbated by racial tensions through the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1940 and the present day, close to half of the population of the Mississippi Delta left for opportunities elsewhere, and, today, downtown Greenwood is peppered with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots. In the traditionally African American neighborhood of Baptist Town, just outside the city center, many abandoned shotgun-style houses line the streets, calling to mind a past when mostly black agricultural workers lived there.

Forces such as these have hit African American communities in Black Belt cities like Greenwood particularly hard. In Greenwood, which was sixty-seven percent black in 2010, the unemployment rate for African Americans is nearly twice that of the state average, which in turn is higher than the national average. Incomes for African Americans in Greenwood are also lower than state and national averages, with half of Greenwood families headed by African Americans living in poverty. The median income of the city has been around half of the national median income for most of the last decade. Residential and institutional segregation is also persistent. For example, following the legally mandated desegregation of public schools in the 1960s, many Black Belt towns such as Greenwood established private "segregation academies" for white students, leaving desegregated public schools mostly African American and starved of resources. Today, Greenwood High School is ninety-seven percent African American, while the nearby Pillow Academy — founded in 1966 to provide segregated schooling for Greenwood's white children — is ninety percent white.

These racial divides are echoed in the political environment of the Delta. At a city level, the politics of cities like Greenwood have followed the trajectory of African American politics more generally (although, as we will discuss throughout this book, this has not always been the case). Since African American voters today tend to overwhelmingly side with the Democratic Party, this means that Greenwood — like other majority-black cities throughout the Black Belt — has sided with Democratic candidates. The same does not hold, however, for Greenwood's white residents. For example, in 2008 and 2012, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama won nearly no support from the area's white voters. Indeed, at the county level, nearly all of the votes of Leflore County's white residents went to Obama's two Republican opponents, John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012). This pattern — black voters supporting Democratic candidates, but white voters overwhelmingly supporting more conservative candidates — is one we see again and again throughout the South's Black Belt.

Greenwood's historical and political trajectory contrasts with another Southern city, Asheville, North Carolina (2010 pop. 83,393). Whereas Greenwood's fertile land was its primary natural resource, Asheville's location in western North Carolina was by far less friendly to large-scale agriculture, setting its course on a different path. Indeed, Greenwood was settled primarily as a base for the production and shipment of cotton, but Asheville and Buncombe County, a region in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, was settled with the intent of establishing a trading outpost. For that reason, the city remained small for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was only upon the arrival of the turnpike and the railroad later in the nineteenth century that the area started to blossom. For the early parts of the twentieth century, its crisp climate and mountain location made it a desirable vacation destination for Southerners from hotter lowland areas, and, over time, its boardinghouses started housing travelers...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691176744
• ISBN 13: 9780691176741
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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