US Slavery -> Racial Resentment over 150 years later

[lpetrich]

• Study: white Southerners in counties that had more slaves are likelier to back Republicans - Vox
• Legacy of Slavery Still Fuels Anti-Black Attitudes in the Deep South : Rochester News
• The Political Legacy of American Slavery - slavery.pdf - preprint, no paywall
• Review: [Untitled] on JSTOR - "Reviewed Work: Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, Maya Sen"
• The Political Legacy of American Slavery | The Journal of Politics: Vol 78, No 3

From The Rochester News:

The team of political scientists found that white Southerners who live today in the Cotton Belt where slavery and the plantation economy dominated are much more likely to express more negative attitudes toward blacks than their fellow Southerners who live in nearby areas that had few slaves. Residents of these former slavery strongholds are also more likely to identify as Republican and to express opposition to race-related policies such as affirmative action.

The preprint's abstract:

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of contemporary racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of political and racial attitudes. Following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly free African-American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the American South.

The journal paper's abstract:

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. We show that these results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of contemporary racial threat. To explain the results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of political attitudes. Following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly freed African American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations.

 

[lpetrich]

Which goes to show how much the Republican Party has become the party of Jefferson Davis.

We orient our analysis toward the Southern “Black Belt” (or the “Cotton Belt”), the hook-shaped swath of land that was the primary locus of antebellum slavery (Figure1). Scholars have noted that Black Belt whites were particularly prominent in Southern politics and have been more conservative than whites elsewhere in the South. As V.O.Key wrote, it is “the whites of the black belts who have the deepest and most immediate concern about the maintenance of white supremacy,” and “if the politics of the South revolves around any single theme, it is that of the role of the black belts” (Key, 1949). Furthermore, the Black Belt has had an enormous influence on national politics.Members of Congress from these areas held influential positions, effectively exercising veto power during the development of the welfare state in the 1920s and 30s (Katznelson, Geiger and Kryder,1993).

Seems that the North didn't go far enough -- it should have deported much of the Southern leadership and sent in Northern loyalists to govern the South.

Conclusions:

In this paper, we have shown that an institution that was formally abolished 150 years ago still has effects on attitudes today. Specifically, we show that American slavery has had a direct impact on Southern whites’ (1) partisan identification, (2) attitudes on affirmative action, (3) levels of racial resentment, and (4) attitudes toward blacks.We further showed that our findings are robust to instrumenting for cotton suitability,lending credibility that our estimates are causal. Our findings are robust to accounting for a wide variety of factors that could plausibly affect both the share of the population that was enslaved and also contemporary political attitudes. In addition, we ruled out several contemporary-based explanations. Specifically, we ruled out the theory of “racial threat,” or the idea that contemporary shares of the black (minority) population are what drive white (majority) group racial attitudes. When we took into account contemporary shares of the black population using appropriate methods, we found that slavery continues to have a separate direct effect. We also provided suggestive evidence that our results are not due exclusively to geographic mobility over the course of the 20th century, nor are they due to contemporary income inequality between blacks and whites.

Our results instead suggest a separate causal channel attributable to the historical persistence of regional variation in attitudes that was amplified by post-Civil-War events. The years during and after the Reconstruction period saw whites coordinating to provide an informal social infrastructure (and to the extent legally permissible an institutional one as well) to maintain as much as possible the economic and political power previously guaranteed to them under slavery. As affirmative support, we showed that greater prevalence of slavery predicts more conservative (for many years more Democratic) presidential vote shares, higher rates of radical violence, and decreased wealth concentrated in black farms in the decades after Reconstruction. We also showed that the long-term effects of slavery are smaller in areas of the U.S. South that were quick to mechanize in the early to mid-20th century. Finally, we also offered evidence that parent-to-child transmission could be an important mechanism by which attitudes have been passed down over time. However, we do not rule out that Southern institutions may have also played an important role.

 

[ronburgundy]

That's an awesome study, very clever methodology and use of historical data. The results provide additional strong support that the modern GOP is the party of white supremacists who inherited cultural attitudes from those who supported and benefited from slavery, and against the excuse that it's merely about "southern pride" and "states rights" (which were already clearly nonsense since the primary thing the south is proud of is that it killed US soldiers to protect their states rights to own slaves).

And the findings would inherently under-estimate the true strength of the impact of pro-slavery culture on current GOP support, since mobility over the 150 years would dilute the the % of people who live in a county today that were raised in that county and thus more strongly shaped by it's political culture and racial attitudes

 

[Rhea]

Amazing how long regional ideas can persist. And yet, we should not be surprised, if we think about it, we see it in many arenas.

 

[ronburgundy]

Amazing how long regional ideas can persist. And yet, we should not be surprised, if we think about it, we see it in many arenas.

And the ideas most likely to persist will tend to be those held by political conservatives, since by definition conservatism is opposed to change and progress, and seeks to preserve traditional ideas and practices for the sake of tradition itself, independent of how the surrounding changing context makes those ideas and practices less valid, useful, or ethical than once considered.

Only basic guiding principles like progress, fairness, reason, etc.. would remain stable over time within liberal/progressive framework, since those very principles inherently produce more change and sensitivity to new information. It's not just analogous to but directly tied to the exponentially greater change in scientific than religious ideas over time.

 

[Angry Floof]

Considering how white people's attitudes about slavery and black people persist and run so deeply in contemporary heads, you'd think right wing morons could get an inkling of why contemporary black people's attitudes about black people actually having been enslaved to those same white people that spawned these "traditions" might persist and affect people today. You'd think...

 

[ronburgundy]

Considering how white people's attitudes about slavery and black people persist and run so deeply in contemporary heads, you'd think right wing morons could get an inkling of why contemporary black people's attitudes about black people actually having been enslaved to those same white people that spawned these "traditions" might persist and affect people today. You'd think...

Except right wing morons completely deny that any white person today has attitudes shaped by the pro-slavery white supremacy of generations past, and they will dishonestly deny the objective reality of this current evidence. So, of course they'd also deny that 500 years of slavery, brutality, and government mandated inequality right up until 50 years ago would have any relevance for understand the psychology, behavior, and outcomes of black people today.

There is a gargantuan sized irony in the fact that the very conservatives whose core value is to preserve the past and prevent change away from it also simultaneously deny that the past has any influence.

 

[lpetrich]

Now to Vox.

The authors propose transmission across the generations of beliefs about what to do about black people.

To test this idea, the authors looked at how the adoption of tractors in some counties affected anti-black attitudes. The idea: If white Southerners could use the technology to mitigate their demand for black labor and maintain economic dominance over their black counterparts, there would be less of a need for anti-black attitudes to maintain white supremacy.

The hypothesis held true: White Southerners in counties that adopted tractors earlier were less likely to hold anti-black and conservative views today.

...
One caveat: The study also found the effect of slavery falling over time — it was much stronger in the early 20th century. It's possible that could continue.

But Sen said the study, overall, shows political views can be fairly persistent. "Political attitudes are really sticky. They can actually persist from generation to generation," she told me. "My parents' political attitudes really influenced how I view politics now. And their parents' attitudes influenced how they view politics. And so on and so on."

The article then mentioned Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, and how it was part of the realignment of the two parties in the 1960's and 1970's, with the Republican Party becoming the party of Jefferson Davis.

Before the 1960's, the Democratic Party was strongest in the South, and the former presence of slavery was a good predictor of whether one would vote Democratic. Before the Civil War, there was a weak negative effect, but after that was, there was a positive effect that steadily rose until around 1900. It plateaued there then after 1920, started declining. Strom Thurmond's 1948 run in his States' Rights Party fit the curve very well. The curve reached zero in the late 1960's, with George Wallace's 1968 run having a sizable positive effect.

The paper does not have numbers since that year, except for Barack Obama's candidacy. Votes for him had a negative correlation with the presence of slavery.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Considering how white people's attitudes about slavery and black people persist and run so deeply in contemporary heads, you'd think right wing morons could get an inkling of why contemporary black people's attitudes about black people actually having been enslaved to those same white people that spawned these "traditions" might persist and affect people today. You'd think...

Except right wing morons completely deny that any white person today has attitudes shaped by the pro-slavery white supremacy of generations past, and they will dishonestly deny the objective reality of this current evidence. So, of course they'd also deny that 500 years of slavery, brutality, and government mandated inequality right up until 50 years ago would have any relevance for understand the psychology, behavior, and outcomes of black people today.

There is a gargantuan sized irony in the fact that the very conservatives whose core value is to preserve the past and prevent change away from it also simultaneously deny that the past has any influence.

They seem to think that once black people were freed from slavery they became pure equals and thus if they didn’t succeed in life or business it’s purely due to their own inherent laziness or stupidity. Furthermore, any government help they receive would thus be an unfair hand out.

 

[ronburgundy]

Now to Vox.

The authors propose transmission across the generations of beliefs about what to do about black people.

To test this idea, the authors looked at how the adoption of tractors in some counties affected anti-black attitudes. The idea: If white Southerners could use the technology to mitigate their demand for black labor and maintain economic dominance over their black counterparts, there would be less of a need for anti-black attitudes to maintain white supremacy.

The hypothesis held true: White Southerners in counties that adopted tractors earlier were less likely to hold anti-black and conservative views today.

...
One caveat: The study also found the effect of slavery falling over time — it was much stronger in the early 20th century. It's possible that could continue.

But Sen said the study, overall, shows political views can be fairly persistent. "Political attitudes are really sticky. They can actually persist from generation to generation," she told me. "My parents' political attitudes really influenced how I view politics now. And their parents' attitudes influenced how they view politics. And so on and so on."

The article then mentioned Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, and how it was part of the realignment of the two parties in the 1960's and 1970's, with the Republican Party becoming the party of Jefferson Davis.

Before the 1960's, the Democratic Party was strongest in the South, and the former presence of slavery was a good predictor of whether one would vote Democratic. Before the Civil War, there was a weak negative effect, but after that was, there was a positive effect that steadily rose until around 1900. It plateaued there then after 1920, started declining. Strom Thurmond's 1948 run in his States' Rights Party fit the curve very well. The curve reached zero in the late 1960's, with George Wallace's 1968 run having a sizable positive effect.

The paper does not have numbers since that year, except for Barack Obama's candidacy. Votes for him had a negative correlation with the presence of slavery.

Thurmond and Wallace provide particularly strong support for the thesis that the southern power shift from the Dems to the GOP during the mid 20th century was fueled by the shift of pro-slavery/white-supremacy voters away from the Dems to the GOP.

Thurmond was a Dem up to 1948, but when Truman came out strongly in favor of federal anti-lynching laws, elimination of poll taxes, and the creation of a Fair Employment Commission Thurmond ran against Truman's re-election by helping form the "Dixiecrats" (which existed only that year) with an overtly white supremacist and Jim Crow platform. He took 4 of the 5 stronghold "deep south" states from the Dems, which as the original paper linked in the OP shows, was due largely to the fact that he took away the pro-slavery counties from Truman. Thurmond returned to the Dems after losing, but then along with many other Dems, left for the Repubicans in the mid 1960's in opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

The story of George Wallace is similar. He was a lifelong Dem (as were most white Alabamans back then). Although as Judge he blocked many civil rights and desegregation efforts, he lost his first run as Governor in 1958 to an even bigger racist, and was quoted as saying "you know why I lost that governor's race? ... I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again." True to his word, he became a very outspoken segregationist, and by the next election won the white supremacist vote and therefore the Governorship of AL.

In 1964, besides his home state of AZ, the only 5 states that Goldwater won was the 5 "deep south" states of AL, LA, GA, SC, and MS. But that showed that the south could be taken from the Dems by appealing to anti civil rights conservatives, which was Goldwater's platform against Johnson who has just signed the Civil Rights Act. In 1968, Nixon's campaign put the "southern strategy" into effect by speaking against Justice Warren's "liberal" application of the Civil Rights Act and using "law and order" rhetoric about forcibly putting down the racial unrest erupting due to things like King's assassination.

However, Wallace, still a Dem, proved that the way to win the deep south was with deeper and stronger racism. He ran as an independent, and explicitly endorsed segregation and attacked the Civil Rights Act that Republican majorities in Congress had just vote for 4 years prior. Nixon succeeded in getting a number of southern states, but Wallace "outniggered" Nixon and took 4 of the 5 deep south states plus Arkansas. In fact, because Wallace and Nixon split the racist vote, if just 150k votes across a couple states had gone differently, the election would have been decided by the Dem controlled congress and Nixon would likely have lost to Humphrey.

 

[Lion IRC]

...They seem to think that once black people were freed from slavery they became pure equals and thus if they didn’t succeed in life or business it’s purely due to their own inherent laziness or stupidity. Furthermore, any government help they receive would thus be an unfair hand out.

Some lazy and stupid people refuse to cooperate with other peoples' efforts to help them.

 

[lpetrich]

The Republican Party was originally a northern regional party, and it was the party that succeeded in succeeding the Whig Party after that party broke up.

It was strong in the northern and western states, while the Democratic Party was strong in the ex-Confederacy. But the Democratic Party attracted followers from Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants in northern cities, and eventually also northern blacks. The Northern Democrats became sympathetic to civil-rights efforts, and that eventually caused a split between the northern Democrats and the southern ones, the Dixiecrats.

When Strom Thurmond ran for President in his States' Rights Party, it was one of those events whose full significance became apparent only in retrospect. But it was already an indication that civil-rights concerns were causing a split in the Democratic Party. The split became stronger and stronger, and in 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater appealed to disgruntled Dixiecrats. In 1968, George Wallace ran outside both major parties and got enough of the Dixiecrat vote to get some electoral votes. Not long after that, Richard Nixon devised his Southern Strategy for appealing for Dixiecrats, and that ended up making the Republican Party the party of Jefferson Davis. The electoral map now looks like a mirror image of the electoral map from 1900. The two parties have exchanged constituencies, and the Republican Party now gets a lot of its support from white people in areas where there were lots of slaves, for all that that implies about that party.

 

[Derec]

I think it is exactly the opposite. It is the blacks that have a lot of resentment against whites because of slavery (which ended over 150 years ago).

Also, something that stood out: the authors use opposition to so-called "affirmative action" as some sort of evidence for racial resentment. Again, I think the authors miss the point because of their ideology. It is racial preferences that drive resentment. If you tell a white or Asian kid they need a 1550 SAT or 515 MCAT to be as competitive as a black kid with a 1400 SAT or 505 MCAT, how could it not drive resentment?

I think John Roberts has been right - the only way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race. And also to stop using something that ended over a century and a half ago as a cudgel in political and pseudoacademic debates.

 

[Derec]

They seem to think that once black people were freed from slavery they became pure equals and thus if they didn’t succeed in life or business it’s purely due to their own inherent laziness or stupidity.

The Left thinks that if blacks do not have at least the same representation in top colleges that means there is "systemic racism" and that justifies continued discrimination against white and Asian students under the guise of so-called "affirmative action". Take Harvard. Black students are actually overrepresented at Harvard as share of population due to extreme racial preferences they are beneficiaries of.

Furthermore, any government help they receive would thus be an unfair hand out.

Any government help should be race invariant.

 

[southernhybrid]

I guess the Black people in other regions of the country should follow Charles Blows advice, and reverse migrate back to the South. Charles Blow is a Black opinion columnist who writes for the NYTimes. He moved to Atlanta about a year ago. He loves Georgia and is trying to convince other Black professionals to return to their southern roots, to help the Democrats take over the South.

The South is already heavily populated by Black professionals, and hourly workers. I already live in a Black majority city about 40 miles from ATL. I am a bit skeptical of some of the claims make in the OP, although I agree that today's Republican Party has been dominated by racists. I don't think the racism in the South is worse than the racism in the North.

My city just won what is called a "visionary award" for the way it handled the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. Our protests included the police, local religious figures as well as a mix of both Black and White citizens. The award also applauded a large mural that was painted on the side of a building downtown of the first Black woman in the US to receive a commercial pilot's license. Maybe that's trivial, bu the mural is pretty cool.

While we have our share of racists here, they are usually much easier to identify compared with those in other parts of the country. So, let's not pretend that racism is just a Southern problem, when it exists all over the country.

 

[SimpleDon]

I think it is exactly the opposite. It is the blacks that have a lot of resentment against whites because of slavery (which ended over 150 years ago).

Also, something that stood out: the authors use opposition to so-called "affirmative action" as some sort of evidence for racial resentment. Again, I think the authors miss the point because of their ideology. It is racial preferences that drive resentment. If you tell a white or Asian kid they need a 1550 SAT or 515 MCAT to be as competitive as a black kid with a 1400 SAT or 505 MCAT, how could it not drive resentment?

I think John Roberts has been right - the only way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race. And also to stop using something that ended over a century and a half ago as a cudgel in political and pseudo-academic debates.

Blacks don't resent whites because of slavery, they resent that they are still subject to systemic racism kept alive by the Republican party almost 75 years after the passage of the Civil rights laws.

There is no chance that the systemic racism against blacks will disappear if a few private elite universities are prevented from doing what they have always done, establish their own administration standards to have the incoming student body that they want to admit.

You seem to be going to an extreme to find an example to satisfy your apparent need to be aggrieved.

 

[jab]

...They seem to think that once black people were freed from slavery they became pure equals and thus if they didn’t succeed in life or business it’s purely due to their own inherent laziness or stupidity. Furthermore, any government help they receive would thus be an unfair hand out.

Some lazy and stupid people refuse to cooperate with other peoples' efforts to help them.

like those dumb ignorant, mentally lazy Southern whites: you can lead a bigot to truth, but you can't make him think.

 

[Lion IRC]

Racist.

 

[zorq]

Racist.

Yeah. That's what Jab meant by "bigot."

 

[Angry Floof]

Racist.

Yeah. That's what Jab meant by "bigot."

Don't you know that calling out bigots for their bigotry IS bigotry????