Today, Mississippi is politically polarized along racial lines. Whites are Republicans, blacks are Democrats, and the former controls state politics. Public investment isn’t just disdained, it’s attacked as racially suspect. “The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran’s re-election bid,” said state Sen. Angela Hill during the Mississippi Senate Republican primary, in reference to Sen. Cochran’s outreach to black voters. The state is harshly carceral—jailing more people per capita than almost anywhere in the country, the majority of them black—and has a huge number of all-white private schools while the public school system is largely segregated.
You can understand all of this in terms of ordinary conservatism—and many people do—but this is a particularly strong conservatism shaped by a particularly brutal racial history. It’s a small-government philosophy that has its roots in the pro-slavery thought of John C. Calhoun, emerged as resistance to Reconstruction, resurfaced in the fight against civil rights, and is now mostly ideological, if attenuated—but not separate—from its roots.
What we see in Mississippi—and, in varying degrees, the country writ large—is what was wrought by white supremacy. A society where the racial caste system is still intact but justified by other means. And it’s a caste system that—as we see with the revanchist attacks on health reform—is destroying Mississippi by making it difficult to craft any solutions to the state’s deadly problems.
