Posted on 09/24/2013 8:03:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The slave population, shown in the above map based on the 1860 census, was concentrated in counties where cotton plantations dominated the local economy. Whites in these areas today express more racial resentment and are more likely to vote Republican and oppose affirmative action than other Southerners, a new study finds.
Whites who live in areas of the South once dominated by the plantation economy and slavery are much more likely than other Southerners to express colder feelings toward African Americans, to oppose affirmative action, and to vote Republican.
Those are among the findings of a groundbreaking new study titled "The Political Legacy of American Slavery" by a team of political scientists from the University of Rochester in New York. It was based on a county-by-county analysis of census data and opinion polls of more than 39,000 Southern whites.
"Slavery does not explain all forms of current day racism," says Avidit Acharya, who conducted the study along with Matthew Blackwell and Maya Sen. "But the data clearly demonstrates that the legacy of the plantation economy and its reliance on the forced labor of African Americans continues to exacerbate racial bias in the Deep South."
To explain their results, the authors theorize that Southern whites -- faced with having their political and economic power undermined by emancipation -- had incentive to propagate racist violence, institutions and norms in parts of the region like the so-called "Black Belt" or "Cotton Belt" that had high numbers of freed slaves in the decades after 1865.
"We argue that these attitudes have, to some degree, been passed down locally from one generation to the next," they write.
The researchers looked at data from 93 percent of the 1,344 Southern counties in the Black Belt where plantations dominated the economy from the late 1700s into the early 1900s. They found that a 20 percent increase in the percentage of slaves in a county's pre-Civil War population is associated today with a 3 percent decrease in whites who identify as Democrats and a 2.4 percent decrease in the number of whites who support affirmative action.
What they call the "slavery effect" accounts for up to a 15 percentage point difference in party affiliation today. About 30 percent of whites in former slave plantation areas report being Democrats, compared to 40 to 45 percent of whites in counties where slaves made up less than 3 percent of the population.
The researchers considered whether there could be alternative explanations for their findings. For example, they looked at whether whites who live around larger black populations have more negative racial attitudes -- what's known as the "theory of racial threat." But they found that share of black population actually predicts warmer attitudes toward blacks among whites once slavery is accounted for.
They also considered whether what they found was related to slavery being more prevalent in rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than urban areas, or whether it had something to do with Civil War destruction, or with whites holding particular racial attitudes migrating to areas with others of like mind. But again, those hypotheses did not hold up to scrutiny.
The study also compared Southern counties with very few slaves in 1860 to non-Southern counties with no slaves in the same period. It found very little difference.
"Thus, in the absence of localized slavery, it appears that the South would have had a distribution of present-day political beliefs indistinguishable from comparable parts of the North," the authors write. "This provides evidence that the effect that we see comes primarily from the local presence of many slaves, rather than state laws permitting the ownership of slaves."
The researchers point to an emerging literature showing that the legacy of slavery can be observed today in other contexts internationally -- from lower levels of household consumption and childhood growth in areas of Peru and Bolivia where people were subject to forced labor, to higher poverty, reduced school enrollment and lower vaccination rates in parts of Colombia where gold was mined by slaves.
The authors will present their findings at the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium at the University of California at Riverside on Sept. 27.
"In political circles, the South's political conservatism is often credited to 'Southern exceptionalism,'" says Blackwell. "But the data shows that such modern-day political differences primarily rise from the historical presence of many slaves."
Where is the (mega) barf alert?
Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lestor Maddox, William Fulbright, the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Byrd, Bull Connor, - yep, all them Republican racists.
I can’t tell you what this scored on my BS meter, because it tore the needle off.
The University of Rochester in New York Nuff said.
Well when you consider that the “black belt” is named after the color of soil not the color of anyone’s skin, you have to dismiss this “analysis” pretty quickly.
It isn’t ‘comments’ which come tyo mind when I read filth propaganda seeking to gin up racial tensions using false premises ...
And there is no racism outside the South? Who knew?
People are more racist up north then down here. I argue this point constantly with Northern pinheads.
Lester Maddox actually was a good governor of Georgia and he lived long enough to hear a few of his opponents admit it.
Just how many people do these author believe were slave holders in 1860? Does the percentage of people who were slave owners correspond somehow with the percentage of people who are, “gasp”, against Affirmative Action and vote Republican and have a negative attitude towards African Americans? I mean if the two are directly related one would expect there to be some kind of direct linear connection. You know, like tracing somebody’s current political philosophy on the fact back in the day their family were slave holders.
How many people interviewed were transplants? I can guarantee you that people don’t move to the South just in hopes they will get to carry on the Plantation life. Nor to relive the glory days of Reconstruction where crimes against recently freed slaves was a Democratic past time. In fact Southern Democrats have been very closely connected with such crimes. How did the authors miss that?
This poor attitude was towards which African Americans? You see we don’t think they all look alike nor do we lump them together. If you ask a person that lives in an area where most of the violent crime is committed by certain classes of Blacks you will get a negative attitude because the reality is that someone has probably had a negative experience with such persons. Get down to specifics and you will find the attitude is not applied to all Blacks.
The biggest BS of them all is that it is very obvious (nope I have not read the original source material, but I know.) the authors decided in advance what the conclusion must be and made sure to frame their questions in order to solicit the answers that would meet that conclusion. This is what Liberal academics do. It is also BS because it totally ignores the racial tensions and outright racism in those areas of the country (Boston, cough, cough) that do not have a legacy of slavery. Not only that, these are so-called enlightened areas which vote Democrat and just love their little Brown brothers. That is not how I think of Blacks but I notice there is always a tone of “White man’s burden” in how Libs speak about Black people.
Lastly the authors failed to learn something very important before speaking to Southerners. We can shine on a stupid, condescending, peckerheaded, fool of a damn liberal Yankee and not break a sweat. We know what they think of us. We know they hold us in contempt. We bless their hearts all the way up one side of the road and then bless it all the way down the other side. All the time wondering how God must surely love fools cause He made so many of them. By the way they do make tasty breakfast treats.
Bullcrizzap!
I always assumed that much of the southern conservatism was based upon “the Bible Belt”..and having grown up in Durham, N.C. I think I am more correct than these liberal bozos.
I have fond feelings toward blacks, and am as Conservative as they come!~
In the North there is/was greater segregation on a physical basis tot eh point where many on both sides had no daily interaction with each other. Quite different situations leading to quite different understandings.
The Southern slave owners back then were Democrats. The CW only ‘freed’ the slaves in the South, while allowing people in the North to continue to have slaves. The Union also destroyed land ownership records and permitted their carpetbaggers to claim lands in the South.
The slavery issue was just used as an excuse to start the war. The real issue was economics, as the North was just making products that they couldn’t export (because they were being made in Europe as well), but the South had secured lucrative contracts for exporting cotton and tobacco to other countries. The North saw it was going to lose economically big time, so had to find a reason to foment a war, where they had the manufacturing advantage for armamant. ............JMO
During slavery many slaves learned the trades and once freed were free to practice these trades. In the north all trades were unionized, highly paid and practiced racism with a vengeance.
Much of the negative portrayal of southerners is the product of “sophisticated” northerners trying to assuage their guilt of a much more damaging form of racism.
I say this as a person who lived his first sixty years in the north and nearly forty years in the tristate region.
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