Posted on 08/13/2007 10:27:22 PM PDT by BnBlFlag
Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 By:
Last week while I was up at Harvard University meeting with black columnists from around the country, including several of my BlackAmericaWeb.com colleagues, Michael Dawson took me to school with his map that shows the overlap between Republican red states and the old Confederacy and slave-friendly territories. Dawson is a professor of government and Afro-American studies who specializes in the ways that race and politics intersect.
I was sold. His map spoke to the things you can’t help but notice when you live in a red state like Alabama – especially if you’re black.
Things like pickup trucks with gun racks and Confederate flag bumper stickers. White teens wearing the Confederate flag on their T-shirts. Statues memorializing old Confederate leaders like Nathan Bedford Forrest. Commemorations of the Confederate dead by state officials, especially speeches in which they maintain that the Civil War – or, as some of them might say, the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression – was fought over state’s rights, not slavery. And predominantly, the people who espouse these things in the red states are white Republicans.
Because Dawson’s map rings so true to me, I expected to hear Alabama’s lone black congressman, Artur Davis of Birmingham, echo his sentiments. “I’m not persuaded by that analysis,” said Davis, a Democrat, during our phone interview last week.
My jaw dropped. Davis is a sharp brother, himself a Harvard grad, who has been dedicated to addressing issues affecting poor blacks in our state. I just knew he’d agree with the map analysis.
Sure, race still influences our politics, Davis explained. However, he believes that cultural conservatism, not race, is the pivotal issue in red states.
“We’ve got to find a way to talk to fiscally and culturally conservative values,” he said. “We have to find a way to move to the center.”
And for Davis, that means that his fellow Democrats and their progressive supporters should move away from advocating for gay marriage, for example. “Americans are opposed to discrimination against homosexuals,” he said. “Where people part company is on the very specific institution of marriage.”
Davis would rather see his party advocate for tolerance of gays. Thurgood Marshall didn’t go to court to argue for lifting the ban on interracial marriage but against separate and unequal schools.
With states erecting gay marriage bans like Christmas trees and a U.S. Supreme Court that is bound to get more conservative in the next four years, Davis wants Democrats and progressives to be pragmatic.
“The black community had to pick and choose its battles,” Davis said. “The gay community will have to do the same.”
Davis’ point of view has merit, though it sounds like the “slow down” argument Dr. King and other civil rights leaders used to hear from black and white leaders advocating caution on civil rights. Still, his analysis of the red state mentality is very accurate and deserves consideration, even though it’s incomplete.
Alabamans just elected a candidate to our state Supreme Court who openly cavorts with rebel flag-waving neo-Confederates. And in 2000, the final vote to remove a ban on interracial marriage from our state constitution – a ban which had been rendered null and void by the U.S. Supreme Court 33 years before – broke down to a shamefully close 60 percent to 40 percent. That’s barely passing in my book, especially since removing it was supposed to be our opportunity to showcase a new Alabama. Maybe we could, if we could ever get rid of the old Alabama.
One of my neighbors, who had barely spoken to me, one day knocked on my door and asked me to help him unload a new couch and love seat from his truck. He’s a young white guy with an ex-military look: close-cut hair, muscular and all tattooed up.
We got the couch off first and struggled to get it through his narrow front door. I could see a giant U.S. flag and an Alabama state flag tacked up on his wall.
That’s nice, I thought. Then I looked to my left and saw his Confederate flag, also on the wall.
What the hell?
Due respect to Congressman Davis, but my neighbor and I are separated by more than cultural conservatism. After seeing that flag on his wall, I didn’t have to ask him about his politics or for whom he was voting. It told me all I needed to know.
I don't think it was that was done away with by the '64 act. I think those election requirements were eliminated by the Voting Act of 1965 which was supported by 85% of Congress including Barry Goldwater.
There’s no doubt blacks mostly vote as a monolithic block. However, they are regularly sold out by the Democrats. If Republicans started actually practicing what we preach, perhaps the blacks would realize conservatism is better for them. Honestly, what have they gotten from the Democrats for all the years of loyalty???
Unfortunately, the leadership of both parties panders only enough to get elected and then mostly ignores the people who voted for them. At least that’s my opinion.
I think had there been a civil rights act passed in the 1860s-70s there never would have been a need for the flawed CRA in 1964. Even such a conservative like Barry Goldwater saw merits in some provisions of the CRA of 1964, he just could not accept the whole thing.
Most slaves didn't live on a plantation. Thomas Jackson, for example, had as many as 8 or 9 at a time and he was a college instructor. The average slave owner had a handful of slaves and that indicates most were not plantation owners. And why wouldn't Northerners invest in slaves and enjoy the benefits of the return they might get on their chattel...unless they were opposed to the practice to begin with?
Dawson is a race-baiting race-pimp pol working the upper end of the educational spectrum with some retail bloody-shirt politics.
He's scared to death, like all his liberal pals, that culturally conservative Southern blacks and whites will eventually reach some sort of down-home modus vivendi without liberal supervision......and that it might prove tough, later on, to split the vote in Southern States along racial lines by talking about "them" (sc., redneck knuckle-dragging etc. etc. honkies etc. etc.).
Splitting up the South is what liberal urban politics has been about since about the beginning of the 20th century. Splitting off other conservatives from the Southern white conservatives who elected the "Class of '94" freshmen, is what the liberals and Democrats have had as Priority One ever since the Reagan Revolution showed them how irrelevant they are. Remember, The New York Times began the campaign against the Confederate flag in the early 1990's, even before the '94 conservative victory in Congress. The termites were already at work.
This article highlights one of those liberal termites munching away on new wood. The contrast between his hate-propaganda and the attempts of the black legislator in Alabama to work with people and get things done is the real lesson here.
In my opinion that was the goal of Reconstruction Republican policies. But a independent yeomanry of the freed slaves politically allied with the white yeomanry was not in the economic interest of the Democratic plantation class and their desire for a "disciplined" labor force. Thus they condemned the South to a long term condition of us versus them tribalism.
It's misleading -- your specialty -- to speak of averages when the distribution of slave ownership was so strongly skewed. Better to speak of medians, or better still, to offer more datapoints. How many slave-holders had more than 100 slaves? How many had more than 200? 1000? And so on.
The reason that these numbers are important is that there was a social fault line separating large planters, who owned many hundreds of slaves, from the freeholders most of whom owned no slaves, or who, if they did own a slave, owned one or two, who lived not in quarters but with the family.
Big difference, which guys like you are at pains to blur and conceal, the better to work your grift of trying to paint all Southerners, dead and living, as slavers <hisssssss!!>, scum of the earth and just repositories of your undying enmity and spite.
We seem to agree, then, that a rotating incumbency of elite, alienated political groups interested in splitting up the yeomanry, as you refer to the middle and lower economic classes, have played at the same politics of division without discernible differences in their m.o., despite overall differences in their own larger goals.
It shows how two groups of kooks use each other to attract followers.
Non-kooks won't be taken in by such trolling.
I think we do agree on that important fundamental. We might disagree more about the particular identity of the malevolent manipulators. I think that since the mid 1850s the Democratic party has been the greatest true enemy of the majority of Southern white people.
But there's nothing discriminatory about that. I also think that since the mid 1850s, the Democratic Party has been the greatest true enemy of the majority of Southern black people.
i see you're still trying to deceive the ignorant/UNwary /naive.
tell us WHY the DYs (who SAID they hated slavery!):
1. kept slaves as long as it was more economical than hiring free people,
2.financed essentially ALL of the:
a. slave ships,
b.slave-TRADING companies &
3. sold their slaves to places where slavery was still profitable, when slavery was UNprofitable in the north, rather than FREEING their slaves.
AND
4. TRIED desperately to "cover-up" their slave dealings after the war while continuing to be IN the "flesh trade", in those places where slavery was still lawful.
PLEASE, OH PLEASE, tell us why those DAMNyankee elitists, that you champion on FR, were anything other than SELF-serving, sanctimonious,SELF-righteous,arrogant,LIARS, HATERS & HYPOCRYTES???
free dixie,sw
Bush won 14 former slave states and 16 free states. Kerry took two former slave states. So much for near perfect alignment.
A guy from 'Bama is proud of his confederate heritage? That hardly makes him a racist. The fact that the guy rang his black neighbor's doorbell might be an indicator he's not a racist, to anyone other than this South-hater.
But, if you really think attachment to 19th Century causes is an indicator of racism, how about the Democratic Party, which supported slavery in the Slave States before the Civil War and supported segregation until after WWII???
The map supports what the author's Alabama source was trying to tell him - this has more to do with cultural conservatism. When the Dims split over Vietnam and abortion in the 1970's, they pushed both national defense and cultural conservatives out - the bedrock of Southern politics. Today's map reverts to a much older pattern of sectional alignment, with the South and West allied against a Northeastern based party.
Look at Texas v. White.
Texas joined the union with an agreement that the state be able to secede and become fully independent again if that was what the state chose.
Myth. Read the document yourself: Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States Approved March 1, 1845
OK, so let's look at that. Statistics I've seen show that only 12% of all slave owners had more than 20 slaves. About half of all slave owners had fewer than 5. Link
The reason that these numbers are important is that there was a social fault line separating large planters, who owned many hundreds of slaves, from the freeholders most of whom owned no slaves, or who, if they did own a slave, owned one or two, who lived not in quarters but with the family.
With the family? What, in the same room? Are you trying to imply that those small slave owners looked upon their property differently than the larger ones? Those individuals like Jackson who were not plantation owners did keep their slaves in the house, so I suppose you could say that they 'lived with the family' but I doubt in as comfortable quarters. But I'm not aware of anything that indicated that Jackson, who owned less than ten slaves, looked upon blacks any differently than Robert Lee, who's father-in-law left 60 to 70 slaves. Both men considered slavery the best position for blacks to be in. And you accuse me of blurring and concealing.
free dixie,sw
Maybe he should also look at other maps, such as the map of 1896. Most of the “Red” states voted for William Jennings Bryan.
further, you tried (again W/O success) to cover-up your DISHONESTY by offering a book (which even you admit doesn't exist) for sale on "the worldwidewierd", in violation of RI state law & only removed that fraudulent listing when you were notified that you had committed a crime.
the truth is that you've told so many lies, about so many subjects & for so long that NOBODY knows whether you lied on another WBTS thread about being:
1. the PERMANENTLY BANNED (from FR) "heyworth" and/or
2. a "member" of DU.
the UNvarnished TRUTH is that you should, if you were a DECENT/moral person, leave FR forever, after apologizing to everyone for being a LIAR, a south-HATER & a HUMILIATION to the otherwise excellent reputation of freerepublic.com.
imVho, your reputation is RUINED beyond redemption with everyone who reads the WBTS threads, so why not LEAVE FR & rejoin your "buddies" over on DU & A.N.S.W.E.R.??
laughing AT you.
free dixie,sw
You're the one who appears to have attempted to perpetrate a shabby (and clumsy) fraud. And, as before, there's no credible proof that "Yachts Against Subs" by the "noted author" Commodore Admiral LBN Gnaedinger actually exists.
Or would you like to tell us the one about the US troops burning down the Alexandria synagogue years before one was ever built there, according to both the historical marker on the site and the history of the temple itself?
Or maybe the one about the court battle that was fought over the captured Galveston U-boat. You cited the newspaper articles about that one.
Tell us how every last victim of Quantrill's raid on Lawrence was a notorious war criminal who had it coming.
Now, tell us about your reputation for honesty
Finally, do you find anything factually wrong with my earlier post? Do you think that Texas did reserve the right to secede in the annexation agreement? I posted a link to the text of the agreement. Show me where it says that.
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