Deep Roots
Book Review by Kam Williams
Deep
Roots
How
Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics
by
Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell and Maya Sen
Princeton
University Press
Hardcover,
$29.95
296
pages, Illustrated
ISBN:
978-0-691-17674-1
“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.”
Excerpted
from the dust jacket
William
Faulkner is the only Nobel prize-winner born in Mississippi, which is
where most of his stories are set. One of this preeminent Southern
writer's most memorable lines is, “The past is never dead. It's not
even past.”
That
quote comes to mind while reading “Deep Roots: How Slavery Still
Shapes Southern Politics.” That's because, after conducting
painstaking research, authors Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell and
Maya Sen arrived at a conclusion (“History shapes contemporary
political culture.”) which sounds like a paraphrase of Faulkner's
famous saying.
Over
the course of the 150+ years since Emancipation, the descendants of
slave owners have continuously operated to prevent blacks from
pursuing the American Dream. In the face of the 13th,
14th
and 15th
Amendments, southern municipalities, cities and states passed Jim
Crow laws denying African-Americans the right to vote, travel, buy
land, possess a gun, get an education, and so forth.
The
punishment for even the slightest of infractions ranged from whipping
to lynching in order to strictly maintain the region's color-coded
caste system. “Racial violence was an important component of the
development of anti-black attitudes, even among poor whites.”
Furthermore, “White children were often present... and, in some
striking cases, they were also active participants.”
So,
is it any surprise that, “As of the 2016 election, all of the
former states of the Confederacy had implemented some voter
identification law” in an effort to deny as many black citizens as
possible access to the ballot box? Advocates of Confederate monuments
and memorials continue to claim the Civil War was waged over states'
rights, conveniently ignoring the assertion of the designer of the
rebel battle flag that, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain
the heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or
colored race.”
A
timely tome which explains why, from neo-Nazis marching in
Charlottesville to Virginia politicians donning blackface, when it
comes to the South, the more things change, the more they remain
insane.
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