Spurred by the graphic in Paul Krugman's "More on Slavery's Shadow" at
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
which links to a paper showing "strong relationship, at the county level, between the slave share of the population in 1860 and political attitudes today" at
http://scholar.harvard.edu/...
Please indulge me while I try to lay out for myself a few of my related thoughts about racism and America. I'm not sure why I need to do this.
First, I was asked at about 13 whether I was racist and I said I was the kind of New York Jewish liberal who accepted cultural blame for such things. I don't feel I'm allowed to consider myself not to be a racist because even without culpability I'm so covered with what's been around me that I wouldn't know anyway.
I have also done a lot of listening about this and heard the Black Panther-influenced POV that real racists can and often do coexist nicely, that the problem is social and not limited to people who hate -- because they can be quite gracious and decent too as well as making exceptions. The real issue is between live-and-let-live Americans and the supremacist/terrorist pattern that comfortable liberals are seemingly able to patiently coexist with.
I note the Slavery in New York exhibit
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/...
about how until 1827 my childhood home town was racially a very different place than I had imagined.
I wish I remembered more of what little I used to know about David Niewert's work on sunset towns.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/
I believe the basic argument was that there was a post-Civil War diaspora of black citizenry, and that the sunset laws locally treated anyone black as an undesirable transient who had better just be passing through.
I also note the Green Book black people used to survive and hopefully enjoy cross-country motor trips.
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/...
What I wonder, based on the paper Krugman cited, is how these regional and especially sub-regional/local areas overlap. Were the most ethic-cleansing sunset towns red on the map of black population in 1860s that is so vivid in Krugman's post? So where were the motorist's safe routes through that? You would wish there would be somewhere that racist attitudes could coexist with decency and people driving while black could be safe. Aside from rare individual exceptions, I doubt it. Maybe there is a map we already somehow know about America. Those red areas feel intuitive, especially up and down the Mississippi.
So my thought is that racism is everywhere in America but "racism" is not the problem with "Racism" so much as active, ongoing persecution, eliminationism, white supremacy, modern Jim Crow, mass incarceration, War on Drugs, the public education system, police as agents of a system of racist oppression, realpolitik stuff that wrecks lives, individuals and futures. DOES THIS STUFF all make sense on the county level?
update: I forgot the obvious map which is the DOJ voting rights districts where the Supreme Court said Congress was being knee-jerk to keep the same map without fresh data. What if the fresh data is that self-perpetuating local attitudes in local counties was always to blame. You've also got to expect this somehow tallies with the 1,250 neighborhoods recently identified by HUD
http://thehill.com/...