Please help me identify what some of the darkest counties are on this quasi-map.
I'm hoping people who KNOW these will be in a position to notice subtleties lost on me. So far, my main progress has been to suspect that the darkest spots are not centered on urban areas but more adjacent to them, like suburbs.
modified from The Political Legacy of American Slavery by Acharya, Blackwell and Sen, itself based on 2012 work by Heather A. O'Connell
The reason this is important: The paper this image is taken from (and modified enough so I'm claiming fair use) lives at
http://scholar.harvard.edu/...
and shows 1860 census data of slave ownership projected onto contemporary counties. As I'll elaborate beyond the squiggle, the authors derive a general pattern suggesting that local cultures of white cohesion grew in the post-bellum period based on this distribution and apparently have persisted, meaning they are being sustained and fed from within.
I find this very interesting and encourage my fellow Kossacks to give me a pass here on the horrors part of responding to this. The paper's authors do not speculate on patterns of cultural transmission beyond expecting a mixture of parent-to-child and institutions. The thought is that deeply rooted pockets peppered across the darker spots of this map both started and perpetuated local white supremacist systems, embedding a living culture that continues to influence political attitudes. This is not a conspiracy model -- think tide pools & independent pockets with their own ecology.
My previous diary where I STARTED to make sense of this is at http://www.dailykos.com/...
This diary is pretty informal since I am hoping to solicit input or ongoing participation from other interested folks here. I guess this has Group potential, but I doubt we're close to that. But if one or two people were willing to trade Kosmail, it would be a big help.
There must be interesting stories centered on these living cultural pockets. The paper's authors deliberately avoided non-academic speculation. But here are some excerpts of what they did say:
p. 1: political scientists have largely overlooked how American slavery and the events following its abolition could continue to influence its contemporary politics.
p. 5: In our theory, it is socio-political attitudes, rather than partisanship, that are passed down from parent to children.
p. 8: our primary goal in this paper is to establish the effect of slavery in 1860 on attitudes today.
p. 18: The prevalence of slavery, coupled with the shock of its removal, created strong incentives for Southern whites to try and preserve both their political and economic power by promoting racially targeted violence, anti-black norms, and, to the extent legally possible, racist institutions.
p. 24: there is more racial violence in areas previously more reliant on slave labor.
p. 34: [other] research overlooks historical and culturally rooted explanations for the formation of public opinion.
For folks willing to explore my request for help, I'll link here to the sundown town state-by-state data from the work of James Loewen (h/t Sara Robinson):
http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/...
I know so little about the South and have barely been in it. I know this is not a great presentation-of-research I've got going here. What I expect to uncover is something speaking to a lovely white supremacist lifestyle that LOCAL members dearly wanted to preserve based on their heartfelt values. For example, TPM has an eye-opener about how Ellen Wilson's heartfelt feelings led to the resegregation of the federal workforce
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
As an American ethnic jew raised to expect that attitudes can change and I might not always be safe in America, my love of my country has co-existed with the idea that some people do bad things, and being victimized by murdering nutjobs is never out of the question. My interest in this is compassionate and sympathetic to emotional desperation as a spur to evil acts. Instead of building the America you and I were raised on, frightened pockets built a system that continues to victimize all of us, generally. That picture shows wounds that did not heal properly. The hideous crimes that can be tallied might be relevant to a future indictment of the do-ers, but for this, here, they are more likely clues to where these attitudes continue to be fed with new life and new fuel.
Update: TarheelDem's "This is not difficult" comment below is fabulous. Check it out.