Nixon recognized that these voters represented the urban and suburban face of a changing South. Many were transplants from the North who came to the South in search of jobs and opportunity. Nixon appealed to these Peripheral South voters not on the basis of race but rather on the basis of Republican policies of entrepreneurial capitalism and economic success. In other words, he went after the Peripheral South’s non-racist, upwardly mobile voters, leaving the Deep South racists to the Democratic Party. And sure enough, in 1968 Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee and Florida in the Peripheral South and the entire Deep South went to the racist Dixiecrat George Wallace.
What happened to all those racist Dixiecrats who, according to the progressive narrative, all picked up their tents and moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party? Actually, they exist only in the progressive imagination. Of all the Dixiecrats who broke away from the Democratic Party in 1948, of all the bigots and segregationists who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I count one—just one—who switched from Democrat to Republican.
That solitary figure was Strom Thurmond. The constellation of racist Dixiecrats includes Senators William Murray, Thomas P. Gore, Spessard Holland, Sam Ervin, Russell Long, Robert Byrd, Richard Russell, Olin Johnston, Lister Hill, John C. Stennis, John Sparkman, John McClellan, James Eastland, Herman Talmadge, Herbert Walters, Harry F. Byrd Sr., Harry F. Byrd Jr., George Smathers, Everett Jordan, Allen Ellender, A. Willis Robertson, Al Gore Sr., William Fulbright, Herbert Walters, W. Kerr Scott and Marion Price Daniel.
The list of Dixiecrat governors includes William H. Murray, Frank Dixon, Fielding Wright and Benjamin Laney. I don’t have space to include the list of Dixiecrat congressmen and other officials. Suffice to say it is a long list. And from this entire list numbering over 200 we count only a single defection. Thus the progressive conventional wisdom that the racist Dixiecrats became Republicans is exposed as a big lie.
The Dixiecrats remained in the Democratic Party for years, in some cases decades. Not once did the Democrats repudiate them or attempt to push them out. Segregationists like Richard Russell and William Fulbright were lionized in their party throughout their lifetimes, as of course was Robert Byrd, who died as late as 2010 and was eulogized by leading Democrats and the progressive media.
HOW THE SOUTH BECAME REPUBLICAN
We still have one final mystery to clear up. If it wasn’t because of white supremacy, how did the South—not just the Outer or Peripheral South, but also the Deep South—finally end up in the Republican camp? This question is taken up in political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston’s important study, The End of Southern Exceptionalism.49 This work, relatively unknown and with an admittedly strange title, provides a decisive refutation of the whole progressive theory of the Southern Strategy and the big switch.
The key questions that Shafer and Johnston ask are: when did the South move into the GOP camp, and which voters actually moved from Democratic to Republican? Shafer and Johnston show, first, that the South began its political shift in the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower, who won five Peripheral South states in 1956, was the first Republican to break the lock that the FDR Democrats had established in the South. Obviously this early shift preceded the civil rights movement and cannot be attributed to it.
Shafer and Johnston, like Kevin Phillips, contend that after the postwar economic boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, the increasingly industrial “New South” was very receptive to the free-market philosophy of the Republican Party. Thus Shafer and Johnston introduce class as a rival explanation to race for why the South became Republican. In the 1960s, however, they cannot ignore the race factor. Shafer and Johnston ingeniously find a way to test the two explanations—race and class—against each other in order to figure out which one is more important.
Shafer and Johnston do this by dividing the South into two camps, the first made up of the wealthier, more industrial, more racially integrated South—this is the New South—and the second made up of the rural, agricultural, racially homogeneous South—this is the Old South that provided the historical base of the Democratic Party. Shafer and Johnston sensibly posit that if white Southerners are becoming Republican because of hostility to blacks, one would expect the Old South to move over first.
But in fact Shafer and Johnston find, through a detailed examination of the demographic data, that this is not the case. The wealthier, more industrial, more integrated New South moves first into the Republican Party. This happens in the 1950s and 1960s. By contrast, the rural, agricultural, racially homogenous Old South resists this movement. In other words, during the civil rights period the least racist white Southerners became Republicans and the most racist white Southerners stayed recalcitrantly in the Democratic Party.
Eventually, the Old South also transitioned into the GOP camp. But this was not until the late 1970s and through the 1980s, in response to the Reaganite appeal to free-market capitalism, patriotism, protection of the unborn, school prayer and family values. These economic and social issues were far more central to Reagan’s message than race, and they struck a chord beyond—no less than within—the South. In 1980 Reagan lost just six states; in 1984 he lost only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Obviously Reagan didn’t need a specific Southern Strategy; he had an American strategy that proved wildly successful.
Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party, starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing though the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.
As far as congressional House and Senate seats are concerned, the South didn’t become solidly Republican until 1994. Again, this was due to the Newt Gingrich agenda, which closely mirrored the Reagan agenda. Leftist historian Kevin Kruse spells out the Gingrich agenda—reducing taxes, ending the “marriage penalty” and more generally reducing the size of government—and then darkly implies that “this sort of appeal” also had a hidden racial component.50 But everyone who voted for the Contract for America knows that this was not the case. Small-government conservatism is not racism.
Finally, we can figure out the meaning of the title of Shafer and Johnston’s book. We are at “the end of Southern exceptionalism” because the South is no longer the racist preserve of the Democratic Party. The South has now become like the rest of the country. Southerners are Republican for the same reason that other Americans are Republican. And black Southerners vote Democratic for the same reason that blacks everywhere else vote Democratic. For whites no less than blacks, economic issues are predominant, foreign policy and social issues count too, and race has relatively little to do with it.
We can sum up this section by drawing two lines in the South, the line of racism and the line of Republican affiliation. When we draw these lines we see that they run in opposite directions. Survey data show that racism declined dramatically throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and precisely during this period the South moved steadily into the GOP camp. Thus as the South became less racist, it became more Republican. The progressive narrative is in ruins.
Still, don’t expect the Democrats to quit. They have, after all, their new progressive plantation to protect. It may not have the aristocratic élan of the old nineteenth-century slave plantation, but it’s the best FDR, LBJ and their cohorts could do to re-create the plantation system in the twentieth century. And as we will discover, this Democratic plantation is the true home of racist exploitation today. This fact, however, must be covered up if Democrats want to continue to win the votes of blacks and other minorities.
Consequently, we can expect the progressives to continue to chant about the Southern Strategy and the big switch, even when the
evidence has collapsed all around them. They need this rationalization almost as much as they need the plantation itself to stay in power. In fact, their main goal now is to sustain the plantation and to expand it, and to that subject we turn in the next chapter.
9
Multicultural Plantations
Expanding the Culture of Dependency
Nowhere in the ancient or modern world . . . is there the idea that people will become self-sufficient if they are given a lifetime income that is slightly better than subsistence with no requirement either to work or educate themselves.
—Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred1
In this chapter we examine the multicultural plantation, one whose foundation was established by LBJ but was built mostly by Bill Clinton and, even more, by Barack Obama. The multicultural plantation was made possible by the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened America’s door to more than twenty-five million nonwhite immigrants mostly from Asia and Latin and South America. Democrats have seized on this demographic change, the third great wave of immigration in America’s history, to create an expanded plantation system that incorporates blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanics. This plantation—fortified by an accompanying ideology of multiculturalism and identity politics—is the new venue for the most crippling racism that exists today.
Let’s recapitulate our story about racism so far. Throughout this book we have been examining the exploitation schemes put into place by racism and white supremacy. These schemes have been quite varied, even as racism and white supremacy have remained the same. Thus the slave plantation from the 1820s through 1860 generated its own type of racism to justify the ownership of human beings by other human beings. In a country built on the proposition that “all men are created equal,” it was difficult to have slavery without introducing the rationalization that the slaves were an inferior type of human or perhaps even subhuman, so that it would be acceptable to treat them like brutes or merchandise.
The slave plantation was also a self-contained ecosystem, transmitted through generations, with its own rules and codes. Work was mandatory—it was the point of the system—but masters knew slaves had no incentive to work, because they did not receive the fruits of their labor. Hence even masters who were ordinarily kind people knew they needed the whip to make the slaves work against their will.
Stealing in general was regarded indulgently by slave-owners because they recognized they owned not just the stolen property but also the thief who stole it. In no slave state were slave marriages legal, and there were special laws governing mulatto children who turned up. If a plantation owner impregnated a female slave, the law held that the offspring of that union remained a slave. Slave status, in other words, was transmitted through the mother. This was the way of the old slave plantation.
This rule was quite different from the one that operated under the second phase of racism and white supremacy, which was the progressive plantation phase, from the post-Reconstruction 1880s through the 1950s and 1960s. Here black identity was established by the one-drop rule, in which any discernible black heritage—theoretically a single drop of black blood—consigned one to inferior legal and social status. One progressive writer termed it “the mark of the Ethiopian.”
This phase was defined by racial segregation and racial terrorism. This too was an intergenerational system with its own norms, defined by such features as separate schools and separate water fountains, the exclusion of blacks from public life with the possible exception of sports and entertainment, and the use of various forms of intimidation—lynching being only the most gruesome—to punish suspected black criminals and to suppress the black vote. This was the way of the progressive plantation.
But where are racism and white supremacy today? Since those earlier schemes of racist exploitation have ended—we don’t have slavery of the antebellum type anymore, legal segregation has been abolished and no longer do roving hordes of costumed Klansmen ride roughshod over black communities—some might hold that racism and white supremacy have largely disappeared. I entertained this possibility in my 1995 book The End of Racism, in which I argued that while one could find episodic instances of racism, racism as a system of organized exploitation no longer controlled the lives of blacks or anyone else in America.2
That book stirred up a hornet’s nest of progressive criticism. I remember a debate I had with Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in which I challenged him to show me evidence of racism now that was strong enough to prevent his children or my daughter from pursuing their dreams. Jackson confessed he couldn’t, but he insisted that was not because racism had diminished. Rather, he said, it had gone underground and now operated covertly rather than overtly to thwart the aspirations of blacks and other minorities. The less we actually observe this racism, Jackson declared, the more insidious and powerful it is. You can imagine my frustration in attempting to refute this charge of invisible racism.
Yet in the past few decades the progressive left has become obsessively focused on invisible racism. The textbooks are full of concepts such as “subtle racism,” “unintentional racism,” “neoracism” and “cryptoracism.” On one campus, a left-wing psychologist elaborated for me the distinctions between what he termed the three phrases of racism, the “oral phase,” the “anal phase” and the “phallic-oedipal phase.”
Progressive pundits insist that racism doesn’t have to manifest itself through individual acts of racial discrimination; rather, there is “symbolic racism,” involving the use of coded symbols like the flag to provoke racial animosity, and “institutional racism,” operating through seemingly race-neutral practices such as university admissions policies, corporate hiring, bank lending and government contracts. Since those selection processes—merit-based though they might appear—disproportionately benefit whites over blacks, they are manifestations, we hear, of “white privilege” and “white supremacy.”
This search for invisible racism strikes me as looking for racism in all the wrong places. Why pursue hidden racism when there is obvious racism staring us in the face? We can clarify this idea by asking a different question: is there a system of subjugation today that reveals the most blatant manifestation of racism and white supremacy and also represents the third phase of the plantation? This question generates a series of others. If so, how does it operate? Why don’t the people who run the system want to fix it? Why don’t the inhabitants get up and leave? Is such a system limited to blacks or does it also involve other minorities: Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos?
Clearly such a system exists and it is no less an intergenerational ecosystem of racial exploitation than were slavery and segregation, only its reach is much wider. Indeed, all the progressive gobbledygook about covert racism, institutional racism and white privilege seems designed to draw attention away from it. But here, in plain sight, is a racism for the twenty-first century, a whole ecology of human exploitation that is not just protected but cherished by progressive Democrats. It is time to visit the urban plantation.
STREETWISE
I’ve seen the urban plantation myself, up close, in cities like Detroit and Chicago, which I visited most recently in connection with my films. But for my guide I’d like to use progressives who grew up on the plantation or specialize in studying it. I’ll begin with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was raised on the rough streets of Baltimore. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth,” he writes, “was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease . . . Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns.”
The underlying emotion of the urban plantation, for its inhabitants, is fear.
The only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid . . . It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large ring
s and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against the world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall with their hands dipped in Russell sweats.
I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear . . . I learned that “Shorty, can I see your bike” was never a sincere question, and “Yo, you was messing with my cousin” was neither an earnest accusation nor a misunderstanding of the facts. These were the summonses that you answered with your left foot forward, your right foot back, your hands guarding your face . . . Or they were answered by breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting through backyards, then bounding through the door . . . into your bedroom, pulling the tool out of your lambskin or from under your mattress or out of your Adidas shoebox, then . . . returning to that same block, on that same day . . . hollering out, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?”
Coates understands that for young men on the urban plantation, it’s all about power expressed through the ability “to crack knees, ribs and arms.” He also knows how abnormal this environment is, and that there’s another one in which “there were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks.”3
Impressed as I am by Coates’ raw, vivid descriptions, I notice he never asks the question: How exactly did my world get so screwed up? How can my Hobbesian world, where life is nasty, brutish and short, be converted into a happier, more peaceful one? Here Coates is maddeningly unhelpful, giving us nothing more than dark hints that the urban plantation is a creation of public policy. Yes, it is, but whose public policy? Coates does not say.
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