Via Edge of the West this map showing the distribution of slaves in the antebellum United States is pretty neat as are the other maps on that page from the University of Chicago. While you're at Edge of the West, check out their historically informed take on Bruce Bartlett's odd thesis that a full and frank airing of the Democratic Party's history on race would reflect poorly on contemporary liberalism.
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Mapping Slavery
28 Dec 2007 03:17 pm
Comments (20)
Judging from the way the Clintons have run their campaign, I think the dems can longer really claim the moral high ground on the issue of racial equality. I just posted a comment about this on Ambinder's blog post about Michelle Obama's speech in South Carolina. I'll post it here too because its relevant. I found the following via Rikyrah at Jack and Jill -- and she found it on daily kos. I have no idea who originally posted it, but I thank the author wholeheartedly for speaking the truth -- people need to understand what has been going on. They cannot stay in denial about it:
"bell hooks, in one of her many brilliant writings, said "Beware the liberal walking beside you." I understood the meaning of the words clearly enough when I studied hooks a decade ago, but I was living in Canada then, and didn't understand the raw guts of the thing.
Now I do.
The academic term for what Hillary, Kerrey et al (including the media) are doing is reinscription - the reinscribing of racial stereotypes. That's what the "just saying what other people are going to say!" thing is called. Think of it as drumming racism into our heads so it stays there. Here's another one - "I'm just describing reality, the way things really are." Bob Kerrey's "I meant it in a good way" comment is classic. It's like "Jews are good with money." (Kerrey actually lied tonight, by the way, in saying that Obama attended a secular madrassa. There is no such thing, as he well knows. But he wanted the word madrassa in there.)
They're trying to make us fear Obama on a subconscious level, so we hesitate, so we "feel" that there is something that just doesn’t "feel" right....
And they're trying to make Democrats fear the big, bad xenophobic Republicans.
But Conservatives have no monopoly on xenophobia.
hooks warned against liberals for good reason. There is power in feeling oneself to be "one of the good guys." We like that. We like to think that those other guys are racist, but we're not. We’re the heroes! We like black people! We want black people to get ahead!
Alas, we don't want them to get ahead of us. Subconsciously, we "feel" that Obama should know his place. We'll march beside, him but heaven forbid he leads! We’re being nice to him, he should respect that and know his place. These are feelings, not thoughts.
It's all about how many degrees of difference there are between us and the "other" that we perceive. White males still rule this country, much more than we know. It's all about the mind. White females are one step removed from the white male subject, and Hillary has her own difficulties on that score. But black men are further away, because race is even more different than gender, and blackness creates even more fear in white men than femaleness.
It's all about power and fear. We fear what is different, and we can’t grant power to that which we fear. The Clintons, more ruthless than Karl Rove in his own wet dreams, are capitalizing on that fear."
Thanks for sharing, Matt. Totally fascinating to note the dearth of slaves in my native east Tennessee, where Northern sympathizers were numerous and where the Republican party commanded a majority of the electorate (then as now). A few counties even voted to secede from Tennessee in order to rejoin the Union -- not for nothing was Tennessee the last to leave and the first to return formally.
On the other hand, the rural Georgia county where my mother was born and raised was heavily populated with slaves, apropos of the plantation economy there. Incidentally, this county's current demographics rank it as one of the top five in percentage of African-American citizens throughout the entire U.S.
As Faulkner observed about the South, "the past ain't even past."
If you go to one of those red/blue by county maps for 2000 and 2004, the similarity is striking, with some exception. The blue Mississippi valley, the bits of blue in northern Florida and the blue swath running through Alabama, Gerogia and the Carolinas up to southern VA on the 2000/04 maps look very much like the dark spots on the antebellum slavery map.
Nice try, Bruce.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm
Emmy,
But Bruce Bartlett would just respond "see, that proves my point -- the counties of slavery are those that are to this day Democratic" and ignore the demographics of the Democratic voters.
Interestingly FWIW, here in North FL, the blue swath would have been bigger but in some of the counties 'round these parts, local election officials were able to mysteriously set ballot readers in such a way that many votes would be rejected due to stray marks (some made by the machines themselves ... and others made by the crappy pens they give you to mark your ballot which leave marks everywhere unless you are super-duper careful and spend a lot of time being so ... time which those who have to work multiple jobs to stay afloat financially lack) without the voters knowing that they ought to have casted another vote.
"Bruce Bartlett's odd thesis that a full and frank airing of the Democratic Party's history on race would reflect poorly on contemporary liberalism."
I did not understand Matt's earlier criticism of my book. But if this is what he thinks I am saying then it becomes clearer to me.
This is not in fact the thesis of my book at all. Indeed, it says almost nothing about contemporary liberalism. I am not arguing at all some racial version of Jonah Goldberg's book. My book is a purely historical review of the Democratic Party's racist past--emphasis on the word "past."
I make it clear that the Democratic Party finally began to repudiate its racist past under Harry Truman, whom I declare to be an unsung civil rights hero. What made him a hero is precisely the fact that he bucked his own party on civil rights.
The only negative thing I have to say about liberals since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s is that they tend to look the other way at racism exhibited by Democrats like Ernest Hollings, while grossly exagerating lesser offenses by Republicans.
But this is politics and Republicans certainly play the same game with Democrats on issues such as national security. However, while Democrats fight back against Republican charges of being weak on national security, Republicans almost never respond to Democratic charges that they are racists. And as everyone knows, in politics charges that are not responded to are assumed to be true. I think this is a key reason why Democrats are so convinced that Republicans are inherently racist.
This is a lie, of course, but one I don't have space here to examine in detail. If my book encourages Republicans to fight back, I think it would be good for the country. I don't think elections should be based on lies. There are more than enough legitimate differences between the candidates as it is.
Here's a helpful summary:
Past Democrats: pro-racist
Past Republicans: anti-racist
Current Democrats: anti-racist
Current Republicans: anti-racist
It is pretty clear that whether members of a party was pro-racist or anti-racist in the past has nothing to do with whether today's members of the party are racist.
So Bruce Bartlett,
Would you mind telling me, Joe Reader (forget that I'm liberal, but consider me as someone who, like any politically aware person, knows something about the history of the Democratic party, including of the existance of Southern Dems, etc.), what exactly is the thesis of your book? Sell me your book -- tell me why I should buy it. What insights will it give me? What will it tell me that I don't already know?
Alternatively, consider me as Joe Publisher. What did you tell the publisher to sell your book? I know books don't get peer reviewed like (academic) journal articles, but if you were writing a journal article version of your thesis and the reviewer said "I already knew that about the Dems", what would you point out is new and exciting about your thesis and evidence/arguments for it that would cause me to want to accept it for publication?
"Democrats are so convinced that Republicans are inherently racist. This is a lie, of course."
Of course. Look idiot. Either they're not convinced, or it's not a lie. If I'm convinced that what I'm saying is true, I can't be lying.
"If my book [which doesn't "reflect poorly on contemporary liberalism" and in fact "says almost nothing about contemporary liberalism"] encourages Republicans to fight back..."
This is incoherent. Sorry, I know you tried.
I don't think elections should be based on lies.
So where's your book calling your own party's candidates, past and present, to account for specific lies they've told to get elected? Where's your book identifying the GOP's rhetoric about Democrats on nat'l defense as a lie?
If your goal was to cut down on the lying that goes on during campaigns, you've certainly taken a circuitous, oblique route to addressing the problem.
Thanks for commenting in the thread, Bruce.
I don't think that Democrats think that Republicans are racists. They think that Republicans are indifferent to the problems that blacks face, and willing to exploit racism for political gain. Try writing a book discrediting that thesis.
Bruce --
As a child growing up in a white Southern evangelical household, we were all perfectly clear on what your icon, Ronald Reagan, was trying to communicate to us about "states' rights" and his rhetoric about welfare queens and the like. All of us knew he was speaking directly to us in racist code. We all knew this, year in, year out. There were various reasons why my family -- and indeed, virtually everyone I ever knew -- voted Republican, but the GOP's appeals to racism, both overt and covert, was the hub from which all the other concerns spoked.
I can appreciate your frustration at Krugman and Yglesias and the rest of us, how we cast aspersions on your so-called great man of history. But I came of age in the South in the 1980s so I know in a way you never could about the truth of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Pretty much mirrors historical maps of U.S. cotton production. (You might want to throw in a few other crops, such as tobacco, but this is what I found quickly.)
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Eatlas/english/US/map15.html
Bruce, your thesis is that this history has been "buried," and you now seem to be claiming that it means "buried" in the sense of "dead and buried" rather than "covered up."
A more interesting question is, of course, what original contribution your book provides. After all, you're an economist, not a historian. I, myself, am an engineer. Is there any reason that you can provide particular insights into the well-documented history of southern Democrats' opposition to civil rights laws for blacks that I could not? Or can you tell us what special insights that you will provide in this book that could not be gathered elsewhere?
As I remember, MattY's first post on the topic of your book was to opine that the subject matter was simply a "banal" retelling of history that we are already well-aware of. You yourself now seem to admit that MattY's take on it is correct. Is that what you're getting at? You're justifying yourself by pretty much saying that it's stuff we already are well aware of?
Presumably it was the shame of the Democratic South's racist past which forced so many openly segregationist Southerners to become Republicans.
I'm sure Strom Thurmond wanted to be Republican so that for once and for all everyone would know that he was no Democratic racist, and in fact loved black people, especially the women folk.
I'm quite sure that when in the 1960s the then-Democratic Jesse Helms referred to the liberal UNC Chapel Hill as the "University of Negroes and Communists" on his TV editorials that he was doing so to prepare ground for his split with the racist past of the Democrats, so feverish was his support for the Civil Rights movement he was appearing to denounce. Jesse Helms then became a Republican AFTER his opportunity to stand up for the Civil Rights movement, because I guess he was struck by such admiration for Lincoln. Later, his campaign ads suggested that white hands were losing jobs to affirmative action candidates, I guess as a way of highlighting how racist the Democrats once were decades ago.
Is there any reason that you can provide particular insights into the well-documented history of southern Democrats' opposition to civil rights laws for blacks that I could not? - Tyro
Of course, there is an economics as well as a political story to be told here: about why a party that, in the North especially but even in the South, embraced the "working man" would also be so racist; about the intersection of politics and economics of competition between lower class whites and black worked to the benefit of the upper classes; etc.
And perhaps someone with a foot in both politics and economics as Bruce Bartlett is just the person to tell this story. Is that the story you tell Dr. Bartlett?
OTOH, if the past is dead and buried, why bring it up considering that it is well known? If you think it is buried in the sense of being covered up, what made you come to that odd conclusion when a lot of Democratic attacks of GOP "racism" (about which you complain) directly invoke "we kicked the racists out of our party and funny, they now are in your party", which certainly does not indicate a cover up. What are you trying to get at here, Bartlett?
The one interesting thing though is the under-appreciated role of Truman, as a desegregationist (and, I might add, as a partisan Democrat). A lot of the whistful "why can't we all get along" rhetoric from the kewl kids has invoked "the party of Truman" as their ideal of the Democrats. This invocation troubles many Democrats as the reason for the lack of polarization at the time was the fact that Southern Dems. (and Liberal Republicans*) still were major forces, so the kewl kids' invocations seem almost whistful of a more racist time. But what's interesting about invoking Truman in this regard was (1) his role in driving out the Southern Democrats (although he himself was a product of a border state) and (2) that he was himself outrageously partisan and did many of the things about which the kewl kids complain (even as today's Democrats are far less hard-core about their partisanship and their challenging of the executive in a time of war than Truman was). Should I buy your book, Bartlett, just to read about Truman, 'cause that's always a good story!
(* and to be honest, if I were a Republican, I wouldn't mourn their disappearance -- many of them were exactly the stuff-shirt effete snobs that some Republicans claim Democrats are. Indeed, many of the stereotypes of liberals reflect not the behavior of actual liberal Democrats but how the liberal Republicans of 50-100 years ago were ... the swell of reaction against them didn't just come from right wingnuts -- even Nixon, who rode a wave of right wing support, was really a moderate at heart, but he had good reason to dislike and distrust his party's liberal wing!).
fascinating to note the dearth of slaves in my native east Tennessee - BryklynLibrul
I also note the dearth of slaves in Southern MO and the presence of more than a few in Northern MO. So much for the "South" vs. the "North" in all but the most general linear, geographic terms.
I have family in Poplar Bluff, and it seems that, in spite of their (or perhaps because of their "exotic") foreign-ness and non-Christianity, they were very well received.
OTOH, a friend of mine, whose parents are immigrants (and whose father is non-Christian) grew up in rural, Northern MO. From what he said it was a very tough place to grow up as an "outsider". Also, he told me they still had old-fashioned, medieval-style, anti-Semitic Passion Plays -- in the 1980s!
Interesting how cultures develop, ain't it?
My book is a purely historical review of the Democratic Party's racist past--emphasis on the word "past."
And it comes with a coupon for a free bridge in Brooklyn.
Disingenuous hack.
Here's a helpful summary:
I prefer this one:
Al yesterday: hack.
Al today: hack.
Al tomorrow: hack.
I loved that John F. Smith, "Historical Geography" map. It demonstrates partisan trolls predate the invention of the WWW by over 100 years.
I also note the dearth of slaves in Southern MO and the presence of more than a few in Northern MO. So much for the "South" vs. the "North" in all but the most general linear, geographic terms.
This would seem to be an artifact of the techno-economic nature of slavery and the distribution of plantations and agriculture around major rivers. It's also the same river that leads into eastern Kansas.
Comments closed January 11, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Scroll down for maps.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/dusting-off-manual-kevin-reports-that.html
Posted by Gary Sugar | December 28, 2007 3:42 PM