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“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”

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Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were. This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”

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Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today. While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”

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Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”

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Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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