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“It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.”

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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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“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas as well as to suppress blacks. In his definitive study of disenfranchisement, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, J. Morgan Kousser quotes North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, who made the point succinctly, writing several years after a violent 1898 Democratic putsch ousted the interracial Populist-Republican-Fusion government that had won consecutive statewide elections: "The Democratic party is alone sufficient. We need a united people. We need the combined effort of every North Carolinian. We need the strength which comes from believing alike." Segregation was enforced on whites as well as blacks. That reality is obscured in a contemporary perspective that flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white. That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated.”

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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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