Passed Down Through the Generations

[Editorial]

You hear a lot about family values, but sometimes those family values started with the enslavement of human beings, and they have been passed down through the generations.

The Supreme Court just stripped protections from the Voting Rights Act by allowing states to redistrict. The defendants in court claimed that the redistricting was not about race.

What was the first thing those states did?

They did away with Black districts… but (wink, wink) it supposedly was not about race.

So look at the states that redistricted.

They are the same states that opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They are the same states that enforced Jim Crow laws. They are the same states that broke away from the Union. They are the same states that believed it was acceptable to own people.

Harvard Kennedy School in two book reviews about on how slavery still is affecting the states, the first article, Slavery, Politics, and Causality...

Abstract

How has slavery shaped the politics of the United States over the last century and a half since emancipation? Our book, Deep Roots (Acharya, Blackwell and Sen, 2018), tackled this question using a combination of quantitative, historical, and theoretical tools. Building on our earlier article published in The Journal of Politics (Acharya, Blackwell and Sen, 2016), our book shows a clear, persistent correlation between the proportion of enslaved people in a Southern county in 1860 and the political attitudes of whites living in those counties in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially on issues related to race. The book employs various identification strategies and falsification tests to establish these relationships as plausibly causal. It presents evidence that these patterns cannot easily be explained by theories of racial threat or by antebellum attitudes on race, but, rather, that the political economy of the post-Civil War period generated incentives for whites of all social strata to adopt strongly anti-Black views, which have been passed down in local communities over time.

And the second article; The Political Legacy of American Slavery,

Abstract

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action policies, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of racial attitudes. We argue that, following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce racist norms and institutions. This produced racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the American South.

They values of bigoty and discrimination are passed down through the generations! And they're not my family values.

[/Editorial]