Shame of the South

If you’re interested in a good book for the Christmas of 2009, drop me a note. If you can’t wait just follow along here over the next several months

In the wake of Barack Obama’s historic victory there are many proclaiming the end of race-based politics, or who at least see it on the horizon.

I don’t.

I have spent the last three years as editor at Voic.Us, a political blog site. My method was simple. I wrote stories about southern politics, based on links to newspaper stories and blog posts. My job was to collect all the political blogs I could in each state, and then try to describe to readers what they were obsessing about in terms of local and state politics.

The Voic.Us beat eventually covered 10 southern states. I eventually put them into two camps:

1. A near-south group (Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky) where the parties mirrored those of the nation as a whole, and
2. A deep south group (Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) where the parties divided by race. Those who chose to be Democrats had to put up with their neighbors considering them "n-lovers."

Note. Five Thirtyeight.com says that Republicans actually did better in some Voic.Us areas — Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana — in 2008 than in 2004.

It is from the latter group of states that I drew my original thesis, which is that the
Deep South is as divided by race as it ever was, that the problem has
grown noticeably worse over the last decade, and that both sides suffer
equally from that. (Shown here is Georgia House Speaker Glenn Richardson.)

Segregation is alive and healthier than it has ever been, even in the
era of open housing and black gentrification. Once black folks become a
substantial portion of any suburban area most whites flee, leaving a
few bargain-hunters in a minority and black Democrats in control. They
move further-and-further from the city centers, so that Atlanta now
extends 50 miles in any direction.

Where cities are smaller the differences are starker. In Savannah, for
instance, the beautiful, old center city is (outside its tiny
tourist-trap core) becoming a virtual wasteland, boarded-up homes which
attract only poor people, students, and a few urban pioneers. Meanwhile
a car-rific suburban and exurban lifestyle extends all the way down the
coast, onto every barrier island, where the faces are almost all-white
and the bumpers stickers all Republican.

Some, like State Sen. Eric Johnson, president pro-tem of the Georgia Senate, hardly even pretend any more. Their rhetoric is filled with racial code words. Others, such as House Majority leader Jerry Keen, are more subtle, preferring a reverse social Darwinism to hide the fact that they want blacks to pay the taxes and whites to get the services.

But this is not a one-way street. Far from it. In fact the black
Democratic rogue’s gallery is an amazing and highly corruptible bunch.
The urban machines hold black Democrats in their thrall, delivering
them rhetoric and almost nothing more. Ray Nagin in New Orleans, Willie
Herenton in Memphis, Larry Langford in Jackson, Frank Melton in
Jackson, and the all-star cast of the Clayton County School Board,
whose idiocy managed to cost all children their accreditation, are
legion.

And these people serve their purpose. They keep the idea of a black
bogeyman alive in white suburban voters. They keep the idea of racial
resentment alive in poor people who have nothing else to keep them warm.

In these waters, reform hardly stands a chance. An honest public
servant is hard to raise when officials are elected almost entirely in
primaries and the first instinct is to vote by color. It’s amazing that
some manage it.

You can think of what will follow as a cross between Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities and Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom.
In stating that I make no pretense that the result will be as good as
either of those great works of historic journalism. I merely mean to
show where I got my idea from and the approach I plan to take, which
will be as dispassionate as possible.