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Why did the attitudes of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century southern whites on affirmative action and the Democratic Party, as well as their degree of “racial resentment,” differ depending on the percentage of African Americans in the counties in which they lived? Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen (hereinafter ABS) contend that this attitudinal contrast was not the result of a current “racial threat” that varied by the difference in black proportions among counties, but was instead the product of attitudes formed at least 150 years earlier under the slave regime, attitudes that were passed on by family and community socialization and by institutional reinforcement. Distant history did it, and what came in the century after 1860 reinforced the lessons. The civil rights movement and the federal laws that the movement inspired dampened the effect of slavery equally throughout the South, but left the Upcountry/Lowcountry contrast intact.
In a sense, their thesis only states a tautology. But for slavery, a much smaller number of African Americans would have voluntarily moved or been involuntarily forced to move to the South, even if tobacco and cotton had been widely cultivated there. No slavery, no Civil War. No freed persons, no Reconstruction, Redemption, or Jim Crow. No Solid South, no civil rights movement, no racist Republican Party. Other resentments. Q.E.D.
But should final effects be attributed to the First Cause alone? Was slavery even the starting point, or was it spotlighted to draw attention to the book? What are we to make of the “behavioral” and “institutional” path dependence that the authors posit to have connected slavery to the present? What causal emphasis should we place on current conditions or a century and a half of reinforcing events? What role did racial threats have in the onset and development of the path? Is the ABS gloss just another form of racial threat theory? Are all facets of race relations so essentially similar that we should view them as a phenomenon that...