Wheat

I am always thankful when there is a scientific explanations for things that I find troubling. And never more so than when the explanation packs a surprise while simultaneously making you slap your head along the lines of “Of course… why didn’t I see that one coming.”

Consider the following, for example. If we took a soil sample from every county in the American South and analyzed it for mineral deposits, which make the soil rich, we would get a map that shows a “black belt.” These stretches of land across the South have dark soil, more fertile than others, and are thus amenable for producing certain nutrient dependent crops, like cotton, tobacco, indigo and rice.

If you superimpose a map of every county election outcome across the South on the soil map, you find that they perfectly overlay – the darker the soil, the more conservative the vote. And that does not go only for the vote per se – if you research attitudes across all those counties, the ones with richer soil have culturally more conservative views and are more (openly and latently) racist, assuming a value differential between white and black people and agreeing with legal, institutional or social measures to prevent the progress of Blacks.

Sun Flowers

Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics is a scientific exploration of this phenomenon. Avidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history, in a book written during the Obama years, no less.

Here is the full argument: https://art19.com/shows/why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes/episodes/1c01f809-2331-4d1f-97be-7320c96af997

 

 

 

Corn

And here is my distillation in a nutshell: Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose. What the authors add, though, is a mechanism called behavioral path dependence: Generation after generation passed down and reinforced beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learned from their parents and taught their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoed the value judgments and created spaces for segregation.

Rape seed

When slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relied increasingly on cultural mechanisms:

MAYA SEN: I think things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.

.. to be able to kind of preserve the same structure, economic structure that we had  with slavery it required a lot more kind of local vigilance to kind of enact these policies. So you had a kind of creation of a culture, a maintenance of a culture that required things like extrajudicial violence, it required basically training and indoctrinating young children into thinking about the world in certain ways.

And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (what’s left of it…,) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.

Grapes

Berries and fruit trees

Here is the full introductory chapter to their book:

https://books.google.com/books?id=zKtADwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=maya+sen+soil&source=bl&ots=d6EGFYepGL&sig=MSHEo1H07y9bSAicq6AWPPwEWT4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAuvuI59zeAhXKilQKHe1FBrE4ChDoATAIegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=maya%20sen%20soil&f=false

It has nothing to do with what is happening in the present, or how you could rationally argue about economic interests in the present. It is about pervasive prejudiced beliefs instilled through generations, not likely to be eradicated by external education unless they are systemically tackled over the long haul.

Photographs are of crops grown in my immediate vicinity….

Cabbage

And last but not least: hazel nuts and tulips!