Still distinctive after all these years

Southern Cultures

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 117-141

  Griffin, Larry J ^a   Hargis, Peggy G ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57049182689     PISSN: 10688218     EISSN: 15341488     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/scu.0.0020     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Hugh D, Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origin and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
2. Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
3. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
4. R. A. R. Edwards, "Deaf Rights, Civil Rights: The Gallaudet 'Deaf President Now' Strike and Historical Memory of the Civil Rights Movement," in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 317-45
5. Larry W. Isaac and Lars Christiansen, "How the Civil Rights Movement Revitalized Labor Militancy," American Sociological Review 67 (October 2002): 722-746
6. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
7. Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, "New Patterns of American Inequality," Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 75-108.
8. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
9. Gary Orfield, Susan Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal oj Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New Press, 1996).
10. On the events in Jena, Louisiana, see Tom Mangold, "Racism Goes on Trial Again in America's Deep South," The Observer (UK), 20 May 2007
11. Richard G. Jones, "In Louisiana, A Tree, a Fight, and a Question of Justice," The New York Times, 19 September 2007
12. and "Race, Justice, and Jena: Black Leadership in America," The Economist, 29 September 2007.
13. One of the ugliest events to occur in the post-Civil Rights South was the 1999 murder, by dragging, of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. See "Dragging Victim's Suffering Cited; Texas Jury Hears From Pathologist," The Boston Globe, 23 February 1999.
14. American sociologist and Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) argued in his 1907 treatise, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1906), that "stateways cannot change folkways. "
15. On the white South's emphasis on folkways at the expense of stateways, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)
16. and conservative newspaper editor James J. Kilpatrick's The Southern Case for School Segregation (New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1962).
17. Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 86, 126.
18. See Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America, 1-8, for an exceptionally clear discussion of the distinction between racial attitudes and racial norms and the bearing each has on behavior.
19. For useful discussions of these changes and the reasons behind them, see Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America, 279-310
20. and Glenn Firebaugh and Kenneth E. Davis, "Trends in Antiblack Prejudice, 1972-1984: Region and Cohort Effects," American Journal of Sociology 94 (September 1988): 251-272.
21. In arguing that favorable responses to social distance and equality principles may be an indicator of "color blind racism," sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is one of the strongest critics of the exclusive use of questions eliciting only old-fashioned prejudice or racist responses; see his Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
22. For a discussion of "laissez faire racism," see Lawrence Bobo, James R. Klugel, and Ryan A. Smith, "Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Prejudice," in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 15-44. Fielded by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the GSS is the most widely used survey of its type in the United States, in part because of the quality of the data: its samples are generally representative of the nation's non-institutionalized adult population, and nearly all information is collected by personal interviews rather than telephone interviews or internet surveys. See http://www. norc. org/GSS+Website/ for more information. Throughout this paper, we use the U. S. Census definition of the South, which includes the 11 former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Were we able to use more stringent (and, to us, accurate) definitions of the region - excluding, in particular, the Mid-Atlantic states, Washington, D. C., and West Virginia - we would without doubt observe larger regional differences than we report here.
23. Combining the 1994 and 1996 surveys yields a larger sample and thus more stable results.
24. On the central importance of sex, racial purity, and interracial sexual relations to the Jim Crow South, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black / White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)
25. and Melton McLaurin, Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).
26. James H. Kuklinski, Michael D. Cobb, and Martin Gilens, "Racial Attitudes and the 'New South,'" Journal of Politics 59 (May 1997): 323-349.
27. See http://www. pollingreport. com/politics. htm; http://www. cnn. com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/ results/candidates/#1918
28. and Adam Nossiter, "Race Matters Less in Politics of South," New York Times, 21 February 2008. We suspect that many southern whites who voted for Clinton in the Democratic party primaries would also vote for Obama in the general election of 2008.
29. On white supremacy and the cardinal test of white southerners, see Ulrich B. Phillips, "The Central Theme in Southern History," American Historical Review 34 (October 1928): 30-43
30. and John Shelton Reed, "'The Cardinal Test of a Southerner': Not Race But Geography," Public Opinion Quarterly 37 (Summer 1973): 232-240.
31. According to the combined 2004-2006 GSSes, 26 percent of white northerners lived in rural areas or small towns (i. e., those with populations less than 2500), compared to 31 percent of white southerners. Sixteen percent of the region's whites had failed to finish high school, and 12 percent had some post-graduate college education. Comparable statistics for whites in the North were 11 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Thirty-one percent of white northerners self-defined as Republicans in 2004/06 and 33 percent as conservative to some degree; 37 percent of white southerners claimed allegiance to the Grand Old Party, and 45 percent asserted a conservative political ideology. The argument that education teaches people to present themselves as egalitarian and tolerant rather than actually instilling these characteristics is found in Mary R. Jackman and Michael J. Muha, "Education and Intergroup Attitudes: Moral Enlightenment, Superficial Democratic Commitment, or Ideological Refinement?" American Sociological Review 49 (December 1984): 751-69.
32. See Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
33. Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis, "Surveying Memory: The Past in Black and White," Southern Literary Journal 40 (Spring 2008): 42-69
34. and Larry J. Griffin, "Give Me That Old Time Music . . . or Not," Southern Cultures 12, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 98-107.
35. Shankar Vedantam, "See No Bias: Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are," The Washington Post, 23 January 2005, http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/articles/A27067-2005Jan21. html.
36. For more on the Implicit Association Test, see http://www. projectimplicit. net. When used to measure implicit racial bias, the test is designed to elicit automatic associations between concepts or entities (e. g., black faces and white faces) and attributes of those entities (e. g., "nasty," "wonderful"). Bias is measured by the length of time it takes subjects to match different colored faces with positive attributes. (We were unable to locate regional breakdowns in test results. ) The form of prejudice or bias detected by the IAT differs from that uncovered by the political scientists we discussed earlier (see note 10). The former is assumed unconscious and thus unknown by the individual her- or himself; the latter is very much conscious and known, but masked, unspoken in public circumstances or in "polite" conversations.
37. Devah Pager and Lincoln Quillan, "Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do," American Sociological Review 70 (June 2005): 355-380
38. Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108 (March 2003): 937-975.
39. Quoted in John Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 103.