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ObamaNation See other ObamaNation Articles Title: How ex-Confederates spread racist attitudes far and wide after the Civil War A new study outlines how white people’s migration during and after the Civil War, from the Confederate South to the West, bolstered white supremacy and institutional racism in non-slave states, helping create the vast racial disparities that exist today nationwide. Five researchers from separate colleges collaborated on the study, called “Confederate Diaspora,” to compile and study census data that tracked the migration to the West of white Americans, including 60,000 former plantation owners. The former Southerners took on local positions of authority, like police officers, clergy and politicians, giving them influence to create a post-Civil War culture that continued to oppress Black people even after slavery had ended. This results in structural and systemic racism in almost every walk of life today — education, housing, jobs, health care and wealth, among other areas — that continues to hamper progress for Black people, according to a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research this month. The former Confederates “continued to transmit norms to their children and non-Southern neighbors,” the researchers wrote, “shaping racial inequities in labor, housing, and policing.” Researcher Patrick Testa, an assistant professor of economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, said the impact of the Confederates on other parts of the country was deep and long-lasting. In the three decades following the Civil War, white Southerners were more likely than other white people to take on work in governance, he said, and former slaveholders were even more likely to assume those positions, he said. “What we show ultimately is that these migrants,” Testa said, “through these governance channels and channels of public-facing authority, helped lay the groundwork for these types of symbols and racial norms and a broad-base Confederate nostalgia to really take off at a national level by the early 20th century.” One of those “norms” was the institution of the Ku Klux Klan and the racial terror it inflicted in many parts of the country. In the report, the researchers identify “overrepresentation of first-and second-generation migrants in the KKK,” adding that the second generation of the KKK established in 1915 helped to “rejuvenate and mainstream Confederate culture.” Those born in the South were 11% more likely to belong to the KKK in the Denver metropolitan area, for example, a major hub of Klan activity in the 1920s beyond the South, the report said. “The harmful legacies of slavery persist beyond those that experience being slaves, but across generations and across places,” Testa said. Along with census data, the group of researchers analyzed KKK membership records of second-generation Confederate migrants who were born outside of the South but maintained slavery-era norms. “This suggests,” Testa said, the passing down of racial animus from generation to generation may have been “an important vehicle for sustaining diaspora influence long after the initial Confederate migrants had passed.” As the California Reparations Task Force is set to hand over its recommendations to the state’s Legislature next week, this new study crystalizes how states that did not legally allow slavery, like California, still contributed mightily to oppressing Black people. Some detractors of reparations have argued that California was not a slave state and therefore, it should not offer reparations. But in the later part of the 19th century it became the home of numerous former Southerners and it was populated by so many Confederate-aligned citizens that it supported John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 presidential election. Breckinridge advocated for the expansion of slavery and supported the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which required the return of an enslaved person to a plantation even if he was found in a “free state.” “It’s important to look beyond the South, even to places like California,” Testa said, “and look for ways such as reparations … to heal these divisions, to heal the socio-economic gaps.” Because many parts of California favored Breckinridge, it became a popular destination for Southerners at the time. “Outside of the South, California is maybe the most intense in terms of a cultural index that indicates how it accepted racism,” Testa said. Studying the spread of former Confederates was important, Testa said, because it provides clear data on how the ills of slavery and the Confederate ideology spread across America. “For the purposes of understanding the multifarious roots of racial division in American society, which continues to be persistent long after, it’s important,” Testa said. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com Poster Comment: One of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces of sophomoric drivel I have ever come across. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 9.
#3. To: Dakmar (#0)
Let's see... "other white people" in the context of this sentence would be..... white Northerners? This is probably due to the fact that white southerners were economically displaced due to their losing the war and having their cities looted by the north as punishment. So the well-to-do southerners, which yes would very often be ex-slave holders, would have lost their homes and been more in the market for a new life in generally white collar occupations in places to which they were displaced.
Southerners lost much more than their homes when the Yankee invaders razed Southern cities and countryside; they also lost their loved ones, their fortunes, and their future. With their state constitutions overthrown, Negro legislatures forcibly installed, disenfranchised, and ruled at the point of a federal bayonet by the Yankee occupiers, many Southerners sought greener pastures for themselves and their posterity. Your analysis, as far as it goes, is right on. Thank you. But just as the author of this drivel chose to capitalize "Black people" and not capitalize "white people", you capitalized "Northerners" while not capitalizing "Southerners". We Southerners take that as an insult; I trust that this was inadvertent, and that you did not intend to insult the people of the South.
It was inadvertent. I don't think there are any grammar rules firmly dictating which is appropriate, but you are obviously right that usage should be consistent on black/white/northern/southern. Thanks for the correction.
Thanks for the reply. Agreed; there seems to be no hard rule for whether Black and White and such should be capitalized. But geographic regions and the collective names for their inhabitants -- especially if they share a common culture -- should always be capitalized, no? E.g. Southern Indiana, Northern France, East Tennessee, Midwesterner, Southerner, Damnyankee.
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