The Legacy Of Racism, And Haley Barbour's Comments

Yglesias summarizes what Haley Barbour was trying to say:

I think both what Barbour said and the context were pretty clear. In Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s most white people were white supremacists. And within the large and powerful white supremacist community, there was a split between more moderate and more radical factions. The moderates pursued a strategy of economic coercion and the radicals pursued a strategy of violence. There was also a small minority of white proponents of racial equality. In Barbour’s home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi the moderate faction of white supremacists had the upper hand. And Barbour thinks the strength of moderate white supremacists helped create a beneficial political atmosphere in his hometown.

Barbour may well have been correct that the Citizens Councils helped keep the peace in Yazoo City, but it's important to remember what kind of (unjust) peace that was, and who benefitted most from that kind of peace (namely, white folks like Barbour).

The legacy of racism lives on, coming alive in any number of ways, even when least expected. Like William Faulkner said:

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The White Supremacists of the South are older now, and their numbers have dwindled with time, but in many cases they are still alive, or they have left their educational legacies through their children. It takes a long, long time for that history to pass away....

I remember about 25 years ago, when I lived in Tucson, being invited to the cabin of a fellow I knew, Dr. T., and discovering that he possessed an entire library of segregationist literature. Wow! I had no idea how vast a field white supremacist literature covered, or how many titles there were! So many cover illustrations dwelled on Big Lips! Kinky Hair! Outside Agitators! Egads!

I knew Dr. T. had been born in Alabama, but apart from a few clues, I didn't realize how he still felt about race, as well as some of modern life's other, more-questionable innovations. (Some things tickled his fancy, like his discovery one day that a local punk-rock band's acronym - UPS - stood for Useless Pieces of Shit. He laughed about that for months....)

I remember one hot summer day when I was trying to fix my VW Bug, and I had stuck my head into the engine compartment to check the carburetor. I thought there might be a blockage there, so I stuck my lips into the carburetor's intake, to make a better seal, and I was blowing hard into it. Dr. T. came up from behind me to ask a question. I spun around with a serious expression on my face. The dirty carburetor intake had left a perfect dark ring all around my dour, white-person lips, creating something of a Reverse, or Negative Blackface Effect. No happy tune from this unsuitable minstrel! Dr. T. gasped with surprise and fell into heap, he was laughing so hard.

Racism lives on, sometimes in the strangest of ways!