Tell me about the post-racist New South again
53Auntie Ovipositor wrote: The Civil War wasn't about states' rights generally, it was about one specific states' right: that of owning other human beings.The Civil War was primarily the result of the politics of the power of the slave holding class beginning to founder on the shoals of the circumstances connected with the nation's growth and the 'overdue bill' that had hovered over the nation's existence since an inception that had put off the fundamental rift that existed between the nation's stated values and goals in re human rights and the need to include political entities (colonies/states) that had economies based in slavery. The North was torn throughout as their reliance on slavery was never the same as that found in the South while they politically and economically hooked into Southern slavery with 'reservations,' let's say. In the end, as new states were added the South felt that they needed ongoing concessions that would allow the spread of slavery as a way to bulwark against the degradation of their share of the nation's power structure. There was a need to maintain congressional seats beholden to slave-owning power. Had the South and those beholden to the nation's various political and legal conceits aimed at smoothing over the above-noted 'overdue bill' been willing to allow the addition of non-slaveholding states without concomitant demands of some sort of balance in the growth of 'slave states' it is likely no war would have occurred. This means, of course, that slavery was not dying of its own bloat and evil, but was instead seen as a fundamental necessity in the South and a growth product for the then foreseeable future (indeed, after the war quashed any need to continue to cowtow politically to the South by adding a slave state each time a non-slave state came online, the feds abandoned the project of 'equality' in the South pretty quickly and allowed business-as-usual to strangle Reconstruction).States' Rights is just one of various post-bellum conceits used to try to isolate individual human rights based in egalitarianism away from the conversation of how we try to deal with federal- and state-level rights. It is a clumsy and odious sleight of hand that only works because powerful people profit from ignoring the equal protection clause. If the play of ignoring the equal protection clause gets removed from the Jenga pile family of defenses to which 'States' Rights' belongs, those arguments don't bear much weight and you have longstanding cultural/political/legal practices that get swept aside in a single motion based on con law, i.e., the recent SC decision in re gay marriage. Once you decide that a group of people are human and deserve protection, there is no state right to protect, really, as such is clearly superseded by the EP clause.