Hi, hello, hello, everyone. Hello.
The Deep South is the espresso of American Capitalism. Wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, economic precarity for everyone else.
If you are not useful to capital you are Bad. If you are useful to capital (cop, worker drone, salesman, soldier), you are Good.
The way they sell this kind of economic disparity as The Correct and Right Way to Run a Railroad to a population that is majority disenfranchised from wealth is through Jesus, Patriarchy, and the Protestant Work Ethic.
Down here in Real America, this is amped up to pathological levels, but it's the same all over this great nation of ours. (see also: South Side of Chicago or East St Louis, IL)
As with everywhere in America, the majority of people in the Deep South are kind, generous, optimistic, and think of themselves as Good People. In the right circumstances, they will literally give you the shirt off of their backs. It's hard to keep the lid on Bad People (re: not useful to capital), though, if everyone is busy giving away their worldly possessions and following the Man from Galilea/Son o' God as the character was originally written.
What's that quote?
frank wilhoit wrote:Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
America is experiencing a managed decline in material well-being for everyone except for a tiny sliver of exceedingly wealthy people. American prosperity is dissolving like Hemingway describing how a millionaire goes broke, "very gradually and then all at once." In 1946, 51% of all manufactured goods in the WORLD were produced in America. There's nowhere to go but down from there. If the Tiny Sliver people are going to continue to live at the comfort level to which they have become accustomed, they're going to have to have an army of mooks to keep Everyone Else from getting a crumb from a piece of the pie. Fortunately, there's Race, Class, and Gender to use as a motivator for the Good (useful to capital) people.
Historically, the roots of this struggle are obvious: The American South was basically a colonial state where people were forced to work for free under pain of death or mutilation. The transition of enslaved people to Free Men was met with a brutal mix of state sanctioned violence and political disenfranchisement tactics. This continues to this day. After all, in 1912, the population of Georgia was majority Black. The Klan in Georgia really hit its stride in 1915, using terror tactics and economic/political control to drive Black Georgians out of the state. (Hello, South Side of Chicago)
Georgia still has the 2nd largest population of Black people in the country, after Texas, however. When you begin to understand this dynamic through the lens of post-colonial America, the intractable nature of Southern (and American) Racism comes into much clearer focus. The police are a colonial occupation force, and because of the significantly higher representation of Black Political Power being in the South, you're going to see a much more obvious and pitched battle between entrenched power and the lives and livelihoods of its Black citizens. What's wrong with the South? Oligarchal Capitalism is what's wrong with the South. The same thing that's wrong with the rest of America.
Fried catfish is motherfucking awesome, though.