The patriotism of many Americans who live outside the South depends partly on a disavowal of the region, onto which the present and historical sins of the nation are projected. Racism, conservatism, and political extremism may exist elsewhere, but they are, in this narrative, only really constitutive of the South, which is understood as historically as well as culturally distinct from the remainder of the country, a residue of a disavowed and discredited past. The fantasy of Southern marginality is reinforced even in the ways the United States commemorates its formation; Thanksgiving, a northeastern celebration that only became a national holiday during the Civil War, shifts the origin story of America from the tobacco planters of Virginia to the religious radicals of Massachusetts. Focusing on Plymouth Rock rather than Jamestown enables Americans to see the nation as the product of pious, self-reliant, industrious farmers fleeing persecution in the Old World, rather than settlers sponsored by the Virginia Company whose eventual prosperity was built on bonded labor and slavery. The narrative acknowledges injustice and exploitation but contains it below the Mason-Dixon line, in an area differentiated from the authentic nation.
Many people may find this account of the United States comforting, but it is too simple to be useful. The failure to understand or even meaningfully engage with the South, save as an unfortunate but superseded aberration, is always also a failure to understand American history. As its title suggests, Adolph L. Reed’s The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives not only analyzes the “regime of codified, rigorously, and unambiguously enforced racism and white supremacy” imposed throughout the region from “the defeat of Reconstruction and the Populist insurgency” until the 1965 Voting Rights Act but also considers its implications for contemporary struggles against injustice. His provocative argument that, as Barbara J. Fields puts it in her introduction, “‘white supremacy’ is useless as a tool of analysis, however potent it might be as a slogan” is a necessary corrective to some current discussions of race and inequality and provides a foundation for a more effective oppositional politics. Reed defines white supremacy, which he navigated as a child, as a historically-specific regime used to consolidate and reproduce an equally “specific order of political and economic power.” Recognizing this enables a critical engagement with the distinctive qualities and material foundations of both the Jim Crow South and current forms of oppression. In contrast, insisting on direct continuities with previous periods “flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white.” Avoiding the difficult but essential work of historical analysis, it mystifies the experiences and relations it purports to explain.
The failure to acknowledge the specificities of the Jim Crow system, including its evolution and localized variations, exposes a broader problem in conventional accounts of race. As Reed argues, “[r]acial identity… has no foundation outside of social experience.” Representing it as a fixed, foundational quality that defines individuals and groups risks reproducing the essentialism of biological racism and obscures the fact that race is a “fluid, contextual, and historically contingent notion” that always does particular “social and ideological work.” The “segregationist regime” that Reed lived under served “practical purposes”; interpreting it as the product of “abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism, and most recently an eternal White Supremacy… tells us nothing about how the order operated” or what it was for. The system was “obviously racist and white supremacist” but it “wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake”; it “stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests.” Jim Crow naturalized and codified a class structure, and in this sense whilst it “was explicitly and definitively about race, at the same time it was fundamentally not really about race at all.” White supremacy was at once dangerously real, making everyday decisions and interactions a matter of life and death, and “an ideology, and a very abstract one at that,” mobilized for material ends.
As Reed argues, any attempt to understand race in America that does not consider social and economic class is at best seriously flawed and at worst reinforces established structures of power. The results of such complicity are, predictably, visible in the contemporary South. The defeat of “the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests” but it “left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it.” A limited change in the composition of the dominant class legitimized “a social order that is sharply unequal for most,” enabling its representation as a meritocracy in which resources are distributed “without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation.” In fact, as Reed notes, in his reflections on the city where he grew up, “black New Orleanians are disproportionately—but by no means entirely or exclusively—likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed” despite a theoretical equality of opportunity. The pattern is repeated throughout the country, not just the region. Whilst Reed always recognizes and celebrates the considerable achievements of mid-twentieth-century radicalism, he has an urgent sense of what remains to be done and the intellectual as well as political work it will demand.
As Barbara Fields argues, “[s]oi-distant progressives are more likely these days to invoke ‘white supremacy’ than are troglodyte racists,” believing that it provides a “political analysis” of current conditions. It does not. In fact, as Reed argues, the failure to understand how “the present differs most meaningfully from the past” constrains or even prevents meaningful change, which depends on an understanding of current relations of power. The study of the Jim Crow system is important, not because the same ideological and material forms persist today, but because it emphasizes that racism is a functional practice that serves particular interests as well as an irrational system of belief, that it is inseparable from other forms of exploitation and oppression, and that can be effectively contested only through a rigorous engagement with its specific forms. It also emphasizes that, far from being an exception that can be disregarded, the South is simply the site where the ideological power and logical incoherence of the idea of race have been most visible in America. The region remains, as it has always been, central to any understanding of the United States, but analyzing it involves sustained, difficult work few people are able or willing to do. Adolph Reed’s eloquent, uncompromising book demonstrates why it matters and what is possible.
NONFICTION
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
by Adolph L. Reed Jr.
Verso
Published (Paperback) on February 4, 2025
