Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 19: The social function of white racism

I've fallen behind in my April posts against Confederate "Heritage" Month. I'm intending to complete a daily series for April. But some of the posts will spill over into May.

For this post, I'm going back to Stetson Kennedy's 1946 book Southern Exposure that criticizes the Jim Crown laws and voter suppression practices directed against African-Americans at the time, particularly in the South.

In the book, Kennedy speculates on the mass psychology of white racism. He starts it with an assumption that early human tribes were suspicious and hostile to each other. That's still a widespread assumption, though I'm not sure how well current anthropological research sustains it:

Primitive men no sooner became aware of their racial and cultural divergencies than they began to band together in tribes of their own kind - and individual xenophobias merged into group xenophobias. As such, they acquired the characteristics of mass psychology. The individual's fear of strange tribesmen was re-enforced by the identical fears of all his fellow tribesmen; and the trepidation which had begun as a protective instinct now took on the infallibility of a verity imputed by socially consistent sensation.

But Kennedy also makes it clear that this is in no way a valid excuse for contemporary racist practices, i.e., that's just the way people are. He's not buying that:

Although it is entirely natural for people to first make issues of their differences, it is equally natural for them to resolve those differences and to work out ways of co-operation. This means that race hatred can be kept alive only by forces foreign to the folk themselves. The whole monstrous mass of racial and religious animosities, despite their instinctive and traditional background, are not bona fide folkways, but a deadly virus that has been artificially cultivated by the few who profit from the disunity of the many. Exploitation, imperialism, fascism, and war would all be impossible without forced feeding of these asocial instincts. [my emphasis]

He also characterizes that process this way: "Fascism represents the ultimate expression of this policy."

And that is still the direction that contemporary versions of voter suppression and election subversion aimed at displacing African-American and Latino voters are headed.