Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 20: Prejudice, "natural" and manufactured

In the previous post in this series, I quoted once again from Stetson Kennedy’s 1946 book Southern Exposure a passage where he talks about how Southern elites – others might say Bourbons (a term used for decades to describe conservative Democrats who favored the wealthy), the ruling class, the wealthy, capitalists, the establishment – deliberately promoted racial prejudice to divide working people from one another.

I want to expand on this idea a bit more.

This was an explanation often used not just by the ideological left but by labor unions more generally, an argument of the “don’t-let-the-boss-man-divide-you” type. Kennedy devoted a chapter of his book to the role labor and the pro-labor Roosevelt Administration had played in recent years defending the civil rights of African-Americans.

White racism is of course a complicated phenomenon with many villains. The fact that the wealthy convinced many whites that Black people were their enemies doesn’t excuse those of all classes who have played into it. Nor does it excuse non-elite whites who joined in organizations like slave patrols prior to the civil war (which participation was often mandated by state and local governments) or to white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in later times.

To use political terms from more recent decades, class conflicts and racial prejudice overlap but are not identical. Achieving a just society requires combating both. But equal representation in unions won’t automatically eliminate white racism. Nor will celebrating highly successful individuals with a minority background. And unfair wages and bad working conditions aren’t any better if whites and non-whites are equally represented among the workers being exploited.

Racial injustices and class injustices are deeply interconnected. And one can certainly argue plausibly that one cannot be fully solved without also solving the other. But the two are distinct problems, however intertwined they may be.

Kennedy also makes a distinction between what we might call prejudice arising from normal social processes, e.g., when two groups with notable cultural differences first find themselves interacting with each other, and maliciously generated prejudice. He sees the bosses-setting-workers-against-each-other kind of hatred as one that is systematically promoted by particular interests. He makes the distinction this way:

We have seen how social prejudice comes into being naturally and can be overcome naturally through co-operation and education, while institutionalized prejudice, on the other band, is deliberately fostered and nurtured to serve the ends of economic and political reaction. Social prejudice is a growing pain incident to the process of becoming civilized, but institutionalized prejudice is the cause of untold suffering, war, and depression. The task of eliminating the latter type is therefore most urgent. [my emphasis]

And he makes it clear that the white Southern elite - and not just the Southern version - worked on promoting racial prejudice against African-Americans for a long time.