Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 21: Democracy vs. white supremacy

I have one more quote from Stetson Kennedy's Southern Exposure (1946). He stresses in his book the similarity of white-supremacist Southern racial ideology and practice to the ideologies of the defeated fascist nations in the very recently concluded Second World War. And he writes about the importance of ending white racist political and social practices everywhere in the country in order to secure democracy for the US as a whole:

Because of its afore-mentioned poverty, prejudice, poor health, poor education, poll tax, white primary, and the relative weakness of its unions, the South is American democracy's Achilles' heel - its soft spot. Not only the Southern enemies of democracy are aware of this - many of the nation's most powerful antidemocratic elements are also concentrating their big guns on the South. Already they have succeeded in blasting into office a pack of prostitute Southern congressmen and senators who for decades have virtually controlled Congress and subverted democracy throughout America. Not satisfied with this, some among them are plotting to build up a reservoir of fascism in the South with which to flood the whole nation.

There is no intent here to oversimplify the problem of the South in terms of democracy versus fascism; on the contrary, this has been an attempt to sketch something of the complexity of the problem. Nevertheless, the struggle against fascism in the South is basic, just as the War Against Fascism was basic. A total democratic victory over fascism, inside and outside the South, is prerequisite to any and all forms of permanent Southern progress. [my emphasis]

And there is an echo of today's Republican anti-public-education rhetoric in this comment of Kennedy's from 1946: "Inasmuch as a racial educational differential is essential to the socio-politico-economic system of white supremacy, the system's opposition to federal aid to education has dated from Reconstruction."

Dishonest history and science are something that white supremacists have always considered important to promote.

And Kennedy almost seems to have had a premonition of Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene: "As was only to be expected, a cult of witch doctors has arisen to administer the poison and conduct the rites of white supremacy. No diagnosis of the problem of the South would be complete without close scrutiny of these pathological symptoms."

To be fair, I've never come across evidence of the old Jim Crow white supremacy advocates advocating white supremacist math. So Gov. DeSantis deserves some credit for innovation.