Previously published in edited form in The Journal of Psychohistory,
Summer 2024, Vol. 52 #1
Two Competing World Views
America has two competing stories of those living in poverty. The white working-class poor see fewer jobs, more competition, and less opportunity. They see an America so worried about being politically correct that it can no longer distinguish what is right from what is wrong. They see themselves being held accountable for the sins of their ancestors, over which they had no control and no part in, and they see their values and beliefs denigrated as provincial at best, idiotic at worst. They believe they work hard and deserve more respect and greater reward for their efforts. They do not and cannot see privilege in the lives they lead. The competing vision of American poverty looks quite different. America’s black working-class poor have to edit their names on resumes to get called for job interviews. They endure casual racism in the workplace from customers and peers. They pay higher interest rates and get fewer loans. They monitor their tone of voice when speaking to white colleagues or friends, so as not to be too loud or aggressive, especially if they are women. They always keep their hands visible. They too believe they work hard and deserve more respect and greater reward for their efforts. They do not understand how white people cannot see privilege in the lives they lead. Yet, both black and white poor struggle to pay rent. Both have families and worry for their future. Both have parents who go hungry, so their children can eat at night. Both get their power cut when they cannot pay the bill. Both get laid off when businesses close. Both find themselves underskilled for available jobs. What divides these two groups then, is not as much their current circumstances as it is historical conditioning and institutional structure — institutional racism. Out of the chaos immediately following the American Civil War, human psychological, social, and economic imperatives created a system of institutional bias, which manifested into modern institutional racism. The legal and institutional structures set in place more than a century ago restrict cooperation and communication psychologically and socially. In other words, institutional racism in America derives from a vast difference in world view between America’s white and African American populations, which, while outwardly expressed by race, arises not from physical characteristic but from America’s unique psychological, social, and economic factors that create diverging interpretations of historical and daily reality. These two competing world views are rooted in a much deeper historical story that is full of misunderstanding and fear, intentional and unintentional blindness, inhumanity and humanity, social chaos and order, desolation and hope.
The Psycho-Social Origins of Institutional Bias in America
According to psychologists and sociologists, people need to create order in their world by ranking themselves against each other. Social neuroscientists Jessica Koski and her colleagues tell us that, “social groups across species rapidly self-organize into hierarchies, where members vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance.”[1] Humans do this automatically, basing relative power on instantaneously gathered cues about others ranging from primitive observations like physical strength to sociocultural status judgments like job titles, educational attainments, or, most commonly in America, apparent wealth. Conflict occurs when one individual’s idea of their position conflicts with another individual’s idea of their position, creating a social need to degrade the other in front of the group to cement perceived ranking. This becomes writ large as institutional bias when applied on a social scale, with weighty implications for the social groups relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
In America, this bias is expressed most clearly against those at the lowest social level, those in poverty. Beginning after the American Civil War, America’s impoverished faced much uncertainty. Many of those who were white had lived hand-to-mouth for decades, scratching a living out of the hard earth or working long hours in difficult conditions in urban factories. They lived in competition with each other, especially if they chose to move from farm to city or city to farm, but they knew and understood the playing field. After the war, however, a whole new group of economic competitors entered the field of play: free blacks. This new class of people threatened poor whites’ economic viability. Free blacks menaced poor whites’ core identity and livelihood. Thus began white Americans’ efforts to infringe upon the rights, privileges, and freedoms of free blacks in America. Yet, the story is more complicated than a hegemonic social tribe acting in unison. Poor white Americans shared much more in common with poor blacks than they did with their wealthier same-skin-color counterparts and, in some cases, formed nascent alliances as united sharecroppers against the more powerful landowners.
Only when these same poor whites began forming agricultural collectives with poor blacks against Southern plantation owners did the Southern elites pass “grandfather clauses” allowing impoverished whites to vote.[2] The Southern landowners even embarked on an extensive propaganda campaign to remind poor whites they were biologically better than the blacks to artificially re-create political distance between the two groups. According to Heather Cox Richardson in her 2020 How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, elite plantation owners insisted they were protecting ordinary white Southerners from Northern crooks attempting to rob them of the means to eventually become wealthy. Specifically, elite Southerners convinced poor white Southerners that without cheap free black labor, poor whites would never be able to rise above their impoverished levels. W.J. Cash put it in The Mind of the South, the poor Southern white did not see himself “locked into a marginal life” but as “a potential planter or mill baron himself.”[3] Additionally, “[plantation owners] insisted that their opponents’ ideas could only lead to forced ‘equality’ between blacks and whites and even intermarriage between former slaves and white women.” They even suggested that once black men gained political power, they would turn on the whites, butchering them and taking their possessions and women for themselves. [4] The effort the elites went through to get the poor whites back on board indicates how much of a threat a collaboration between the white and black poor was to the economic elite. Only by coopting part of the poor could the elite preserve their power. The original intent of the elites could only have been to exclude the white poor as completely as they excluded the blacks. Thus, the elite’s political machinations were not solely racist in intent, but classist. With this subtle coaching, the poor Southern white fell into pre-existing psychological conditioning, and wealthy landowners recreated the legal and social separation between whites and blacks that made institutional bias a reality. On the back of fear and exclusion, the dream of social mobility re-established the competition that drove social ranking.
Even here, though, the behavior of white Americans in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America cannot be dismissed as simple racism. Psychology and cultural belief shaped the actions and reactions of poor whites. First, the forces of social ranking combined with ingroup/outgroup bias to further estrange poor whites from poor blacks, ensuring little to no understanding between the two groups. According to Stephen Roberts and Michael Rizzo in their paper The Psychology of Racism, these intergroup tensions tend to ignite when groups are under threats to their self-image, distinctive character, value or belief system, or control over resources. Poor Southern whites felt all of these. Roberts and Rizzo add that situational uncertainty and pre-existing negative stereotypes about the opposing groups greatly exacerbate the sense of threat.[5] Finally, the force of illusory superiority galvanized poor whites into action. According to Learning Mind, illusory superiority consists of egocentrism, or the inability to see the world from others’ point of view, and an intense focus on a single factor to the exclusion of all else.[6] Thus, as poor whites struggled to build a new place for themselves in the chaos following the Civil War, they tended to group up with others who looked and acted like themselves, they became incapable of feeling empathy for other groups’ perspectives, and they tended to focus on a single factor, melanin, in establishing their dominance. Driven by these psychological motives, and the reminders by their economic betters of white social superiority, America’s white poor sought to improve their relative social status by scapegoating free blacks. The psychological entrapments of illusory superiority engaged to smooth over egos and make life in poverty just slightly more bearable. Race or ethnicity became a proxy for social differentiation within the bounds of poverty. And, while poverty remained the silent determinant for social positioning, power, and opportunity for social advancement, race became the visible reminder of social rank.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to this phenomenon in his speech at the Birmingham statehouse after the march to Selma in 1965. King specifically called out the actions of the white elites to create a power imbalance between poor whites and poor blacks to counter the threat of the poor white masses joining with the poor newly freed black masses in a post-Reconstruction populist movement against aristocratic landowners in the South:
the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society… Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it… [they] made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. [7]
King added that:
when [the poor white man’s] wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man… And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.[8]
Reconstruction: The Separation of Two Worlds
The roots of institutional racism are not necessarily to be found in the institutions of slavery itself, as is commonly supposed, although the aspect of dehumanization likely is. For chattel slavery to function as it did in America, white Americans had to believe that blacks were less human than whites at a minimum, less than human more commonly. However, the simple degradation of biological status did not enshrine the standing of blacks into the American legal system, as chattel slaves had little to no place in law. In fact, the only role chattel slaves played was as 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of representation in federal institutions, a numerical boon to Southern planters, not a recognition of black humanity. Even after emancipation, the legal status of free blacks remained in limbo until the passing of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution during the Reconstruction period, which spelled out former slaves’ rights to citizenship as naturally born Americans.
This was the historical moment when the fate of black Americans turned on the precipice between freedom and repression. President Andrew Johnson, himself a Southerner and President Abraham Lincoln’s Vice President, who assumed office upon President Lincoln’s assassination, moved ahead with plans for Reconstruction of the South without consulting Congress. Johnson allowed the Southern states to choose their new representatives without restriction, returned all confiscated land to its Southern owners, including land already distributed to freed blacks by the Union Army, and granted Southern states the ability to pass their own laws to rebuild. Many Southern states immediately passed what became known as the Black Codes, a series of laws designed to restrict the movement and labor of freed blacks.[9]
All of Johnson’s actions directly violated promises made to blacks during the civil war, including Sherman’s famous Field Order 15 declaring freed slaves would receive forty acres of land in recompense after the war. Field Order 15, in fact, remanded 400,000 acres of abandoned Confederate land, from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s river in Florida, to freed blacks for redistribution to families in forty-acre plots for independent governance under the protection of the Union Army until such time the freed blacks could protect themselves.[10] This truly revolutionary act of reparation would have eternally ruptured Johnson’s relationship with the Southern economic elites, a situation he could not brook. Johnson, however, felt he was following the plan set forth by Lincoln before his death of reassimilating the Southern states as quickly as possible and without vindication.[11] Johnson’s motivations have been variously attributed to Southern loyalties, racial bias, or simply a desire to avoid actions that would re-inflame the fires of civil war. However, he may have been motivated by something less conscious than any of these. A 2017 study by Jennifer Mueller entitled “Producing Colorblindness: Everyday Mechanisms of White Ignorance” outlines the various ways white people use ignorance to enable “comfortable complicity with white supremacy.”[12] President Johnson may have fallen to an “a priori assumption about the morality” of white people. In short, Johnson’s ability to easily forgive the Southern people assumes acceptance of their “tacit virtuousness,” their goodness despite the harmful effects of their actions.[13]
Once Congress reconvened, the Radical Republicans, the party of Lincoln, refused to seat the newly elected legislators from the South, many of whom had directly participated in the Confederacy, and attempted to enshrine black freedoms into federal law with the passage of such bills as the Civil Rights Act, which led directly to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to extend the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau for two more years, an organization that provided “food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners, including newly freed African Americans.”[14] Even though one-third of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s services, officially the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, went to Southern whites, whites still felt the Bureau was unfairly prejudicial towards providing assistance to free blacks, which built resentment and bitterness toward the federal government and the freedmen.[15] The fact that the Bureau was addressing the needs of all the poor was irrelevant to the white poor’s perspective. Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2016 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right articulates this perspective with her concept of a “deep story,” a representation not of fact but of “how life feels to people… that is, in the emotion that underlies politics.”[16] In short, Hochschild describes the deep story for the conservative white in today’s America as standing in line for the American Dream but not moving. The American white feels deserving, but undeserving people keep cutting the line in front of them, making them feel “something unfair has been done to [them]… [They’ve] been forgotten.”[17] In this view, the government becomes a “power-amassing elite, creating bogus causes to increase its control and handing out easy money in return for loyal Democratic votes.”[18] As representatives of the federal government in the South, bureau agents were often targets of violence and social derision when they insisted on trying to assist free blacks, but many attempted to complete their jobs despite difficult on-the-ground circumstances.[19] President Johnson, however, saw the Bureau’s presence in the South as disruptive, unnecessary, and a violation of states’ rights. He believed his measures at Reconstruction had resolved the national issue and Congress was jeopardizing the country’s united future in its pursuit of vengeance.[20]
Thus, he vetoed both the Civil Rights Act and the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s activities. In any case, Congress overrode Johnson’s vetoes, and, once Ulysses Grant succeeded Johnson as President, Congress began institutionalizing black civil rights. In April 1871, for example, Congress made it a crime to “keep African Americans from exercising their civic rights: holding office, or sitting on juries (which were picked from the voting lists).” The bill also “authorized the president to declare martial law in places where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) held power” to ensure fairness in civic practice. In October 1871, President Grant actually did declare martial law in nine South Carolina counties, arresting hundreds of members of the KKK and forcing as many as 2,000 to flee the state.[21] Federal action on behalf of blacks predictably led to white panic in the South, as whites feared for their own interests in the wake of the war, with many white families suffering severe and in many cases complete economic, personal, and psychological loss.
Coalitional psychology, a subset of thinking related to ingroup/outgroup bias, reflected the growing conflict between Southern whites and free blacks in society in terms of group actions and threat-detection reactions. Humans are predisposed to form societal coalitions designed to maintain systems of support for large social tasks, like child-rearing, trade, or alliances for protection. Within these coalitional groups, commitment to common goals is viewed as essential to each individual’s welfare, there is a strong motivation to illustrate individual commitment to the group, there is strong monitoring of other group members’ commitment, and group defection is deeply discouraged.[22] When white Southerners chose to dissociate themselves from the United States coalition, seeing themselves as fighting for their freedom and way of life against a domineering and corrupt federal system, they knew there would be consequences for group defection, but they did not expect their former Northern partners to ally with their negro slaves. To lose their homes and land to the free blacks that only months before had served as field hands and house maids was a threat too far. Perceptions of menace from rival coalition groups “trigger a strong motivation to… return to a higher level of coalitional safety.” Three ways to accomplish renewed safety are to cultivate “homogeneity in the group,” avoid those seen as enemies or “members of other alliances,” or fight against “members of rival coalitions.”[23] Thus, economic discrimination, political and social segregation, and racial violence were all manifestations of white Southerners’ psychological response to perceived coalitional threat. White Southerners believed themselves to be the powerless partner in a new coalition between the Northern Union and the free blacks and feared they and their families would be abandoned economically and culturally while free blacks were raised above their due station. To a group of people who had been raised for three generations to believe negro slaves were biologically inferior to white Europeans, the sudden elevation of the free blacks to anything resembling equal status was a direct threat not just to Southern identity but to the cohesion of their entire psycho-social structure. Without the blacks as inferiors, there existed no counter-identity for the Southern whites to define themselves against. If this breakdown in identity had occurred during a period of national unity, Southern citizens might have been able to redefine their character with another metric, but with the federal government apparently supporting the free blacks against the Southern citizens, a bunker mentality set in, and many Southerners simply closed the ranks with racism. As free blacks took a more active role in Southern life, white Southerners’ resentment and fear grew.
As a result of the new federal protections, in the years following the war, 22 black people were elected to Congress, including two senators. Around two thousand more were elected to state and local offices. According to historian James McPherson, about 15% of office holders in the South were black by around 1870.[24] The alacrity of free blacks in taking advantage of their new political rights led to a backlash in the South just as the North lost interest in providing protection for the black people they had fought a war to free. Politicians in the North were facing their own minority problem by the late 1800s, and the political rhetoric of the former Confederates turned Democratic Party began to have growing political and economic appeal. Southern Democrats shifted their language from the pre-war argument that black people were biologically inferior and thus deserving of slavery to black people were part of a lazy working class that “took money from hardworking white taxpayers and redirected it to themselves.” While racial science, which reduced African Americans to a lesser species of human, “undermined Enlightenment notions of universal human rights and equality” upon which the American nation was founded, property rights and the threat of economic competition became the newly freed blacks undoing.[25] Southern Democrats new focus on a group of indolent workers sopping off the wealthy resonated with the Northern white elites fighting their own working class who were beginning to “organize to oppose measures that favored industrialists.” [26] Nativism had set in across Northern states struggling with the flood of immigrants from famine-struck Europe in the late 1800s. According to Dr. Kimberly Kutz Elliott, “white, native-born Americans felt threatened by immigrants on nearly every front. Economically, immigrants desperate for work might undercut wages for native-born laborers and artisans; politically, immigrants were a tempting bloc of voters whose fast-growing influence might eclipse that of native-born men.”[27] This willful ignorance may have contributed to Northerners turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Southerners’ new economic solution to replace the outlawed use of slavery.
The sharecropping system is usually presented as a legal replacement for slavery in that it effectively re-tied freed blacks to the land of plantation owners, often the same masters who had previously owned them, using a system of debt peonage. Black sharecroppers would rent land from the plantation owner under contractual obligation to return a portion of the crops grown to the owner at the end of the planting season as payment. This system often left freed blacks in debt to the owners, as owners tacked on extra expenses like farming equipment, seed charges, and upkeep fees. With the additional fees, freed blacks often had little to nothing left of their crop to sell at the end of the exchange. Many ended up indebted to the plantation owners and were either arrested for breach of contract or forced into serving out another year as repayment, a system that led into years of forced debt servitude. Additionally, “dishonest bookkeeping” could force “hardworking tenants” to stay, while “undesirable ones could be ordered to move on, with their debts transferred to a new landlord.”[28] While records were not consistently kept across the South, anecdotal evidence points to widespread debt levels resulting from the sharecropping system. One study “found that 80 percent of the sharecroppers in Alabama had an indebtedness of more than one year’s standing.”[29] As black resistance to these arrangements grew, white Southerners put laws in place to ensure their compliance. Vagrancy laws, in particular, became common tools to enforce freed blacks into signing labor contracts with plantation owners. Any black citizen caught “loitering” without a contracted job was subject to arrest, jail, fines, and, ultimately, prison, and prisoners could be leased out to plantation owners at a daily rate to work on their farms – effecting the same result the plantation owners sought in the first place. Penalties for vagrancy, as well as enforcement, “increased between 1890 and 1910 in response to the rise of agrarian insurgency.”[30] White vagrants, if arrested at all, typically had their punishments waived. To literally add injury to insult, crimes that white citizens believed were most likely to be committed by Blacks – rebellion, arson, burglary, and assaulting white women – were accorded severe punishment. These crimes typically carried the death penalty for Blacks, although, again, white offenders received lesser punishment.[31] Although the Black Codes only existed for a year, as most were repealed at the start of Reconstruction (when the federal government decided the South was not competent to run its own affairs), the template they created remained and served as the model for the Pig Laws and Jim Crow laws put in place after Reconstruction.[32] Former slaves attempting to navigate this legal quagmire while building lives for themselves and their families from scratch with little to no financial resources or assistance obviously suffered. Many struggled to maintain a steady income, purchase property or a home, or otherwise create inheritable wealth within their families, engendering a cycle of generational poverty due to institutional denial of opportunity and systemic, antagonistic oppression.
To the white plantation owners, however, the sharecropping experience was fundamentally different. Southern plantation owners accustomed to chattel labor as the primary economic model were suddenly forced into a capitalist wage labor model without preparation or training. They needed steady labor to recover the regional economy, which entailed the cooperation of the free negroes, something former slaves were not likely to give willingly or cheaply.[33] In addition, plantation owners could not accept the quality of work blacks were willing to provide as now free labor working without a lash.
Many employers… emphasized the utter worthlessness of the Negro, his unwillingness to work, and the countless number who left the plantations to migrate to the city to enjoy imaginary ease and pleasure. A common feeling was that “He would not work in freedom. God had made him lazy. As a slave he had done only that which he had been compelled to do.”[34]
As employers, they simply could not understand their employees’ disappointment at not receiving the land grants promised to them by the government. Nor could they understand the free blacks’ hesitance to sign contracts with terms that reminded them of slavery, such as the appointment of an overseer in place of direct supervision of the landlord. Many free blacks refused to “hire out” for the entire year out of fear they would “surrender control of their time.”[35] Free blacks also did not often understand the language of their contracts, as most slaves could neither read nor write. While plantation owners were not above cheating their tenants, sometimes, the tenant simply did not understand the math of expenses and assumed he’d been cheated at the end of the contract.[36] As a final concern, plantation owners did not believe freed blacks had the managerial expertise to properly manage their farms. Sometimes, the tenant’s poor knowledge of farming techniques led to poor crop yields. “Laziness, lack of planning, miscalculations, and sheer incompetence were often in evidence.” In addition, from the planters’ point of view, some sharecroppers “tried to leave their land before their contracts expired.”
This forced the passage of legislation which made it a misdemeanor for them to abandon the land before the crop was harvested. Such action was necessitated to prevent one whose crop didn’t look too promising, or who already had obtained advances equal to or greater than his share from abandoning the land and hastening a loss of the entire crop.[37]
Finally, planters began to regulate competition for labor amongst themselves, refusing to hire each other’s freed blacks at better wages and scheming to ensure that freed blacks stayed with the land on which they had slaved. [38] One Freedmen’s Bureau report in 1866 chronicled one such planter’s “community of action” strategy:
The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live. It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding among themselves: “You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours,” then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much their masters as ever. [39]
Planters eventually enshrined such plans into laws with “Enticement” acts, which made it a crime to “hire away, or induce to leave to service of another” any laborer “by offering higher wages or in any other way whatsoever.”[40] From the sharecroppers’ point of view, such laws were attempts by former masters to place limits on their mobility and job choices. From the white landowners’ view, these laws were necessary to hold unreliable and untried labor in check to ensure economic integrity in an increasingly uncertain world. Free blacks were semi-skilled labor without a history of reliability or credit. Even if the black worker was someone known from the plantation owner’s own plantation, their character was now a question as their work was no longer compelled. And, yet, despite the series of legal institutions put in place to secure the compliance of black workers in the South, freed blacks refused to stay still and work where they were told, creating “chronic and consistent labor shortages.”[41]
Free blacks’ noncompliance with white planters’ economic needs led to a second set of institutions, a set of norms to lethally parallel the laws. The message to free blacks quickly became clear: follow the laws or pay the price. Planters across the South took major roles in organizing and directing Klan activities, especially against free blacks considering emigration to the North or the Western regions of the United States. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate General widely believed to be a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan, was one such plantation owner who institutionalized racial violence as a tool of repression against free blacks after the civil war, but he was not alone.[42] These legal and economic forms of repression also encouraged social tyranny in the form of racialized terror. When a government sanctions repression through its legal system, social institutions tend to follow; thus, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan began to grow, with membership rising from 550,000 to 5 million during the period 1871 to 1925.[43] In fact, policemen often participated in racial terror in the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s.[44] Southern police forces grew out of slave patrols and, after emancipation, enforced newly passed Black Codes and vagrancy laws in a racialized manner that normalized violence against newly freed blacks. [45] The process of racializing is a fully institutionalized dehumanizing process by white society of African American and other colored citizens for individual corporate and federal gain.[46] Racializing also ties into the historical need for white economic dominance, connecting eruptions of lynchings and race riots to rises in Black American prosperity. White dominance was threatened by greater competition for employment, and/or perceived loss of political power.[47]
Neoclassicist economists Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch argue that illiteracy and poverty kept free blacks from both knowing about economic opportunities in other parts of the country and being able to move to them, with “lack of education and lack of income” both “consequences of the racist prejudices of Southern whites.”[48] Yet, according to the Congressional testimony of one planter, when blacks “‘got together once to emigrate…, disguised men went to them and told them that if they undertook it they would be killed,’ in order to keep ‘the country from being deprived of their labor.’”[49] In another instance, during the wave of emigration known as the “Kansas fever” of 1879-1880, a wave of “bulldozing” broke out. First, Southern whites assassinated the black leaders organizing the emigration, then they “beat and lynched their followers.” One witness told a Congressional committee that in Alabama “the bulldozers killed off all the colored men they knew going to Kansas” – over a hundred died in one county alone.[50] In Southern white eyes, free blacks needed to be managed not partnered with. Former slaves attempting to navigate the evolving legal quagmire built from the Black Codes, sharecropping contracts, and, eventually, Jim Crow, “while simultaneously building lives for themselves and their families from scratch with little to no financial resources or assistance obviously suffered. [51]
As Richardson says in her 2020 How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, white southerners “began to argue that they had fought the Civil War not over slavery—despite the many state secession declarations and speeches saying exactly the opposite—but rather to keep an intrusive federal government out of their lives.”[52] By 1877, this new narrative in which lazy workers sought to undermine the economy and government regulation was the enemy resonated with a Northern United States increasingly at odds with its own illiterate underclass as immigrants poured in from Eastern Europe. Southern Democrats’ shifting their rhetoric from race to individual behavior was a perfect coup for both parties, as it solved their overt political needs and hypocritically but conveniently appealed to the central American principle of individualism. After all, the poor must be poor because of something they did or are not doing. The poor blacks and dirty immigrants must be dishonest, amoral, lazy, and unAmerican. They do not deserve the right to vote if they cannot pass a simple reading test or pay a simple fee, or, in modern terms, get a driver’s license. Thus, at exactly the moment when institutions were being built to support the newly freed black citizens of America, the Northern states turned their focus inward, and the Southern states gained control of the process. In the political Compromise of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes gained the presidency after a disputed election on the promise he would withdraw Union troops from the South. This ended federal protection for freed blacks and presaged the era of Jim Crow, a system of institutionalized bias based on race to keep black people politically and economically impoverished and, thus, maintain the political, economic, and psychological superiority of Southern whites of all stripes.[53] It also re-established the South’s coalitional bond with the North, leaving free blacks again looking in from the outside. As Clint Smith on “Crash Course Black American History” stated: “some people say Reconstruction failed, but it would be more accurate to say that Reconstruction was violently overthrown.”[54]
The institutions put in place at the end of the Reconstruction era were economic in purpose but social in application. Beginning with the breaking of promises of land restitution to former slaves, the post-Reconstruction era cemented laws to restrict black labor and mobility, politically and economically disenfranchise blacks, and institutionalize racial violence designed to keep blacks (and sympathetic whites) in their place. The effect of these policies and attitudes was, in the end, the same: to create division between blacks and poor whites in order to keep poor whites under the control of the wealthy elites by convincing them all whites were on the same side against blacks. All the lower social classes stayed concerned with each other and “forgot” that their actual economic ills derived from the actions of the social classes above them. As long as poor and middle-class whites believed they had a chance at moving up the social ladder, they had a vested interest in making sure someone stayed under their feet.
Can Two Worlds Merge
The limits on black freedoms codified in law, such as the Black Codes restricting movement and labor, and economic developments over time, such as the sharecropping’s harsh peonage system, created setbacks in wealth generation that follow the black community today, as generational wealth remains startlingly lower than white peers due largely to an inability to acquire real estate holdings and financial assets. However, the most pernicious institutions built during this period were the political and social attitudes displayed by politicians at both federal and state levels, as these were the models regular citizens emulated and history followed. President Andrew Johnson’s lenient treatment of the South during Reconstruction set a terrible precedent, as it allowed former Confederates back into the U.S. fold with little to no accountability for their treasonous behavior. In addition, Johnson’s casual disregard for the welfare of the newly freed blacks set a tone that the people of the North soon followed, forgetting the commitment they had made to the former slaves they fought a war to free. In fact, when the “reformed” Southern Democrats began to shift their language from the pre-war “black people were inferior” to a post-war stance of blacks as lazy, complacent workers who “took money from hardworking white taxpayers and redirected it to themselves,” Northern white elites fighting an increasingly belligerent immigrant working class obligingly sympathized.[55] This narrative of the black man (and immigrant) as lazy, complacent, and willing to mooch money off hard-working real Americans continues today as an undercurrent of racist thought and often an unconscious bias against the poor.
A second attitude institutionalized during this period came out of the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an organization that provided “food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners, including newly freed African Americans.”[56] Despite the fact that the Freedmen’s Bureau worked with the poor of all classes in the South, with one-third of its services supporting white citizens made destitute by war, white citizens viewed its work as unfairly biased toward helping the free blacks. The refusal to see the inclusivity of the work this welfare agency was doing, and the enduring bitterness left in its wake, presage the later work of today’s welfare agents and social workers who spend most of their resources assisting America’s poor white communities but receive only vitriol and accusations of corruption and favoritism toward the minority communities they assist in lesser numbers. Notably, Johnson’s depiction of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s work as a violation of states’ rights was not accidental. Johnson styled his language after the Southern Democrats who now claimed states’ rights as the reason for the Civil War, to keep the federal government out of regular people’s lives. This attitude becomes the third of the dangerously institutionalized views from the post-Reconstruction period. The idea that the federal government is inept, corrupt, amoral, or evil – a view often used as a straw man by state or local politicians who do not want federal regulators ensuring consistent application of civil rights laws.
Black resistance and police response became the fourth attitude institutionalized during Reconstruction. As white Southerners put more laws and regulations into place around the new freedoms free blacks had been granted, many blacks simply refused to cooperate. When faced with voter intimidation, many voted anyway, going in groups for protection. When faced with economic threats or burdensome contracts, some just walked away. In response, white landowners pursued vagrancy laws to ensure black compliance, effectively making any black who was not working or who walked away from a contractual obligation subject to arrest, imprisonment, and forced labor. The police became a tool of the white plantation owners, effectively extending their previous experience tracking down runaway slaves into tracking down freed blacks at the request of their employer. Black men of working age learned to run when they saw the policeman coming. This poor community-police relationship has not improved significantly today. Many young black men, in the north as well as the south, continue to see the police as enforcers not defenders of the law, and, as such, continue to see themselves as potential suspects in the policemen’s eyes.
Lastly, the post-Reconstruction period gives us the emergence of the KKK, a hate-driven manifestation of white people’s fear of social change. At the same time, Reconstruction oversaw the birth of the system that became Jim Crow, a psychically and emotionally violent system of separation that broke the spirit of many blacks under its yoke while maintaining the political, economic, and psychological superiority of whites. While many if not most would argue that neither of these institutions has lasted into modern times, with the possible exception of a few strongholds in isolated areas of interior America, institutionalized racial violence as a tool of repression is still very much alive. As mentioned previously, Neoclassicist economists Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch argue that illiteracy and poverty in post-Civil War America kept free blacks from both knowing about economic opportunities in other parts of the country and being able to move to them, with “lack of education and lack of income” both “consequences of the racist prejudices of Southern whites.”[57] Today’s educational system in minority neighborhoods is woefully inadequate in serving the needs of its children, often leaving them with low literacy levels and even lower graduation rates versus more affluent, white neighborhoods. Additionally, the average incomes of minorities remain significantly lower than those of white Americans, with African American and Latino women at the very bottom – the two groups most likely to be single parent heads of household in the lowest income neighborhoods. The psychological damage done by this racial violence is underlined by what happened in Chicago in 1919, Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923, Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, many locations after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jackson State in 1970, Los Angeles after Rodney King in 1992, Ferguson in 2014-15, and George Floyd everywhere in 2020.
The institutions created during Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction period set up two separate worlds for black and white Americans who lived geosynchronously but existed in disassociation – a psychotic society. According to the Cleveland Clinic, people who suffer from psychotic delusions hold “an unshakable belief in something that’s untrue.” Typically, this belief is not part of the individual’s culture and other people around the delusional person know their belief to be false. These delusional beliefs involve “the misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences,” but those who hold them often continue functioning in daily lives as if everything were normal until or unless their belief begins to preoccupy them so completely that they can no longer ignore it.[58] However, if an entire society is psychotically delusional, no one remains to tell anyone the belief is untrue. Institutions designed to advantage whites over blacks during Reconstruction grew into a system that politically and economically punished blacks and psychologically reduced whites. Institutional bias created a delusional world of superiority that becomes unstable when it rings untrue, creating foundational chaos that threatens the identity of the most powerful, thus engendering retribution for the most vulnerable.
How does one fight a world view? How can people reach understanding when every perception is subjective, when even facts are up for debate? Will the strong always create systems to disadvantage the weak? Governments are simply reflections of the people who make them, and the institutions within societies are largely arms of the government, so institutional bias is the extended will of the people who make the government – a kind of tyranny of the majority, or tyranny of the most powerful. White Americans’ inability to see institutional racism due to a beleaguered mentality created by more than a century of psychological retrenchment is a serious historical issue in a modern context, and race is an easy tool to manipulate citizens, especially poor citizens, throughout their daily lives. The American dream beckons for anyone willing to work hard and take risks, or so Americans are told, but institutional bias rigs the game. For every individual who managed to pull up their bootstraps, millions of others who were trying just as hard failed through no fault of their own, and the American ethos named them lazy, shiftless, stupid. This institutional system of inequality ineffably shaped and shapes the lives of not just America’s minorities but its impoverished whites as well. After all, the system was designed that way.
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[2]. Grandfather clauses were enacted by seven Southern states between 1895 and 1910. These laws stated that provided an individual’s grandfather could vote prior to 1866 or 1867, that individual would be exempt from all educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. This meant illiterate, landless, and poor whites could vote, but descendants of former slaves could not. In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the grandfather clauses unconstitutional because they violated the equal rights guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. “Grandfather Clauses, Literacy Tests, and the White Primary,” USLegal.com, accessed on 2 Aug. 2023, https://civilrights.uslegal.com/voting-rights/grandfather-clauses-literacy-tests-and-the-white-primary/#:~:text=Because%20former%20slaves%20had%20not%20been%20granted%20the,vote%20to%20many%20impoverished%2C%20ignorant%2C%20and%20illiterate%20whites.
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