The South is Not the Monolith You Want it to Be

Stacey Abrams and the late Representative John Lewis pictured at a 2017 protest in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Tani P.

Every presidential election season, it becomes clear that people don’t understand both geography or history. As states begin to be called, people—typically Democrats, leftists, and/or liberals—quickly begin to make jokes about the red-block that is the South and to some degree the Midwest. However, when the map is changed to look at votes by precinct, county, or even the US House of Representatives, we see maps that appear much redder across the country than specifically concentrated in the South and Midwest. Looking at these maps, California and New York start to look a lot more like South Carolina and Texas with a divide that is more between urban and rural areas than between large geographic regions. This presidential election was nearly 50/50 in many states, and in nearly every state, the losing candidate received at least a third of the total vote count. By percentage, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are all much more alike than they are different. 

What liberals don’t seem to understand every election cycle is that it is in the South, more than any region in the country, where 58 percent of the nation’s Black people live—and have always lived. Additionally, Southern states like Texas and Florida boast some of the largest Latinx populations in the country. It is between Houston and Dallas, Texas where I grew up surrounded largely by these two groups of people. Because the nation, including those in its liberal states and cities, is still severely segregated along the lines of race and class, this is a reality that the vast majority of white people cannot say they live.

 It is in the South that many of the country’s greatest organizers and liberators —Ella Baker, A. Phillip Randolph, Angela Davis, John Lewis, Pauli Murray, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name some of the most well-known ones—were born and organized. The South is home to some of the most innovative civil rights organizations from the older Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to more modern ones like the Equal Justice Initiative and Fair Fight Action. These people and groups show the power of Black Southern organizers and are examples of what can change when we invest in the South. Significant credit has gone to Stacey Abrams for her work against voter suppression in the South and specifically Georgia, a state that is being called the “center of the political universe.” Though Abrams shouldn’t receive all the credit as, for years, Black organizers in Georgia and throughout the South have worked to change the political landscape of the state and the South. For the first time in decades its electoral votes have gone to a candidate of the Democratic party, and, now, its two senate run-off elections will decide which party controls the Senate. It is a Southern state, largely due to the organizing of Black people and especially Black women and Black LGBTQ+ people, that can push this country towards the future liberals want.

Still, people make statements about the “backwards South.” People, often white liberals, argue that it can’t be won. Some even say, albeit somewhat jokingly, that the South may just need to secede (as if the first time the South seceded it wasn’t to keep Black people enslaved). These statements rage even as historically “red” states like Georgia and Texas have become battleground states in spite of the widespread voter suppression of communities of color and Black communities that have especially pervaded the states since the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

This is unsurprising. There has never been a true investment in Black people and their communities in this country and certainly not those in the South, as often noted as the failures of post-enslavement Reconstruction. However, Reconstruction’s failure, like much of Black oppression in the country, required the complicity and often active participation of white (Northern) moderates and liberals with white (Southern) conservatives in the country. This pattern tracks with the development of Jim Crow, segregation, policing, and mass incarceration throughout the country. Often, states considered to be liberal havens, like New York and California, were and are the states that have the most school segregation, class inequality, healthcare, and incarceration disparities by race. These havens often have vehemently racist origins as well. For example, Oregon —another beacon of American liberalism —“forbade Black people from living, working, or owning property”  when it was granted statehood in 1859. Racism is deeply ingrained in our systems in all geographic regions of the United States; believing a false dichotomy of liberal and conservative, racist and non-racist, or red and blue states both ignores history and silences Black people and people of color in all of them.

The 2020 presidential election results broken down by county. Map.

Nevertheless, cities and states in the North and West are frequently championed for their social reforms especially in racial and criminal justice, with many national non-profit organizations like the ACLU, Vera Institute of Justice, and Innocence Project often centered and headquartered in them. Ironically, though, these reforms often increase racial disparities in policing and incarceration rather than decrease them as the policies implemented disproportionately benefit white people and may even further harm communities of color. However, the South and especially its rural areas (as well as rural areas throughout the country generally), has rarely seen this much investment towards it for reform movements, despite some of the most obvious and egregious racial disparities existing and even growing in Southern and rural America and the South being the region, again, with the highest concentration of Black people.

White Americans, and especially those considered liberals or radicals of their time, have often only viewed Black people as a means to an end. It’s why George Washington banned Black people from fighting in the Continental Army until he needed more soldiers. It’s why Abraham Lincoln viewed emancipation more as a political tool to win the Civil War than a genuine cause in itself. It’s why New Deal policies were full of exclusions aimed to prevent Black people from accessing them and why FDR stayed away from overt support of Black Americans until World War II saw other countries discussing the abhorrent treatment of Black people in the United States. It’s why Bill Clinton fought for the Black vote, even playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, only to pass legislation that helped push mass incarceration and the War on Drugs to new peaks. Due to centuries of systemic oppression and segregation, Black people have been relegated to particular geographic locations, and it is this intentional disinvestment that is ironically the root of much of our political power. Black people’s concentration in the South in particular has been used to win elections and even wars for the people that are active in their oppression but considered the lesser of evils in a two-party system that together created their oppression to begin with. White supremacy has lasted because white people en masse both conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, left and right, have always chosen their whiteness over everyone and everything else.

Black people in the United States, the majority of whom live in the South, have always resisted their oppression in this country. We can’t afford to underestimate or leave them behind. Maybe it’s time for white liberals all over the country to instead start having difficult conversations with their white neighbors, friends, and family members that voted for Donald Trump rather than focus on the South where Black people and other people of color continue to save themselves while saving white people from their own demise.

Colby King is a staff writer for CPR and a junior studying African American and African Diaspora Studies and Psychology.