Moderate White Supremacy

Haley Barbour has come under some fire for some comments--old and new--about race, the Citizens Council, and the Civil Rights movement. The most problematic of his recent statements was a suggestion that the Citizens Council movement was primarily targeted against the KKK, and helped maintain racial peace in Yazoo, Mississippi.[1]

You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.

Now it's true that the Citizens Councils didn't like the KKK, and they did organize against them. But the bulk of their activities were organized against the NAACP and other organizations that they saw as interfering in the noble southern traditions of apartheid and anxious assertions of racial supremacy. And all of their activities were aimed at preserving white supremacy, both in law and in community belief. Whereas Barbour sees them only fighting the Klan, and ignores them trying to keep the white community's boot on the neck of blacks, Matthew Yglesias has a more revealing take:

In Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s most white people were white supremacists. And within the large and powerful white supremacist community, there was a split between more moderate and more radical factions. The moderates pursued a strategy of economic coercion and the radicals pursued a strategy of violence. There was also a small minority of white proponents of racial equality. In Barbour’s home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi the moderate faction of white supremacists had the upper hand. And Barbour thinks the strength of moderate white supremacists helped create a beneficial political atmosphere in his hometown.

Hell we could call this triangulation, but really it's the classic strategy for those who want to achieve/maintain desired policies in an inhospitable climate. It is the same strategy employed by racial egalitarians in the Civil War/Reconstruction period, who sought to separate out a sphere of social equality from the spheres of political and civic equality. They recognized that they could only make gains in the latter if they forswore equality in the former.

From a 1965 NY Times article, a nice taste of this divide between moderates and extremists.

Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson made his strongest public statement against racial extremism, during an introductory speech for Senator James O. Eastland, who recently has been accussed by ultra-conservatives of 'going soft' on segregation. Referring to racial extremists, Governor Johnson said 'We're not going to be the pushing boy for that element ever again. We were not only the architects but helped build the dog house we now find ourselves in.'... Johnson, who won election on an uncompromising racist platform, asserted he would continue to fight for segregation, but through legal channels. 'Rather than accept the interpretation of laws by some bureaucrats,' he said, 'we prefer to go to the courts for their interpretation.'

I especially love that Johnson both ran on an uncompromising racist platform and still is able to refer to extremists as "that element." While the center of gravity has moved rightward on a whole series of issues, it has definitely moved to the liberal position on matters of race. 



[1] His watermelon comment is probably the most offensive in one way, but it's also weirdly ambiguous. On the one hand it is a classic racist trope. It was said, however, as a somewhat jocular warning to an aide who persisted in using racist language during an 1982 election campaign. It's possible that what upset Barbour about his aide's comments were that they were overheard. Of course, his own comments were also reported. Racist language and sentiment are a deeply ingrained part of the social and political discourse in many areas and communities of the country, south and non-south. Much of this is tied to actual policy positions, in the sense of not just believing blacks inferior and undesirable but in the belief that government and private power should be employed to sustain and strengthen white supremacy. But not all of it, and possibly not even most of it. Barbour's comments have always struck me as the latter: racist language, possibly reflecting underlying racist beliefs, but constrained by a belief in a citizenship regime that does not actively discriminate or sustain racial hierarchies. I felt similarly when Harry Reid's 'negro' comment came out. Certainly doesn't excuse it, and one should hold public officials especially to a standard in which the power of language and the reality of racism in government and society are recognized. But different than Trent Lott's comments that the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected President in 1948, which are really hard to understand except as an endorsement of public and private power being deployed to maintain white supremacy. Also, the fact that Barbour, in trying to upbraid an aide for racist language, couldn't help himself but to get in a racist joke, seems sufficiently sophomoric to raise broader questions about his judgment. But sophomoric has definitely been his M.O. throughout his career, and probably explains some of his electoral appeal.