Why did the attitudes of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century southern whites on affirmative action and the Democratic Party, as well as their degree of “racial resentment,” differ depending on the percentage of African Americans in the counties in which they lived? Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen (hereinafter ABS) contend that this attitudinal contrast was not the result of a current “racial threat” that varied by the difference in black proportions among counties, but was instead the product of attitudes formed at least 150 years earlier under the slave regime, attitudes that were passed on by family and community socialization and by institutional reinforcement. Distant history did it, and what came in the century after 1860 reinforced the lessons. The civil rights movement and the federal laws that the movement inspired dampened the effect of slavery equally throughout the South, but left the Upcountry/Lowcountry contrast intact.

In a sense, their thesis only states a tautology. But for slavery, a much smaller number of African Americans would have voluntarily moved or been involuntarily forced to move to the South, even if tobacco and cotton had been widely cultivated there. No slavery, no Civil War. No freed persons, no Reconstruction, Redemption, or Jim Crow. No Solid South, no civil rights movement, no racist Republican Party. Other resentments. Q.E.D.

But should final effects be attributed to the First Cause alone? Was slavery even the starting point, or was it spotlighted to draw attention to the book? What are we to make of the “behavioral” and “institutional” path dependence that the authors posit to have connected slavery to the present? What causal emphasis should we place on current conditions or a century and a half of reinforcing events? What role did racial threats have in the onset and development of the path? Is the ABS gloss just another form of racial threat theory? Are all facets of race relations so essentially similar that we should view them as a phenomenon that can be placed on a single scale, so that “conservatism” at the time of slavery can be meaningfully related to “conservatism” in an era of formal legal equality? Did different facets of race relations move across time in lockstep, or was discrimination more complicated?

Let us start with slavery, which ABS largely treat as a static institution solely focused on raising upland cotton. Their treatment is too simple, and it focuses too much on the years just before the Civil War. There was substantial slave importation to the United States by 1700, and upland cotton could not be easily ginned before 1793. By 1860, the tobacco, rice, and long-staple cotton cultures of the seaboard states had had a much longer time to develop a tradition than the two generations of Mississippi parvenus and the single generation of East Texas frontiersmen had. Slavery changed drastically over two centuries in the United States, and there was not a single slaveholder culture to transmit; if the counties where slavery thrived had been assessed in 1800 or 1830, rather than 1860, the pattern would have been different.

Often, ABS suggest that the roots of twenty-first-century southern politics reach only to Reconstruction: “the political divergence between high- and low-slave counties began to emerge in the years immediately after the Civil War, not before” (pp. 107–8). Or “the time period after emancipation was likely a critical juncture in the trajectory of Southern whites’ racial attitudes” (p. 153). Indeed, antebellum Whigs and Democrats each appealed to areas where slaves were scarce and areas where they were predominant. It was from 1865 to 1900, not during the era of slavery, when Republicans and, later, Populists (who make no appearance in this book) split from the virulently white supremacist Democrats. As ABS realize (p. 135), it was only after 1865 when a coalition of African American voters and largely upland whites began to pose what they explicitly term a “threat” to plantation-area elites within the South. “How the First Reconstruction Still Shapes Southern Politics” might have been a more appropriate subtitle for the book.

The time path of race relations was also much more complicated than ABS generally present it. Black Codes, adopted when Andrew Johnson was president, were soon invalidated by military commanders, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregation of housing and public accommodations was an urban phenomenon that began in the North and was imposed by law in the South a generation or two after emancipation. It was impossible and, for whites, undesirable to mandate segregation in heavily black small towns and rural areas during and after slavery. Plantation whites had other, harsher ways to dominate African Americans.

Political violence, much deadlier during Reconstruction and other political crises than the later, largely social spectacles of lynching, followed a different pattern in time and place than did segregation. If racial violence was an “important mechanism” for the transmission of white supremacist values (p. 138), its sharp decline after 1877 and again after 1920 should have diminished the salience of those values by the twenty-first century. Disfranchisement, gradually instituted until about 1890 and fully accomplished by 1910, traced yet another path. School segregation was, except in New Orleans before 1877, apparently universal in the South from the 1860s until after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The point is that different facets of racial discrimination followed different time patterns through the post-emancipation South and affected different areas differently. Establishment and reinforcement of cultural attitudes were not as straightforward as ABS seem to suggest.

Although they discuss some effects of the Second Reconstruction legislation on white attitudes, ABS skip over the politics of the last three decades of the twentieh century. At that time, a series of moderate southern Democratic governors, led by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, offered some hope that southern whites might come to better terms with racial issues, even in the Black Belt. If ABS had measured southern white attitudes then or looked at state-level elections, they might have found different patterns.

Provocative in their subtitle and in some sweeping statements, ABS often qualify their thesis that contemporary differences in counties’ black proportions cannot account for observed contrasts in whites’ racial attitudes by inserting such words as “in part” (pp. 14–15), “alone” (p. 43), “exclusively” (p. 78), “only” (p. 101), “fully” (p 107), or “solely” (p. 162). The preceding analysis and the facts that the correlation between the slave percentage in southern counties in 1860 and the proportion of African Americans was 0.93 in 1900 (p. 95) and 0.77 in 2000 (p. 83) suggest a reformulation of ABS’s views.

The gravity of racial threats during Reconstruction and the rest of the nineteenth century and the potential threats thereafter varied with the African American population in each area. Putting down these threats with violence, ballot box stuffing, discriminatory laws, and, finally, state constitutional provisions that stifled black aspirations created a racial order of great power. But with great power came great fragility. Even small challenges from within—minor refusals of deference, appointments of blacks to insignificant offices, attempts to register a few African American voters—required constant white vigilance and almost authoritarian control of white impulses toward humanity or the rule of law. And petty threats paled in comparison with the likelihood, growing in the twentieth century, of more significant challenges from outside the region: litigation, proposed acts of Congress, a Second Reconstruction.

State laws seconded white socialization, and both were most effective where continued high proportions of African Americans made the potential threats most palpable. The initial threat was important, but so was the path that led from the First Reconstruction to the present, and especially the demographic continuities that reinforced the boundaries of that path.

ABS deserve praise for paying more serious attention to history than political scientists usually do. But all scholars should avoid getting carried away by clever ideas, however great the methodological sophistication they employ in working out those inspirations.