In Deep Roots, Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen offer a compelling theoretical and empirical case for the lasting effects of slavery on the political attitudes of whites residing in the Southern Black Belt (BB). According to their argument, the effects of slavery persist via behavioral path dependence as a response to the critical juncture lasting from the abolition of the peculiar institution to around the late 1800s when BB whites successfully implemented the Jim Crow system of segregation, which subjugated African Americans to a second-class citizenship in economic, political, and social realms. There is a lot to unpack here, but the thesis, although somewhat novel, is easily comprehensible.

First, the Black Belt is named for the fertile dark soil running across the heart of the South and especially across sections of the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) where the practice of slavery was most prominent. In the BB counties (the authors’ preferred geographic unit of analysis), slavery’s greater presence as a percentage of the population shaped and continues to have a greater impact on whites’ racial attitudes toward African Americans. The emancipation of slaves in 1865 and the crisis it brought on former slaveholders/planters and their progeny led to their successful efforts to rein in the newly freed slaves by severely restricting their economic and political mobility. Unlike in those sections of the South where slavery did not flourish and therefore emancipation of a relatively small number of blacks was never viewed as an existential threat to white rule, BB whites drove the establishment of Jim Crow and the Solid Democratic South as the principal institutional means to perpetuate white supremacy.

Interestingly, the authors place greater emphasis on social (e.g., churches, schools, and parents) than on institutional factors (e.g., restrictive voting measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, and the white primary) for the intergenerational transmission of conservative racial attitudes among BB whites. By learning of their racial superiority as expressed by their parents and in their schools, at the same time as discrimination was mandated by election laws and in racially separate but unequal public places of accommodation, every postbellum generation of BB whites has inherited, maintained, and promulgated the most racially conservative opinions found in the United States. The authors refer to this social and institutional process of inculcation as mechanisms of reproduction: hence, behavioral path dependence explains why BB whites persist as America’s most racially conservative population.

The authors begin by developing their theory of behavioral path dependence as the vehicle explaining why slavery still influences whites’ political attitudes. In making this argument they note that it is generalizable to various places and time periods throughout history; for example, German anti-Semitism dating to the fourteenth century. In part 1 of the book, the authors go straight to the evidence that slavery continues to shape Southern whites’ attitudes. Specifically, the higher the percentage of slaves in a county in 1860, the more likely contemporary whites in that county are “opposed to affirmative action...agree with statements that indicate racial resentment, and more likely to express cooler feelings about blacks” (p. 74). In contrast, and bolstering the authors’ argument that slavery’s main effect is on racial attitudes, they find no significant relationship between the percentage enslaved in a county and white attitudes toward nonracial issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

In part 2, the authors produce their best work in chapters 5 and 6. Here, they employ rich historical data on voting behavior, lynching, and political economy to flesh out their contention that the period between the abolition of slavery and the turn of the century was the critical juncture: it was then BB whites diverged from their white counterparts in low-slave counties by furthering a much more pronounced racial caste system to perpetuate their dominance over a recently emancipated and, in many cases, majority-black population. Notably, white views regarding slavery do not exhibit much variation on the basis of the institution’s relative prominence, even in the 1860 presidential election. Rather, when the profit motive is threatened by political disagreement (intensified Republican opposition after 1860), the split on slavery comes into stark relief as high-slave counties are markedly more pro-secession than are low-slave counties. After the Civil War, BB whites are further incentivized to exert their dominance over African Americans because of the economic toll the conflict wrought on their wealth, which was directly tied to chattel slavery.

In part 3, the last section of the book, the authors offer evidence for the kinds of factors that reinforce or weaken the behavioral path dependency of BB whites’ racial attitudes. The reproduction of racial conservatism is evident with respect to the parent–child transmission of these opinions, and it is manifest in BB whites’ greater support for presidential candidates furthering a racially conservative agenda irrespective of party affiliation; for example, Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Independent George Wallace in 1968. And, even though big changes to race relations through interventions like the 1954 Brown decision, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act have greatly reduced white–black educational, economic, and political participation disparities, the more racially conservative attitudes of whites residing in high-slave counties persist.

Deep Roots is an important work because it is perhaps the most theoretically and empirically developed explanation for why whites residing in high-slave counties remain the most racially conservative Americans. Nonetheless, with the exception of racial resentment, the direct evidence for the relationship between county percentage enslaved in 1860 and modern white racial attitudes is not as robust as the authors claim. This might explain why statistical confidence intervals are typically set at 90%, and in several instances the plotted effects are not even significant at this level. Also, it is curious that the authors include nonsecessionist states in their analysis as “Southern” (e.g., Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia). Presumably this is just because these states practiced slavery, but no portion of the Black Belt runs through them and Kentucky is likely the only one with a legitimate case for being classified as “Southern.”

In the otherwise outstanding chapter 5, the authors unwittingly succumb to the ecological inference fallacy in contending that BB white voting behavior in presidential elections does not depart from the regional pattern until after Reconstruction (Figure 5.4, p. 118). Recall that the impressive enfranchisement of African Americans during Reconstruction and the concomitant strong reduction in ex-Confederate participation (at least initially) mask what is likely already a one-sided Democratic presidential vote cast by native BB whites, who are outnumbered in many localities by the Republican coalition of blacks, Northern whites, and Southern scalawags.

Surprisingly, the authors completely overlook the scholarship of Edward Carmines and James Stimson (1989). This omission is alarming because Carmines and Stimson put forth a theory of issue evolution that, in its entirety, closely resembles the one advanced in Deep Roots. Instead of a critical juncture, Carmines and Stimson speak of a critical moment that constitutes the impetus for a marked change of political course, which is then pursued and prolonged by path dependency. The cardinal example of issue evolution as applied to the US context of racial politics occurred when the national parties permanently reversed positions on civil rights in the 1964 presidential election (the critical moment).

Finally, the authors’ weakest argumentative claim—and also the one given the most attention in the book—is that there is scant evidence of racial threat per se as an explanation for why BB whites harbor the most racially conservative attitudes. The authors tie themselves into knots in their efforts to both explicate racial threat and then knock it down as a significant explanatory dynamic. Indeed, they would be better served to merely state that racial threat is real and that its roots date back to the legacy of slavery. After all, how can they dismiss racial threat or attempt to strip the definition of historical context when they include the following quote, which is a classic statement of the concept? “Southern whites and particularly those whites in the Black Belt who were the most outnumbered...had the most to lose” (p. 209).