Invention of the white race

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Mon Jun 1 12:56:21 PDT 1998


In an illuminating historical note, Comrade Lazare wrote:


> Northern farmers were concerned, out of sight and hence out of mind. For
> Soutehrn populists, it was a different story. Although there are a lot of
> stories of black-white cooperation among Southern agrarian elements, the white
> Populist record on race was patchy at best and outrightly hostile at worst.
> Bear in mind that Southern Populists saw themselves as oppressed by Northern
> capital, which they identified with the GOP. This was the same party that had
> rampaged through Georgia during the Civil War and which was now pressing them
> economically to the wall. Since the Republicans were perceived in the South
> as the friend of the blacks -- and indeed most blacks who still voted did so
> for the GOP -- hard-pressed white farmers gravitated to an anti-black, anti-
> Republican position.

This is pretty much how it seems in Leon Litwack's newly released history of the Jim Crow South, but then I only look up populism in the index. best, rakesh



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