LBJ said that the passage of the (his) 1964 Civil Rights Act meant the death knell for southern Democrats. He was right. Ever since, Republicans have exploited backlash against it.

the two new surnames to make the top ten are garcia and martinez. this is not the time of reagan. the south has always been conservative. down here they were called conservative democrats.

Since the founding of the republic, state's rights has always been code for race-related issues. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, "state's rights" was the argument from the South that there were to be no federal guidelines on how or under what conditions slavery was conducted. In the North, "state's rights" meant that they would not encumber law enforcement with searches for runaway slaves. These same issues in virtual form re-emerged in the neo-slavery known as "segregation." Ghettos characterize segregation and these survive to the present day, enforced by zoning laws and property values, the cornerstones of the perceived social order.
Scratch a conservative, regardless of ethnicity, and one will find a white supremacist. Denial is the only defense of conservatism because overt racism is bad for PR.

"I'm not racist, but..."

I hear this phrase quite a bit in Texas. And yes, it is usually followed by racist filth.

For all the good information that this article has, I think it perpetuates the myth that racism in the United States is mainly in the South, and that with a Northern vanguard, "we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time." I think this ignores the facts and misrepresents the historical trajectory of racism in the United States, including the North.

According to Krugman himself, 39% of non-Southern whites voted Democrat in 2004, while around 35% Southern whites did the same. ("Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one") This is not such a huge difference; apparently whites in general prefer to vote Republican, so we can;t blame the South alone.

Racism itself is more than voting and party affiliation; it has to do with discrimination, segregation, etc. Look at the data on school segregation. After Brown vs. Board of Education and the Civil Rights struggle, the South was desgregated to such an extent that it remains THE MOST RACIALLY INTEGRATED school-system region today. What about other regions? While they were less segregated to begin with, they didn't see as much change either. Shockingly, Northeast U.S. schools continued to become more and more segregated, and continues to be the MOST SEGREGATED REGION when it comes to schools. Its as if Brown vs. Board didn't even happen there. And the general trend for all regions now is towards more segregation by race.

Look at residential segregation. Some of my friends from Atlanta, while they do not deny racist attitudes, speak of a more fluid mixing of races in some situations. I feel that the Northern U.S. and the Midwest are the leaders when it comes to White Flight, the creation of suburbs and the "ghettoization" of urban, black neoghborhoods, gentrification of cities by race, etc. Look at cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, D.C.: they are all profoundly segregated by race.

Thanks for reading!

"Look at cities like Baltimore . . . D.C."

Baltimore and D.C. are both below the Mason-Dixon line.

While racism persists around the country, I'm slightly encouraged that in most cases it's confined to older people. Even in the Old South, teens and 20-somethings listen to rap music, and black celebrities are accepted on an equal footing with white stars. (At least, this is what I've heard from those who have grown up or still live south of the Mason-Dixon line.)

By the next generation, most of the 'Wallace' Republican voters will have died off; this is not to say the South will be a paradise of tolerance everywhere, but it is improving.

Just as the neocon GOP is fading (Paul Krugman wrote a column about this as well), so, too, will racism in this country as our national skin tone becomes more tan than pink.

Already I know a couple of folks who have African, Hispanic and European ancestors; while they may not always know how to identify themselves in the census, they certainly harbor no racism toward any of those groups.

Until the terrorist organizations that led to the "Birth of a Nation" (esp. KKK) are deemed as such and membership made illegal, I will not think the US is on a path towards eradicating racism.

After all, nooses are back in vogue.

I understand that there are more interracial couples and interracial children, but I believe that often times these unions are between people of similar classes. (Poor with Poor and Middle-Class with Middle-Class). And that's a good thing, don't get me wrong.

But old attitudes often resurface when we are dealing with poor minorities and middle-class whites. Not just in relationships, but in politics (as the Reagan presidency illustrates).

Politically, we see old ideas resurface (poll taxes) and in the last two elections, votes of entire (black) communities disregarded/discarded. Was their outrage (outside of leftist circles)?

Oh, and there was Katrina... where "thugs" were molesting babies.

Does that send an improper message to the country? (i.e. Don Imus, Michael RIchards, Limbaugh (I know, I know, which incident?;), Dog the Bounty Hunter....).

Similarly, there's the justice system (part of which Dog was enbaled to enforce). There are many instances from enforcement to prosecution to sentencing (Jena being most celebrated) where the idea of justice being blind is even more appaling because it implies that we stink! Because somehow, justice DOES know colour.

I believe racism (and anti-semitism, xenophabia, homophobia, etc.) is suppressed and not necessarily declining. People understand and gauge what is socially accepted behaviour and act accordingly. Even the most recent immigrants learn not to express such feelings in public. Interracial unions and families is an encouraging sign, but its a sign unbalanced by many discouraging ones.

Ravindp is absolutely right - cities in the North and West have the more insidious form de facto segraegation.

PAULITICS, you forgot , illegal immigrants, you mentioned yet you left out the most hated, despised and demonized peoples nowadays, Muslims and anti-Islamist sentiment post 9/11 as well as anti-Hispanic/Latina and other Spanish speaking countries that are hated and assumed, not presumed, to be illegals hit me way too close to home. Just a friendly addition. thanks.
Peace

As the white population shrinks over the next 40 years to minority status (US Census 2000 Population projections) look for more not less overt racism. You can also expect more Floridas & Ohios. Aryan (white male) Supremacy is bred to the bone. Sorry. It's part of the System.

North, South, East, & West the male population in the US believes in Aryan Supremacy, Human Slavery, Gender Slavery, Massive child abuse, Constant war, & Genocide. It has been our core culture for 3,500 years along with bear baiting, cock fights, and baboons raping human females. We have believed in these things since before we wrote books. We have believed in these things since before we built cities. We have believed in these things since before my first cousins built Persepolis. Books came later. Cities came later. Bill of Rights? Declaration of Independence? Constitution? Those white males were child raping slave holders. They were writing themselves a DEAL. Who do you think they thought those documents applied to? You? Get over it. You are nobody now. You would have been nobody then. The fuckers just want you to fight for them and work for them at slavery depressed wages. In this mix, Gender slavery is the white boy's chip in Master's Wealth thru Slavery economic system. The bitch has no property rights and no biological self-determination. Women; mothers, sisters, daughters, & wives are, in that system, gender slaves. Buy'em. Sell'em. Roast'em on a spit.

They pop babies, also known as free labor, till they die. Then the alpha male gets another breeding female & continues. He negotiates his sons into a 'good' marriage with a proper breeding female and they all breed toxically together. Until the #1 son arranges a fatal hunting accident for dear old dad. Or the young wife slips the aging Mother-In-Law a little arsenic. The daughters of course are sold for business and social connections among the classes that count. That is how wealth has been accumulated in our Aryan societies back to before Cyrus of Persia. And now we're going to be a numeric minority in the land we committed genocide to own and built with forced human labor? Not bloody likely.

White people will see 6bn humans dead first. And that's exactly the kind of bugbats we are. Sorry. It's bred to the bone. Not just genocide & slavery. We've nuked defenseless civilian populations. We've deployed and left radioactive weapons on our battlefields from the Balkans to the ME. We've done things that would make you puke your dinner – and we got away with them all. We don't doubt for one minute the Absolute RIGHTNESS of our claim to tribal superiority. Like I said, Bugbats. And yes, my Aryan cousins in Europa are remarkably similar – especially as they also decline as the dominant populations. Their genocides are so old they've forgotten them.

The good news is that within a century, white people in the US should be around 12%, if that many. At that point containment & suppression policies should have been in place for white ghettos for quite some time. Shoe goes on the other foot for a while. If humanity survives our psychosis, of course. You go George. You go boy. Burn it all down.

Best of Luck, always,

Peace.

Wow there are some fiery comments here. History shows race has been used as a tool in the "Americas" since slavery was implimented for Africans and European indentured servitude was abolished. It was a tool for control over both the oppressed Africans AND the masses of non-Africans who thought they were free.

Yes, Chicago and St. Louis are two cities that I know of that have a "black" side and a "white" side. My own town is that way, too.
Krugman is talking about electoral politics-- the fact that the former Confederacy votes as a block most of the time, and that the change in the region from Democratic to Republican dominance coincides with the civil rights movement of the '60's.
I think he is forgetting about women, who can also be racists. I'd like to see those numbers.
Race is going to become an issue where the majority race feels it is losing its power over the minority race. These feelings are probably more intense in the South because African-Americans are a large minority in both urban and rural locales in the South. Even in slave times, the large black population was feared by whites as a potential security threat.

Here is a joke sent to me by a conservative republican friend that gives us a good idea of how these racist chickenhawks see us liberals:

History lesson for today

For those that don't know about history...
Here is a condensed version...

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals
2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery.

That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men or wussies. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth; the elephant.

Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

A few modern liberals like Mexican light beer (with lime added), but most prefer a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc,with passion fruit and kiwi aromas which are marked by grassy notes, then rounded out on the midpalate by peach flavors. Crisp and refreshing, with a hint of chalky minerality on the finish; or Perrier bottled water. They eat raw fish but dislike beef. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare.

Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, Ivy League professors, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated-hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink Sam Adams, Harpoon IPA or Yuengling Lager. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and generally anyone who works productively.

Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today's lesson in world history: It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it. A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other true believers and to more liberals just to piss them off.

What Krugman fails to understand is that the open borders policy promoted by Ted Kennedy in the 1965 Immigration Reform Act will kill the GOP; if it's not dead already for I've long thought that Bush is and should be the last GOP president. The interesting twist on this is that the GOP death may not work to the Democrat benefit because the Dems fail to inspire turnout in the new U.S. Hispanic majority. My guess is that given another 20 years and a deep, prolonged recession, an Hispanic voice like a Chavez will emerge into a dominant third party that will ultimately take control.

Mr. Krugman forgot to mention that, until the last couple of years, the state governments of the south have been overwhelmingly Democrat for the last 150 years. We have them to thank for such things as the Jim Crow laws.

Paulitics, the most dangerous time in dealing with a dying rattlesnake is right before its final breath. Many have been bitten by trying to handle a snake that is not quite dead yet and lashes out violently with its last gasp. In a similar way, racism in this country is not quite dead yet, but I think we are witnessing the last frenzied attack before it dies. This is true not only in the area of race, but fundamentalist religion, outdated economic structures, and domestic politics.

Of course, we will never get rid of all the stupid people among us, but I think they'll fade into the background, their 'Flat Earth' ideas laughable and ignored.

"People understand and gauge what is socially accepted behaviour and act accordingly. Even the most recent immigrants learn not to express such feelings in public."

And their children and grandchildren often reject such feelings altogether (I have seen this happen repeatedly), just as the '60s generation rejected the racism of their parents. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "We are what we pretend to be." When people pretend not to be racist, they stop acting like racists, and, eventually, even lose the ability to think like a racist, out of habit, if nothing else.

LuckyLefty, you wrote: "Aryan (white male) Supremacy is bred to the bone."

I have seen no scientific study that supports this contention and, as I said in my previous comments, in the future I believe most Americans will have a broader heritage, so who do they hate? Of course, there will still be small bands of racists like the Aryan Nation, but they'll be marginalized to the point where they'll be nothing more than a laughingstock -- in fact, in most places, they already are.

You also wrote: "Bill of Rights? Declaration of Independence? Constitution? Those white males were child raping slave holders. They were writing themselves a DEAL."

In fact, many delegates to the Constitutional Convention that voted on our national charter were dead-set against slavery and did not own slaves -- people such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin -- and Tom Paine, who was considered the author of the American Revolution, rejected slavery as well. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but his feelings about slavery were complex, as his writings show. He believed it was wrong and would eventually be eliminated even while he benefited personally from it, a painful paradox of which he was acutely aware. There is no evidence he, nor fellow Virginia slave-holder George Washington, ever raped or mistreated anyone, although Jefferson did have an affair with his slave Sally Hemings. (Incidentally, when he was posted to France and living in Paris, Jefferson treated Hemings as his mistress rather than his slave.)

The various amendments called the Bill of Rights were not necessarily a 'deal' to the ruling class in America at the time; Federalist Alexander Hamilton, for example, was appalled that 'the rabble' would be granted such leniencies as free speech, a free press, and the ability to overturn the government by their votes. (You might remember that Hamilton wanted the beloved war hero Washington to anoint himself King after the Revolution, an idea our first president rejected in disgust.)

"Yes, Chicago and St. Louis are two cities that I know of that have a "black" side and a "white" side."

Redjeff, I live in one of the two cities you mentioned and I can tell you this: Back in the 1970s there was a bar in my North Side ('white') neighborhood run by an old redneck where my black pals were intentionally made to feel uncomfortable. No more; the old redneck owner has passed away and, under new ownership, people of all colors are welcome there. I can cite other places in my city where that's true, as well. Times have changed and keep changing while sometimes our attitudes are mired in the battles of the past that have already been won.

RSJ--that's good news about your neighborhood bar, though anecdotal. You knew what side of your town was the "white" side w/o my having to tell you. Things are getting better, of course, but it is all too slow. I can also see how the racial divide has carried out to the suburbs, though less emphatically.

Commander_n_chimp wrote:

"I'm not racist, but…"

I hear this phrase quite a bit in Texas. And yes, it is usually followed by racist filth."

Here in South Africa you usually hear it like this:

"I'm not a racist.......blah blah blah ......
Or actually I am a racist ...... blah blah blah ....

But I love the black man, I respect Zulu culture .... blah blah blah....."

What I usually remember from this talk is just that it is a lot of blah blah blah. And that the speaker is not too clever.

"North, South, East, & West the male population in the US believes in Aryan Supremacy, Human Slavery, Gender Slavery, Massive child abuse, Constant war, & Genocide."

Luckyleft's rant has nothing to back it up, but it was fun to read. The problems he pointed out are common to all of humanity. Slavery, for instance, has been practiced in all cultures.

The alway's tendentious Krugman is selectively using only the facts that fit his scenario.