If the authors had said, “Hey, maybe these places have a lot of racism now because they were already full of plantations by the Civil War. Ex-slaveowners are still the old money there, which gives them a lot of influence over social norms,” that might have made sense! Instead, they focussed their mathematical model on poor and middle-class whites who arrived later, when white supremacy was already entrenched.
Second, this paper takes on faith that poor and middle-class Southern white people are racist by nature. It requires deep illiteracy on Southern history to believe this. Wealthy white Southerners passed Jim Crow laws to keep the Black and poor white underclass divided. We’re so used to seeing Jim Crow’s aftermath that we forget to ask why those laws got passed in the first place. The South has long been deeply unequal. Time and again, Black and poor white Southerners teamed up to solve it. And time and again, all they got for it was brutality.
A biracial “Fusionist” coalition seized power in 1890s North Carolina and was successful at beating back the first wave of Jim Crow laws. So wealthy whites launched a coup d’état, massacring the democratically elected Black leadership in the Fusionist stronghold of Wilmington. They appointed their own handpicked team of racists to rule instead. That’s how Reconstruction ended in North Carolina. After emancipation, wealthy whites installed anti-miscegenation laws across the South. Why? Left to their own devices, white and Black Southerners just wouldn’t stop putting a ring on it.
In 1917 Oklahoma, the Green Corn Rebellion saw about a thousand Black, Seminole, Mvskoke, and poor white tenant farmers unite to protest the World War I draft. Their communities couldn’t feed themselves without their draft-aged men. In Depression-era Arkansas, Black and white sharecroppers teamed up to form the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. White landowners threatened, stalked, beat, and killed STFU members and evicted their families from the land, leaving them destitute on the rural backroads. FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration–then led by the supposedly progressive Henry Wallace—shrugged it off as the price of progress.
I’m not claiming that the South is secretly a magical place of interracial harmony. It’s not. I’m just offering some context on how white supremacy works in real life. It’s a top-down effort. The South didn’t just wake up one day with most whites unified by racism. It took a lot of work to get here! That work has prevailed all over the US, and continues to this day.