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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31247 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.

I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?

The justification was about preventing miscegenation. Jim Crow laws were written with the assumption that black men sleeping with white women was an inherent harm, that white men sleeping with black women was also less than ideal, and that it was important to whiten the population and keep it that way. Louisiana briefly attempted to segregate its public schools by sex to prevent black and white students dating after brown v board of ed.

Miscegenation was the primary reason for Jim Crow laws- most were written to maintain distance, and while blacks were definitely viewed as lesser, maintaining a subordinate position(rather than protecting the purity of the white race) was a distinctly secondary goal. Black wealth was tolerated and blacks were permitted to attend college(but segregated to ensure they didn't impregnate any white women). This is a different story from Apartheid in S Africa.

Do you have evidence on this? We have a ton of writings from the south during reconstruction, and while the rape of white women by black men was an important issue (it influenced the Tulsa race riot), and still is an important issue according to fbi stats, I don’t recall much writing talking about consensual sex being the important issue.

The people writing Jim Crow laws didn't make a strong distinction between rape and consensual sex when it came to a white woman and a black man, just as today we wouldn't make a strong distinction when it comes to a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man. Segregationists had a different mentality about miscegenation combined with a view that black males were inherently rapey towards white women and thus couldn't be trusted around them.

I don't say these things to make value judgements, but I do think it's important to remember that people in the past had values dissonance when we try to understand their thinking.

This doesn't show that their "primary" fear was about what today would be considered consensual relations rather than what would today be considered rapes.

I thought anti-miscegenation laws were separate. Was the idea that people might be tempted to break those laws without forced separation?

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