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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?
Pretending for a moment that this question is asked in good faith and not the obviously loaded "Howdy fellow kids, golly gee why is racism?" question that it is, there are actually history books written about this.
Jim Crow laws were not just about "keeping black criminals away" but as much as possible, enforcing the subjugation of black people that had previously existed under slavery but was no longer technically legal now that they were (on paper) equal citizens.
Consider for a moment the possibility that racism actually exists, and that sometimes people act in a discriminatory and oppressive fashion not solely because they are rational actors responding in an evidence-based manner to anti-social behavior, but because they don't like certain classes of people and consider those people inferior to them, and are very unhappy about not being able to legally prevent those people from working and living and mixing with them.
Based on my experience asking these sorts of questions, I figured that at least some people would assume that I'm acting in bad faith. I appreciate you answering my question in spite of this assumption.
Slavery has an obvious economic incentive in that it's profitable for businesses to make people do unpaid labor at gunpoint. When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself. Slaveowners, for the most part, weren't people who found human suffering an inherent positive. They were indifferent to human suffering, which means they would gladly enable it for the sake of profit. To my knowledge, Jim Crow was not a way for white businessmen to make money, and so it did not serve in any way the same purpose as slavery. If there was a way for Jim Crow to be used for profit, then that would change my understanding of this period in history.
Telling me to read books doesn't work unless you name specific books. I don't trust my own education, or anything I'd randomly pick up at the library. I'm well aware now that any issue relating to race will be skewed in the present-day news, and I have no reason to believe this would be different for books about historical racial issues.
In addressing your last paragraph, I know that some racists of the kind that you describe exist, but I have no idea how numerous they are now or how numerous they were historically. I only know that I, and many others, have been falsely accused of being this kind of person, no matter how much we champion liberal values or equality under the law, and the amount of false positives does make me wonder how common the real deal ever was. If I take your description of historical racism as the truth, and I try to imagine how that would work with my understanding of tribalism today, I suppose that historic racism would poor whites treating poor blacks as their outgroup and rich whites as their far group. That would be comparable to things I'm aware of.
I'm saying white people didn't believe that black people should hold equal stature to them and in particular did not think they should intermingle with them in society. White Southerners especially, having recently lost a war and been forced to free their slaves, were not keen on their oppressors (as they saw it) dictating that they treat their former slaves as equals. Others have pointed out that a large part of this was fear of race-mixing (i.e., white women sleeping with black men), and that was certainly a large part of it though not the entirety of it.
I am not sure what to tell the persona you are adopting that pretends to be unaware of basic facts of American history. Leaders of the day were not subtle or covert about their motives; they spoke very openly about wanting to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, and why. I don't think even white supremacists will disagree with my summary. They will only disagree about whether the motives and means were justified.
What other reason do you think there would be for Jim Crow laws if not racism? The motive I suspect you are trying to extract from this discussion is "It must have been justified by their actual dealings with black people." Even if made in good faith, this attempt to map "rationality" onto all past behavior doesn't work because people are not, for the most part, and especially not in large groups, rational actors.
Your phrasing here glosses over a slightly more complex picture--namely, that Northern and Southern anti-black racism had different emphases. There's a reason that the preclearance measures of the VRA covered several northern cities as well as several southern states. Northern racism said that blacks could be "high but not near;" Southern racism was "near but not high." In other words, the racists of the North tended not to be threatened by powerful black people, but they didn't want to live near them. The racists of the South had less of an issue with black people nearby, so long as they didn't get "uppity."
Neither viewpoint is remotely admirable, but the details go some way to explaining how race relations, preferred policies, living patterns, and the like developed in somewhat divergent directions long after the Civil War. As I understand it, this was also a difference in emphasis, not 100% this vs. 100% that.
I'm aware, but I was presenting a simplified version for our OP who suspects racism is just something modern race activists made up.
The old saying that Southerners loved black people but hated the black race, while Northerners loved the black race but hated black people, is also a simplification but has some degree of truth.
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