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Harvard’s Maya Sen points me to a recent paper with Avidit Acharya and Matthew Blackwell, The Political Legacy of American Slavery. They show a strong relationship, at the county level, between the slave share of the population in 1860 and political attitudes today:

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose af- firmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks.

Remarkably, the slave share in 1860 is a better predictor of attitudes than the share of African-Americans in the population today. They attribute this surprising fact to what happened after the Civil War, when

Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly free African-American population.

It seems relevant, then, to note that the “Confederate” flag we’re now focusing on was not, in fact, the flag of the Confederacy; it was a battle flag, but it became a standard emblem of the South thanks to its adoption by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.