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Slavery was the South’s economic way of life that had social consequences we still confront to this day.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina studied how the hometowns of white Southerners play a role in their views of Black people. This is what they found:
Psychologist B. Keith Payne asked, “[Do] counties and states [that were] more dependent on slavery before the Civil War display higher levels of pro-white implicit bias today[?]”
The answer is YES and then some.
Places which had “a higher proportion of their populations enslaved in 1860 had greater anti-Black implicit bias among white residents” today.
White Southerners today are heirs to a legacy of privilege and grudge against Black people, who they blame for getting in the way of their continued prosperity - what with the abolition of slavery, newly awarded civil rights, and demands for equality and all.
Because slavery reinforced a social contract dependant on the idea that Black people were “inferior,” the racial bias established within families has led to what the study confirms are “structural inequalities.”
With this proof that the systemic inequality found in housing, education, labor, and health disparities has deep roots, digging them up will require questioning the implicit and unconscious racial bias of entire communities rather than believing that isolated incidents are, according to the study, “solely a feature of individual minds.”