The Southern Strategy: then....and now

[bigrebnc1775]

Yup interesting how they can claim Nixon courted racist southerns when he sped up desegregation busing and open support for blacks in all walks of life.

when i was growing up in the 70s, it was taught to me as historical fact. i did not question it.

it was only when i was older, that i began to wonder what exactly he did, to pander for those racist votes.


i was unable to find anything.


the older i got, and more i got to see liberals lying, i slowly came to realize, that is was just not true.


since then, i've seen excerpts from more academic research, on what actually happened to the south.

I think I understand your confusion. You are thinking of it only as it relates to Nixon. The sources I quoted from are a bit broader.

nixon was supposed to be the one that made it all come together. if the historical record shows him NOT pandering for racist voters, then the theory is false.

Perhaps so, but it was In process before Nixon. Goldwater was part of it. And remember, Nixon DID promise to oppose busing (hugely contentious) and not to “ram anything down their throats”. He did, in fact work to avoid alienating them by letting the courts take most of the flack.

Presidency of Richard Nixon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Nixon years witnessed the first large-scale efforts to desegregate the nation's public schools.[89] Seeking to avoid alienating Southern whites, whom Nixon hoped would form part of a durable Republican coalition, the president adopted a "low profile" on school desegregation. He pursued this policy by allowing the courts to receive the criticism for desegregation orders, which Nixon's Justice Department would then enforce.[90] By September 1970, less than ten percent of black children were attending segregated schools.[91] After the Supreme Court's handed down its decision in the 1971 case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, cross-district school busing emerged as a major issue in both the North and the South. Swann permitted lower federal courts to mandate busing in order to remedy racial imbalance in schools. Though he enforced the court orders, Nixon believed that "forced integration of housing or education" was just as improper as legal segregation, and he took a strong public stance against its continuation.

If the Southern Strategy was a myth....why did the RNC apologize for it?

Hey retard a couple of posts back you wrote this to me
"The Southern Strategy did not rely on Nixon and started prior to him And continued after him. His record on Civil Rights was good (agree with you there)."
Yet you keep swinging back to Nixon for support for your assertion.

 

[badbob85037]

Political and historical revisionists have been busy lately, what with blatantly stupid or insensitive racial remarks from today's two presidential contenders, racial unrest over policing, the abuse of the "race card" by the left, or the empowerment of white supremacy by the right.

There has been a frantic, almost obsessive effort to portray each party as "the party of racism". There has even been a completely retarded bit of political theatre aimed at "banning" the Democrat Party (seriously - we pay these jokers for this?).

Historically, neither party is the party of the past. Today's Republicans do not in any way resemble the Party of Lincoln, and today's Democrats do not in any way resemble the party of George Wallace. Parties are not ideologies. Parties change their ideologies - not completely, but sufficiently in order to achieve their main aim: winning votes.

That is where the Southern Strategy comes in. The south represented and still represents a substantial largely conservative voting block and one that DIVIDED the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party long held it, reversing the gains made after emancipation and supporting southern landowners in maintaining their racial caste system through a host of new laws that robbed black people of their newly realized rights.

That changed though, with the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1950 and 1968, the government passed 4 bills that were collectively known as the Civil Rights Acts. Both the Democrats and the Republicans voted to pass them. In those votes, the Republicans were more unified than the Democrats. It's a mistake to assume the Democrats were a "united party", they were far less united then than now. The Democrats were divided, with southern Democrats holding the south, the remainder spread throughout the US and the voting for these pieces of legislation reflected that division. This is important to remember because broad brushing either party as "the party of racism" is both dishonest and unhelpful.

So what about the Southern Strategy? What is or was it? It was a political strategy, initially formed by Nixon, to turn the Democrat stronghold in the south to Republican. Was it racist? Yes...in that it played on racial divides. Does that mean Nixon was racist? No...this isn't necessarily about personal feelings about race. Early on, Nixon was a strong proponent for desegregation, then he pivoted, drawing back from it and altering his policies when he developed the Southern Strategy.

Ironically - this is where the latest bit of historical revisionism comes in, with Talking Heads opining:

Candace Owen: "The Southern Strategy is a myth that never happened"...a claim rated as totally false by Politifact.

It's really about the POLITICS of PARTY CONTROL. What would it take (and is it even possible) to gain control of this substantial region?

Southern Strategy - Southern Cultures

www.southerncultures.org

​

In his 1991 book, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream,New York Times columnist Tom Wicker captures the political two-step that Nixon danced as he sought to govern and to carry out a strategy to turn the South into a Republican-dominated region as it had been a “solid Democratic South’’ for much of the twentieth century. Wicker gave Nixon credit for “a spectacular advance in desegregation’’ in 1970. “Perhaps the most significant achievement of his administration’s domestic actions,” Wicker wrote, came as “the Nixon administration had appeared in retreat from desegregation, while actively courting the white vote.”​

​

Indeed, in his 1968 campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters. In the aftermath of city riots in 1967 and 1968, as well as Vietnam War protests, Nixon said he was for “law and order.’’ His administration went to court to slow down school desegregation. Nixon tried to install two so-called strict-constructionist conservatives, Clement F. Haynesworth Jr. of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, on the Supreme Court, but the Senate turned down both nominees...​

​

In their book, The Southern Strategy, published shortly after the 1970 mid-term elections, Atlanta journalists Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver wrote a detailed—and critical—account of the strategy in practice. “It was a cynical strategy, this catering in subtle ways to the segregationist leanings of white Southern voters,’’ Murphy and Gulliver wrote, “yet pretending with high rhetoric that the real aim was simply to treat the South fairly, to let it become part of the nation again.”​

​

White voters got the message. Along the New Orleans motorcade route, a Nixon supporter held up a hand-lettered sign that read, “I am for Nixon . . . Less Federal Control. Equal Treatment for the South.”​

So, while the Democrats were pandering to the newly enfranchised black voters, the Republicans were pandering to the southern white voters unhappy with desegregation and other Civil Rights legislation that they felt "disempowered" them.

That's the history, in part. No one has clean hands in regards to race.

But what about now? Well...the Southern Strategy is still going on. The Democrats are playing to the regions black population and it's more liberal urban white population. The Republicans are pivoting harder towards a more substantial rural and suburban white population, conflating the Confederacy, its monuments and it's flag, with honor and patriotism and an attack on our culture, while making an appeal to authoritarian law and order in the wake of racial unrest and social upheaval. Today's Southern Strategy still capitalizes on the same fears of disenfranchisement but adds some new (and, newly revived old) enemies: immigrants, Mexicans, communists, Marxists.

It has little to do with racism...and a lot to do with party control.

And yes...the Republican Party is still at it. As are the Democrats.

It goes a little farther back than that. Democrats fought tooth and nail against every equal rights bill including anti-lynching laws. But they all passed by Republicans. It got so bad Democras and their KKK couldn't burn a cross in a front lawn or lynch a few to keep that fear burning. They had to think of something to keep these people on the plantation. They made a plan and called the bill exactly what it wasn't, the Great Society. Everybody would get a great job to end the racial divide , end poverty. even clean up the environment. LBJ was so proud of that bill he said "We'll have those ******* voting democrat for the next 200 years."

We now pay out a trillion dollars a year on poverty to the same families we paid three generations ago. They have traitors to their race as Jackson and Sharpner. They are in place to blame all but the guilty for these people stuck in a shit holes with no way up or out. . Hand outs but never a hand up. The race divided is wider apart now than ever thanks to Bo Rock. and maybe pelosi knows where the job are. Remember democrats are the party of the poor and they are going to keep em that way. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, he knew what was up.

 

[Correll]

4. What names have I called you?

the entire southern strategy conspiracy theory is nothing but calling republicans racist.

You talk about nuance as if you practice it. Your posts have been anything but. Broadbrushing the entire left.

For example, this statement. The Dems are certainly guilty of racist policies in the past, but you, and your cohort of Republicans are busy trying to erase your own party’s problematic history by calling the Southern Strategy (a long recognized and documented bit of history) a myth. In fact, while you are up in arms about the left toppling confederate statues you are busy rewriting your own history: what was right is now left, what history is now a hoax. It is a bit unreal.

And again, your lack of nuance. When the Republican Party adopted the strategy, they took on the racist mantle that tbe Democrats abandoned when Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights. You insist tbe Democrats need to acknowledge their past...but give a free pass here for Republicans?

Where the nuance problem comes in is here. ”You are calling Republicans racist”. No. First, Republicans are INDIVIDUALS. Second, like the Democrats, the Republican Party was split on this issue. And third, it was increasing political power as much if not more than the personal beliefs of politicians.

You are pushing the lie....and you have been exposed pushing the lie..........you can't lie without being called out on the lie....the parties did not switch, the democrat party simply accepted racists of all skin colors into their party......

So...the southern racists magically transformed their culture when they started voting Republican. That is a special kind of stupid.

Racial reconcilation in the SOUTH (outside of politics) progressed more rapidly here than in the North.. The southern "racists" were your people. If flying the Confederate flag and donating to Daughter of Confederacy are the marker for racist.. Once the schools got integrated, -- sports, music, southern cooking, RELIGION and regional culture were so much more common value between races here - it was FASTER to realize how MANY Southern values and traditions the races had in common.. Not the same regional culture dynamic as in the more amorphically north...

First of all, I want to clarify something. I am an independent who caucuses with Dems when it comes to USMB. You are a libertarian who caucuses with the Pubs, when it comes to USMB. If you are going to refer the Dems as “my people” then I will refer to the Pubs as “your people”. Fair enough?

The other is that in broadbrushing the parties you ignore the divisions that existed. The Dems were divided on Civil Rights, but Southern Block was so powerful, FDR and his Democrats were unable to make any inroads in regards to segregation, Jim Crowe, or lynchings. The Republican Party was divided on the Southern Strategy. BOTH parties were a lot more diverse ideologically THEN than they are now.

When it comes to the Republicans taking on racism to gain the South...yes. They did. It wasn’t fast process. It took a long time. Two examples exist today that show exactly how Republicans are willing to tolerate, even fight for racist policies or heritage in order to maintain political power.

The first is in the issue of felons voting rights. The second is the issue of confederate memorials.

The history of removing voting rights from felons is one of racism.

.....

ok, you have finally made an actual attempt to support your conclusion. good work.


1. felon voting loss. potentially a significant issue, though i've don't think i have ever heard it discussed in a campaign. so, can you demonstrate any evidence that it was a politically significant force in the goldwater or nixon campaigns in the south?

2. confederate memorials were not an issue until very recently. the southern strategy, if it has any weight to it, would have been a long done deal by the time it became an issue.




and seriously. i am glad that you have finally tried to make a supporting argument. but, it seems plain that the more you try, the more you will realize why you did not do so before.


the normal thing for a human to do at that point, is to double down on their beliefs and become more radicalized and even a troll.


i've done that to rightwinger and to mac1958. i hope you bounce better. though the science says you will not.

Lol she haS no argument.. there was no Southern strategy.. Nixon told democrat run unions HIRE BLACKS! Real racist.. She’s just continuing with stupid fake Democrat narrative of racism

The Southern Strategy had nothing to do with what individual politicians believed. For example I don’t think there is any evidence that Goldwater or Nixon, were themselves racist and, concurrently while Johnson was much applauded for his stancesand legislation on Civil Rights, he himself held racist attitudes. It is about the politics of party Power, and even though it was associated with Nixon, it started well before Nixon. Interestingly, it also was not simply north/south, the west played a role (Which I had not realized).

The Western Origins of the “Southern Strategy”

The untold story of the ideological realignment that upended the nation

newrepublic.com

Unlike Eastern Republicans, whose history was defined by opposition to slavery, Western Republicans had long held racial views toward Asians and Native Americans similar to those of Southern Democrats toward African Americans. For example, Republican Governor Leland Stanford of California had this to say in his 1862 Inaugural Address:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged, by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.… There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races.

Discrimination against Asians culminated in enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 under Republican President Chester A. Arthur, which formed the basis for all subsequent efforts to restrict immigration based on race and ethnicity. The 1888 Republican platform, in fact, said this was just the first step: “We declare our hostility to the introduction into this country of foreign contract labor and of Chinese labor, alien to our civilization and constitution; and we demand the rigid enforcement of the existing laws against it, and favor such immediate legislation as will exclude such labor from our shores.”

Thus by 1890, “the West had an ideology more in common with that of the South than that of the North,” Richardson writes.

Further bringing the Westerners and Southerners together was a shared attitude toward the federal government on economic issues. Southerners had long favored small government in Washington to keep it from interfering with segregation. This meant keeping taxes and spending low and unions out. Westerners shared this libertarian philosophy because they glorified the idea of “rugged individualism” that emanated from myths about the settlement of the frontier.

You were shown in the New York Times Article where it stated that the Southern Strategy was dismissed and not adopted...yet you persist in lying about it...you are vile....




Nixon’s Southern Strategy: The Democrat-Lie Keeping Their Control Over the Black Community | Black Quill and Ink


Ken Raymond
Jun 2011

Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, which the democrats say is the reason black people had to support them during the 1960′s–is a lie.

And it’s probably the biggest lie that’s been told to the blacks since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government after getting the NAACP to support him.
After talking with black voters across the country about why they overwhelmingly supports democrats, the common answer that’s emerges is the Southern Strategy.

I’ve heard of the Southern Strategy too. But since it doesn’t make a difference in how I decide to vote, I never bothered to research it. But apparently it still influences how many African Americans vote today. That makes it worth investigating.

For those that might be unfamiliar with the Southern Strategy, I’ll briefly review the story. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, most blacks registered as democrats and it’s been that way ever since.

And that doesn’t make any sense when you consider the fact that it was the democrats that established, and fought for, Jim Crow laws and segregation in the first place. And the republicans have a very noble history of fighting for the civil rights of blacks.

The reason black people moved to the democrats, given by media pundits and educational institutions for the decades, is that when republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he employed a racist plan that’s now infamously called the Southern Strategy.

The Southern Strategy basically means Nixon allegedly used hidden code words that appealed to the racists within the Democrat party and throughout the south. This secret language caused a seismic shift in the electoral landscape that moved the evil racist democrats into the republican camp and the noble-hearted republicans into the democrat camp.

And here’s what I found, Nixon did not use a plan to appeal to racist white voters.

First, let’s look at the presidential candidates of 1968. Richard Nixon was the republican candidate; Hubert Humphrey was the democrat nominee; and George Wallace was a third party candidate.

Remember George Wallace? Wallace was the democrat governor of Alabama from 1963 until 1967. And it was Wallace that ordered the Eugene “Bull” Connor, and the police department, to attack Dr. Martin Luther King

Jr. and 2,500 protesters in Montgomery , Alabama in 1965. And it was Governor Wallace that ordered a blockade at the admissions office at the University of Alabama to prevent blacks from enrolling in 1963.

Governor Wallace was a true racist and a determined segregationist. And he ran as the nominee from the American Independent Party, which was he founded.

Richard Nixon wrote about the 1968 campaign in his book RN: the Memoirs of Richard Nixon originally published in 1978.

In his book, Nixon wrote this about campaigning in the south, “The deep south had to be virtually conceded to George Wallace. I could not match him there without compromising on civil rights, which I would not do.”

The media coverage of the 1968 presidential race also showed that Nixon was in favor of the Civil Rights and would not compromise on that issue. For example, in an article published in theWashington Post on September 15, 1968 headlined “Nixon Sped Integration, Wallace says” Wallace declared that Nixon agreed with Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and played a role in ”the destruction of public school system.” Wallace pledged to restore the school system, in the same article, by giving it back to the states ”lock, stock, and barrel.”

This story, as well as Nixon’s memoirs and other news stories during that campaign, shows that Nixon was very clear about his position on civil rights. And if Nixon was used code words only racists could hear, evidently George Wallace couldn’t hear it.

Among the southern states, George Wallace won Arkansas , Mississippi , Alabama , Georgia and Louisiana . Nixon won North Carolina , South Carolina , Florida , Virginia , and Tennessee . Winning those states were part of Nixon’s plan.

“I would not concede the Carolina ‘s, Florida , or Virginia or the states around the rim of the south,”Nixon wrote. ”These states were a part of my plan.”

At that time, the entire southern region was the poorest in the country. The south consistently lagged behind the rest of the United States in income. And according to the

“U.S. Regional Growth and Convergence,” by Kris James Mitchener and Ian W. McLean, per capita income for southerners was almost half as much as it was for Americans in other regions.

Nixon won those states strictly on economic issues. He focused on increasing tariffs on foreign imports to protect the manufacturing and agriculture industries of those states. Some southern elected officials agreed to support him for the sake of their economies, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.

“I had been consulting privately with Thurmond for several months and I was convinced that he’d join my campaign if he were satisfied on the two issues of paramount concern to him: national defense and tariffs against textile imports to protect South Carolina ‘s position in the industry.”Nixon wrote in his memoirs.

In fact, Nixon made it clear to the southern elected officials that he would not compromise on the civil rights issue.

“On civil rights, Thurmond knew my position was very different from his,” Nixon wrote. “I was for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and he was against it. Although he disagreed with me, he respected my sincerity and candor.”

The same scenario played out among elected officials and voters in other southern states won by Nixon. They laid their feelings aside and supported him because of his economic platform’”not because Nixon sent messages on a frequency only racists can hear.

And yet I can find plenty of articles supporting The Southern Strategy. Which I posted. What is your point?

that the myth is widely believed, is not evidence it is true.

That applies to your claim as well.

i have not used that claim to bolster my argument.

my argument is based on the lack of pandering by past republican candidates for racist southern votes.

it is generally just presented as a premise. at best, we get vague references to "code words" or something like that.


the historical record does not support the claim that the gop pandered to racist voters to flip the south.

Lack of pandering? No...just more subtle pandering through use of code words, and a deliberately softened strategy after Goldwater won significant southern victories but lost the rest of the US.

American crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south

How the Republican party’s dog-whistle appeal to racism, refined by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, led inexorably to Donald Trump

www.theguardian.com

The transformative chemistry went by various names. “White backlash.” “Racial conservatism.” Or the old standby, “states’ rights”, a political term of art that presumed wide latitude on the part of individual states to regulate provincial society, which included, it hardly need be said (though plenty of hot-blooded segs yelled it anyway), the power to grind black people down to the legal and economic equivalent of inmates on a Louisiana prison farm. As channelled by Goldwater, this new force in the Republican party was a disaster. He may have won white southerners, but he was drubbed in the overall popular vote, and Republicans lost more than 40 seats in the House. His support from Wall Street was tepid at best, and he was deserted by establishment Republican constituencies throughout the north-east and midwest.

Clearly, the situation called for serious soul-searching in the GOP. One might have expected the party to reject Goldwater’s white-backlash strategy and return to establishment Republican conservatism. But party pros, and in particular that political genius Richard Nixon, saw in Goldwater’s defeat the makings of an extraordinary coalition. A compact. A combination. A deal.

What was needed was white backlash with a kinder, gentler face. Years later, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, by then an operative in the Reagan White House, would explain the essence of the “southern strategy” to an academic researcher:

You start out in 1954 by saying ‘******, ******, ******’. By 1968, you can’t say ‘******’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘******, ******’.

and we are back to the "code words". nixon was so smart that he came up with "code words" that promised... something to white racists, to get them to vote republican, and the white racists bought it, so much, that they did not notice, ever, that nothing ever came of it.

indeed, that nixon was a massive desegregater.



empty rhetoric is not a sufficient explanation to support the accusation of the southern strategy.


you brought up george wallace. would you say that george wallace's base, was all about segregation and racism?

 

[Correll]

Yup interesting how they can claim Nixon courted racist southerns when he sped up desegregation busing and open support for blacks in all walks of life.

when i was growing up in the 70s, it was taught to me as historical fact. i did not question it.

it was only when i was older, that i began to wonder what exactly he did, to pander for those racist votes.


i was unable to find anything.


the older i got, and more i got to see liberals lying, i slowly came to realize, that is was just not true.


since then, i've seen excerpts from more academic research, on what actually happened to the south.

I think I understand your confusion. You are thinking of it only as it relates to Nixon. The sources I quoted from are a bit broader.

nixon was supposed to be the one that made it all come together. if the historical record shows him NOT pandering for racist voters, then the theory is false.

Perhaps so, but it was In process before Nixon. Goldwater was part of it. And remember, Nixon DID promise to oppose busing (hugely contentious) and not to “ram anything down their throats”. He did, in fact work to avoid alienating them by letting the courts take most of the flack.

Presidency of Richard Nixon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Nixon years witnessed the first large-scale efforts to desegregate the nation's public schools.[89] Seeking to avoid alienating Southern whites, whom Nixon hoped would form part of a durable Republican coalition, the president adopted a "low profile" on school desegregation. He pursued this policy by allowing the courts to receive the criticism for desegregation orders, which Nixon's Justice Department would then enforce.[90] By September 1970, less than ten percent of black children were attending segregated schools.[91] After the Supreme Court's handed down its decision in the 1971 case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, cross-district school busing emerged as a major issue in both the North and the South. Swann permitted lower federal courts to mandate busing in order to remedy racial imbalance in schools. Though he enforced the court orders, Nixon believed that "forced integration of housing or education" was just as improper as legal segregation, and he took a strong public stance against its continuation.

...

and here we see how much nixon was willing to do to "pander" for the racist votes.


he was willing to ram the policy down their throats, enforcing desegregation and he tried to put the blame on the courts.


that is not the type of strong action, that is normally required to flip millions of votes, and multiple states.


are you aware that george wallace apologized to a black church for his actions?

Except he didn’t. He let those controversial issues be determined by the courts first, then the DoJ simply followed the law.

i'm citing your source on that. and it might be added, you are making the case that he was pandering to white racists.


if he really was, interfering in that enforcement, subtly undermining it, weakening it, underfunding it, ect, you know there would be ways to reduce the effectiveness of enforcement that he did not really support, if he did not.


THAT would have been real evidence of pandering to white racists.

trying to put a little spin on it, to avoid taking the blame for it, is hardly the stuff that people are implying when they talk of "nixon pandered to white racists".

 

[Correll]

Yup interesting how they can claim Nixon courted racist southerns when he sped up desegregation busing and open support for blacks in all walks of life.

when i was growing up in the 70s, it was taught to me as historical fact. i did not question it.

it was only when i was older, that i began to wonder what exactly he did, to pander for those racist votes.


i was unable to find anything.


the older i got, and more i got to see liberals lying, i slowly came to realize, that is was just not true.


since then, i've seen excerpts from more academic research, on what actually happened to the south.

I think I understand your confusion. You are thinking of it only as it relates to Nixon. The sources I quoted from are a bit broader.

nixon was supposed to be the one that made it all come together. if the historical record shows him NOT pandering for racist voters, then the theory is false.

Perhaps so, but it was In process before Nixon. Goldwater was part of it. And remember, Nixon DID promise to oppose busing (hugely contentious) and not to “ram anything down their throats”. He did, in fact work to avoid alienating them by letting the courts take most of the flack.

Presidency of Richard Nixon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Nixon years witnessed the first large-scale efforts to desegregate the nation's public schools.[89] Seeking to avoid alienating Southern whites, whom Nixon hoped would form part of a durable Republican coalition, the president adopted a "low profile" on school desegregation. He pursued this policy by allowing the courts to receive the criticism for desegregation orders, which Nixon's Justice Department would then enforce.[90] By September 1970, less than ten percent of black children were attending segregated schools.[91] After the Supreme Court's handed down its decision in the 1971 case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, cross-district school busing emerged as a major issue in both the North and the South. Swann permitted lower federal courts to mandate busing in order to remedy racial imbalance in schools. Though he enforced the court orders, Nixon believed that "forced integration of housing or education" was just as improper as legal segregation, and he took a strong public stance against its continuation.

If the Southern Strategy was a myth....why did the RNC apologize for it?

Hey retard a couple of posts back you wrote this to me
"The Southern Strategy did not rely on Nixon and started prior to him And continued after him. His record on Civil Rights was good (agree with you there)."
Yet you keep swinging back to Nixon for support for your assertion.

this was a done deal by the time i came along. but looking back, it is amazing they managed to sell the idea.


but now, with the internet, we have access to too much information, for this lie to stand.

 

[Jitss617]

Political and historical revisionists have been busy lately, what with blatantly stupid or insensitive racial remarks from today's two presidential contenders, racial unrest over policing, the abuse of the "race card" by the left, or the empowerment of white supremacy by the right.

There has been a frantic, almost obsessive effort to portray each party as "the party of racism". There has even been a completely retarded bit of political theatre aimed at "banning" the Democrat Party (seriously - we pay these jokers for this?).

Historically, neither party is the party of the past. Today's Republicans do not in any way resemble the Party of Lincoln, and today's Democrats do not in any way resemble the party of George Wallace. Parties are not ideologies. Parties change their ideologies - not completely, but sufficiently in order to achieve their main aim: winning votes.

That is where the Southern Strategy comes in. The south represented and still represents a substantial largely conservative voting block and one that DIVIDED the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party long held it, reversing the gains made after emancipation and supporting southern landowners in maintaining their racial caste system through a host of new laws that robbed black people of their newly realized rights.

That changed though, with the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1950 and 1968, the government passed 4 bills that were collectively known as the Civil Rights Acts. Both the Democrats and the Republicans voted to pass them. In those votes, the Republicans were more unified than the Democrats. It's a mistake to assume the Democrats were a "united party", they were far less united then than now. The Democrats were divided, with southern Democrats holding the south, the remainder spread throughout the US and the voting for these pieces of legislation reflected that division. This is important to remember because broad brushing either party as "the party of racism" is both dishonest and unhelpful.

So what about the Southern Strategy? What is or was it? It was a political strategy, initially formed by Nixon, to turn the Democrat stronghold in the south to Republican. Was it racist? Yes...in that it played on racial divides. Does that mean Nixon was racist? No...this isn't necessarily about personal feelings about race. Early on, Nixon was a strong proponent for desegregation, then he pivoted, drawing back from it and altering his policies when he developed the Southern Strategy.

Ironically - this is where the latest bit of historical revisionism comes in, with Talking Heads opining:

Candace Owen: "The Southern Strategy is a myth that never happened"...a claim rated as totally false by Politifact.

It's really about the POLITICS of PARTY CONTROL. What would it take (and is it even possible) to gain control of this substantial region?

Southern Strategy - Southern Cultures

www.southerncultures.org

​

In his 1991 book, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream,New York Times columnist Tom Wicker captures the political two-step that Nixon danced as he sought to govern and to carry out a strategy to turn the South into a Republican-dominated region as it had been a “solid Democratic South’’ for much of the twentieth century. Wicker gave Nixon credit for “a spectacular advance in desegregation’’ in 1970. “Perhaps the most significant achievement of his administration’s domestic actions,” Wicker wrote, came as “the Nixon administration had appeared in retreat from desegregation, while actively courting the white vote.”​

​

Indeed, in his 1968 campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters. In the aftermath of city riots in 1967 and 1968, as well as Vietnam War protests, Nixon said he was for “law and order.’’ His administration went to court to slow down school desegregation. Nixon tried to install two so-called strict-constructionist conservatives, Clement F. Haynesworth Jr. of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, on the Supreme Court, but the Senate turned down both nominees...​

​

In their book, The Southern Strategy, published shortly after the 1970 mid-term elections, Atlanta journalists Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver wrote a detailed—and critical—account of the strategy in practice. “It was a cynical strategy, this catering in subtle ways to the segregationist leanings of white Southern voters,’’ Murphy and Gulliver wrote, “yet pretending with high rhetoric that the real aim was simply to treat the South fairly, to let it become part of the nation again.”​

​

White voters got the message. Along the New Orleans motorcade route, a Nixon supporter held up a hand-lettered sign that read, “I am for Nixon . . . Less Federal Control. Equal Treatment for the South.”​

So, while the Democrats were pandering to the newly enfranchised black voters, the Republicans were pandering to the southern white voters unhappy with desegregation and other Civil Rights legislation that they felt "disempowered" them.

That's the history, in part. No one has clean hands in regards to race.

But what about now? Well...the Southern Strategy is still going on. The Democrats are playing to the regions black population and it's more liberal urban white population. The Republicans are pivoting harder towards a more substantial rural and suburban white population, conflating the Confederacy, its monuments and it's flag, with honor and patriotism and an attack on our culture, while making an appeal to authoritarian law and order in the wake of racial unrest and social upheaval. Today's Southern Strategy still capitalizes on the same fears of disenfranchisement but adds some new (and, newly revived old) enemies: immigrants, Mexicans, communists, Marxists.

It has little to do with racism...and a lot to do with party control.

And yes...the Republican Party is still at it. As are the Democrats.

Still no evidence lol what a joke

 

[Coyote]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

 

[bendog]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

There cannot be honest disagreement that voter disenfranchisement because of a past felony is mostly racial. It is slowly changing. But it's the gop that still puts on the breaks in Fla.

 

[Coyote]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

There cannot be honest disagreement that voter disenfranchisement because of a past felony is mostly racial. It is slowly changing. But it's the gop that still puts on the breaks in Fla.

Not just Florida though, there are handful of other states still holding out. Maintaining those laws is, imo, just as racist as putting them there in the first place.

 

[bendog]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

There cannot be honest disagreement that voter disenfranchisement because of a past felony is mostly racial. It is slowly changing. But it's the gop that still puts on the breaks in Fla.

Not just Florida though, there are handful of other states still holding out. Maintaining those laws is, imo, just as racist as putting them there in the first place.

Yeah. Fla voted in franchising felons but the legisalature keeps coming up with roadblocks. Like making them all pay fines and court costs when, not surprisingly former felons do well to earn shelter and food. There may other states doing that. I'd agree that Miss drug laws have mostly effected blacks. But I know that 30 years ago, blacks supporte the laws. We're in the process of lowering the numbers of jailed. Our new "Trumpian" governor vetoed the last bill though.

 

[Correll]

...

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

....

not if the original intent is long forgotten and current supporters are supporting the law for other reasons.


and you have not shown that this was a significant policy plank in either the goldwater or nixon campaigns.

 

[g5000]

Political and historical revisionists have been busy lately, what with blatantly stupid or insensitive racial remarks from today's two presidential contenders, racial unrest over policing, the abuse of the "race card" by the left, or the empowerment of white supremacy by the right.

There has been a frantic, almost obsessive effort to portray each party as "the party of racism". There has even been a completely retarded bit of political theatre aimed at "banning" the Democrat Party (seriously - we pay these jokers for this?).

Historically, neither party is the party of the past. Today's Republicans do not in any way resemble the Party of Lincoln, and today's Democrats do not in any way resemble the party of George Wallace. Parties are not ideologies. Parties change their ideologies - not completely, but sufficiently in order to achieve their main aim: winning votes.

That is where the Southern Strategy comes in. The south represented and still represents a substantial largely conservative voting block and one that DIVIDED the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party long held it, reversing the gains made after emancipation and supporting southern landowners in maintaining their racial caste system through a host of new laws that robbed black people of their newly realized rights.

That changed though, with the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1950 and 1968, the government passed 4 bills that were collectively known as the Civil Rights Acts. Both the Democrats and the Republicans voted to pass them. In those votes, the Republicans were more unified than the Democrats. It's a mistake to assume the Democrats were a "united party", they were far less united then than now. The Democrats were divided, with southern Democrats holding the south, the remainder spread throughout the US and the voting for these pieces of legislation reflected that division. This is important to remember because broad brushing either party as "the party of racism" is both dishonest and unhelpful.

So what about the Southern Strategy? What is or was it? It was a political strategy, initially formed by Nixon, to turn the Democrat stronghold in the south to Republican. Was it racist? Yes...in that it played on racial divides. Does that mean Nixon was racist? No...this isn't necessarily about personal feelings about race. Early on, Nixon was a strong proponent for desegregation, then he pivoted, drawing back from it and altering his policies when he developed the Southern Strategy.

Ironically - this is where the latest bit of historical revisionism comes in, with Talking Heads opining:

Candace Owen: "The Southern Strategy is a myth that never happened"...a claim rated as totally false by Politifact.

It's really about the POLITICS of PARTY CONTROL. What would it take (and is it even possible) to gain control of this substantial region?

Southern Strategy - Southern Cultures

www.southerncultures.org

​

In his 1991 book, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream,New York Times columnist Tom Wicker captures the political two-step that Nixon danced as he sought to govern and to carry out a strategy to turn the South into a Republican-dominated region as it had been a “solid Democratic South’’ for much of the twentieth century. Wicker gave Nixon credit for “a spectacular advance in desegregation’’ in 1970. “Perhaps the most significant achievement of his administration’s domestic actions,” Wicker wrote, came as “the Nixon administration had appeared in retreat from desegregation, while actively courting the white vote.”​

​

Indeed, in his 1968 campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters. In the aftermath of city riots in 1967 and 1968, as well as Vietnam War protests, Nixon said he was for “law and order.’’ His administration went to court to slow down school desegregation. Nixon tried to install two so-called strict-constructionist conservatives, Clement F. Haynesworth Jr. of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, on the Supreme Court, but the Senate turned down both nominees...​

​

In their book, The Southern Strategy, published shortly after the 1970 mid-term elections, Atlanta journalists Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver wrote a detailed—and critical—account of the strategy in practice. “It was a cynical strategy, this catering in subtle ways to the segregationist leanings of white Southern voters,’’ Murphy and Gulliver wrote, “yet pretending with high rhetoric that the real aim was simply to treat the South fairly, to let it become part of the nation again.”​

​

White voters got the message. Along the New Orleans motorcade route, a Nixon supporter held up a hand-lettered sign that read, “I am for Nixon . . . Less Federal Control. Equal Treatment for the South.”​

So, while the Democrats were pandering to the newly enfranchised black voters, the Republicans were pandering to the southern white voters unhappy with desegregation and other Civil Rights legislation that they felt "disempowered" them.

That's the history, in part. No one has clean hands in regards to race.

But what about now? Well...the Southern Strategy is still going on. The Democrats are playing to the regions black population and it's more liberal urban white population. The Republicans are pivoting harder towards a more substantial rural and suburban white population, conflating the Confederacy, its monuments and it's flag, with honor and patriotism and an attack on our culture, while making an appeal to authoritarian law and order in the wake of racial unrest and social upheaval. Today's Southern Strategy still capitalizes on the same fears of disenfranchisement but adds some new (and, newly revived old) enemies: immigrants, Mexicans, communists, Marxists.

It has little to do with racism...and a lot to do with party control.

And yes...the Republican Party is still at it. As are the Democrats.

Outstanding post!

I have been making those exact same points about the old racist Democrats being CONSERVATIVES for a long time on this forum.

Trust me, you are wasting your time. Once a stupid, ignorant, and easily disprovable meme has been planted in the minds of the tard herd, there is no overriding it. Pretty sad.

 

[bripat9643]

Yup interesting how they can claim Nixon courted racist southerns when he sped up desegregation busing and open support for blacks in all walks of life.

when i was growing up in the 70s, it was taught to me as historical fact. i did not question it.

it was only when i was older, that i began to wonder what exactly he did, to pander for those racist votes.


i was unable to find anything.


the older i got, and more i got to see liberals lying, i slowly came to realize, that is was just not true.


since then, i've seen excerpts from more academic research, on what actually happened to the south.

I think I understand your confusion. You are thinking of it only as it relates to Nixon. The sources I quoted from are a bit broader.

It's still bullshit.

 

[bripat9643]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

There cannot be honest disagreement that voter disenfranchisement because of a past felony is mostly racial. It is slowly changing. But it's the gop that still puts on the breaks in Fla.

Not just Florida though, there are handful of other states still holding out. Maintaining those laws is, imo, just as racist as putting them there in the first place.

Which laws?

 

[bripat9643]

The fact that racist law and justice by the Dems in the South could INCREASE crimes to felonies for blacks stands on it own.. The LAW SAYS FELONS... The registrars MUST enforce it under penalty of Federal law...

Or CHANGE the LAW. The Republicans have had control of some of those states for over 30 years. Yet only relatively recently have they made any changes.

Republicans have been notoriously reluctant to do so AS have been the communities they represent. If a racist law was created with racist intent, and it is continued, unchanged, by the "new management" - then it's still racist and their unwillingness to change is racist.

So TODAY -- you think removing felons from voting roles is STILL RACIST because charges are being accelerated for blacks because of race? Sure.. In some cases like 3 strikes, or the Drug Laws. But in general, most of it is increased because of longer rap sheets and more history of interactions with the law..

If those laws were made for racist purposes, they don't magically become unracist. I think you didn't read the part where I explained how the definitions of what crimes constituted a felony were deliberately changed to target petty crimes that would be easy to convict black men of? Some of those crimes remain on the books as felonies. And states changed their constitutions as well to accommodate it.

Many have revised their laws, HOWEVER - most of those revisions are relatively recent, when there has been enough pressure to overcome the resistance.. For example, it wasn't until 2017 that Alabama finally made a list of crimes that constituted "moral turpitude" (what a great term isn't it? ). Prior to that, it was vague and could include anything. One of those categories that made it easy to convict a black person of a felony.

Another is larceny (a broad term including petty theft) - that was set up as a means of easily convicting black men, and denying them the vote. It is still considered a felony under some states, who do not return voting rights upon completion of the sentence/probation/parole - such as Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky among others.

Voting roles should be PERFECT in this day and age.. Mastercard/Visa could do that job to 99.99% accuracy.. The government can not... AGAIN -- a "systemic race" problem that is not RACIAL because you cant fix BAD GOVT accounting on voter rolls ONE RACE AT A TIME... That's stupid..

Voting roles are a whole different issue - I didn't bring that one up. I think it's easy to make a case that purging voter roles (in the way they are being done recently) is a way of attempting to disenfranchise certain voter categories - my argument there would be it isn't "racist" - it's about political power. But that really isn't part of my argument on racist laws that were maintained after Republican control.

There cannot be honest disagreement that voter disenfranchisement because of a past felony is mostly racial. It is slowly changing. But it's the gop that still puts on the breaks in Fla.

"it's the gop that still puts the breaks on" what?