The Blame Game: A Prelude To Racial Privilege
The Blame Game: a Prelude to Racial Privilege
In order to fully understand an easily debatable and highly controversial policy, such as racial privilege, one must first understand the political and social climates that led up to it. Racial privilege has been practiced during two periods in America's past: the post-reconstruction era, via Jim Crow laws, and today, by way of affirmative action.
After Reconstruction in the American south, landowners reorganized their land in such a way that it could be farmed without the use of slaves. The most common structure employed sharecropping, in which the land owner divided his property into several plots of land, each farmed by different individuals who paid for the use of this land with a predetermined percentage of their harvested crop. At its onset, sharecropping was a racially diverse program. Boyer et all notes that "By 1880
white sharecroppers now outnumbered black ones, although a higher proportion of southern blacks, about 75 percent, were involved in the system" (597). Tenants, most having no capital with which to purchase farm equipment, livestock, and seed, offer yet another pre-determined percentage of their harvested crop as collateral and repayment for loans. Since both the landowner and the creditor were invested in the profitability of the farmer's crops, they insisted that these farmers raise only easily marketable cash-crops, limiting crop diversification (Boyer 598). When supply began to exceed demand, value of these crops rapidly declined. Sharecroppers, both white and black, were plunged heavily into debt and poverty.
The failure of this system presented a window of opportunity for the Democratic leaders of the Old South who wish to restore the power structure of the pre-Civil War south. All they needed to do was convince the white farmers, as well as other whites who were negatively impacted by this system, that their economic difficulties were a direct...
Please login to view the full essay...