Thread by @jbouie

about this column! i wrote it over the course of yesterday afternoon, so there are a few things that i either couldn’t fit or didn’t get to and i wanted to note them here. nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opi…

1) I am wary of making direct historical comparisons for the simple reason that events are contingent. Jim Crow wasn’t the product of some transhistorical racism; it emerged out of the particular conditions of the South in the last decades of the 19th century...

...I’ve written about them in the past, but in short: agrarian revolt and black labor unrest, economic modernization in the cities, intense partisan competition, and the emergence of a new merchant-landowner class with direct ties to northern capital.

The trick is to note similarities across history without ignoring or abstracting away the differences. To the extent that a Jim Crow comparison is useful, it is to explore the mechanics of suffrage restriction as well as to note the difference in particulars...

...chief among them being the absence of state-sanctioned vigilante violence to enforce race hierarchy. Whatever forces are driving today’s suffrage restriction exist in continuity with the past but are also distinct and worth understanding and theorizing in their own right.

2) One problem with the Jim Crow analogy is that it makes the South exceptional, when we should understand Jim Crow — as per C. Vann Woodward — as part of a national trend of suffrage restriction informed by white supremacy.

Voter registration, literacy tests, and secret ballots were first used in the North to disenfranchise immigrants (and blacks) before they made their way down South. Progressive reformers touted them in the 1890s and 1900s. Here’s Koussar on this:

The Jim Crow South was exceptional in the degree of suffrage restriction, but that doesn’t make the rest of the country somehow innocent.

This also gets back to the question of distinctions: What makes today *different* is the extent to which American political culture has a normative commitment to universal suffrage which it did not have a century ago. That matters. Fin.