Desegregation pressure forced white southerners to reinvent racism as color-blind rights conservatism

Evidence

This book explores the causes and course of white flight, with Atlanta serving as its vantage point. Although it represented one of the largest, most significant, and most transformative social movements in postwar America, white flight has never been studied in depth or detail. Indeed, the scant attention it has received has only been as a causal factor for other concerns, such as the decline of central cities and the rise of suburbia. This study, however, seeks to explore not simply the effects of white flight, but the experience. While many have assumed that white flight was little more than a literal movement of the white population, this book argues that it represented a much more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. Because of their confrontation with the civil rights movement, white southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism. This modern conservatism proved to be both subtler and stronger than the politics that preceded it and helped southern conservatives dominate the Republican Party and, through it, national politics as well. White flight, in the end, was more than a physical relocation. It was a political revolution. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated purpose: segregationist ideology forced into retreat and reinvented as color-blind suburban conservatism — the exact mechanism this book investigates. — connects to: Colorblind conservatism rebranded white residential privilege as neutral meritocracy. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 8; White southerners largely complied with desegregation once defiance demonstrably failed — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 95; Racially conservative whites’ defection drove the Southern realignment (+9 more)
• SEED: A compelling angle: how a defeated political language gets replaced, not abandoned — the ‘Peyton Wall to Peyton Place’ rhetorical migration could anchor an essay on ideological continuity amid defeat.

Broader Connections

• Antiracist reforms repackaged white supremacy as color blindness #corroborates (0.90) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 91
• Colorblindness ideology rearticulated civil rights gains into a new racism #expands (0.88) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 192
• Southern Strategy repositioned white supremacy as mainstream politics #corroborates (0.85) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 186
• Excluded whites reframed their segregationism as a defense of beleaguered rights #expands (0.84) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 102
• Post-civil-rights conservatism reframed anti-discrimination remedies as reverse racism #expands (0.82) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1287
• Color-blindness rhetoric was used to preserve white privilege #expands (0.81)
• Color-blind rhetoric revived segregationism by condemning discussion of racism as itself racist #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1162
• Racially conservative whites’ defection drove the Southern realignment #expands (0.78)
• Civil-rights-era policy shifts drove southern whites into the Republican Party #corroborates (0.78) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 105