Holly Springs, Mississippi, is a town of about 7600 people. It's about a 45-minute drive from where I grew up (outside of Memphis, TN), a small-college town, home of the historically black Rust College. According to the Census, 79 percent of the town's residents are black and 19 percent are white.
But if you visited the public schools in town, you'd never know that white people lived there. The public schools are almost entirely black. The white children in town don't go to the public schools -- they're either enrolled in private schools or homeschooled. Some people likely send their children to the outlying Marshall County Schools (separate from the Holly Springs city schools), though those are majority-black as well in spite of the county as a whole being majority-white.
This, sadly, is fairly representative of the state of Mississippi. As I mentioned, I grew up a few miles from the Mississippi state line in Memphis, a city that for all intents and purposes is in Mississippi -- physically, it's in Tennessee, but it's far more like Mississippi than it is like the rest of Tennessee (though far less rural than most of Mississippi, obviously.) When the federal government intervened to integrate the public schools in Mississippi, the response in most towns -- and in many similar places in the South (like west Tennessee, where my parents grew up) -- was swift and decisive: all-white private schools (colloquially known as "segregation academies") were set up almost overnight, and virtually all of the white children in town were immediately enrolled in the new private schools; since they were privately-operated, about all that the federal government could do was deny them federal funding (which they did.) The public schools were, by law, "integrated," but in many places that just meant that the black schools were closed and the black students started attending the old white schools, while the white students were pulled out. The feds could force the white schools (at least the public schools) to allow black students to attend, but they couldn't force white parents to send their children to school there, and they couldn't force white children to socialize with black children. For all intents and purposes, many towns in the Deep South (including in Mississippi) went from de jure segregation to de facto segregation: by law, the town was no longer segregated, but that was just a thin veneer over a society in which blacks and whites essentially still lived in separate worlds.
Now, if you're like me, your parents (who remained in public schools after desegregation) never drilled the myth of white supremacy into your head in the first place, and you attended public schools where you socialized with black children and figured out that they were no different from you, even if they might have had different life experiences from you because they were black in a society where white supremacy was still largely pervasive, and you understand and sympathize with those experiences and believe that it's wrong that society treats a person differently because of the color of his or her skin. I'm considerably younger than the author of this piece, and unlike her I was never taught the "lost cause" narrative, but this is considerably like my experience in life. The cognitive dissonance between the myth of white supremacy and reality can destroy the myth.
But if your experience is typical of most white children in Mississippi, or in many places in the South, the myth of white supremacy is taught to you -- whether intentionally or subconsciously -- from a young age, and by essentially living in a bubble where you attend separate schools from children of other races and your socialization with children of other races is intentionally limited (hell, if you attend one of the numerous segregation academies, you often only compete with other segregation academies in organized school sports), the myth of white supremacy is never challenged in your mind, at least not until it's too late to do much about it. Sure, you might interact with a few carefully selected token black children -- whom, you are assured, are "different" from those other black children -- but otherwise, you've quite deliberately been placed in the bubble. And in many places, social or financial pressure among whites exists to ensure that as few white children as possible are allowed outside the bubble. Want to keep sending your kids to a formerly mostly-white school that's now much more integrated? Fine, but your nest egg (the value of your home) is going to take a hit. Starting a family and thinking of buying a house? Well, don't put your kids in that school; it's a bad school (read: racially integrated.)
What you end up with, when you have a society where white children are still indoctrinated with the myth of white supremacy and where they're then placed in a bubble where this myth is never allowed to be challenged, is Mississippi's racially-divided politics. It is no surprise that whites in Mississippi vote for Republican candidates at something like a 90 percent clip when Democrats are viewed as the party of black people and black people are still largely viewed as fundamentally different (and inferior) to white people. No, Mississippi Republicans are not (usually) explicitly racist (they have, like many Republicans nationwide, learned the way to appeal to racism without being blatantly racist), but they do play to the "us-versus-them" struggle that pervades this kind of society.
All of which brings me to this piece in Slate from Jamelle Bouie. It is a well-written piece about how demographic changes can make white people become more conservative, and how demographic changes may wind up making politics in all of America like, well, Mississippi:
Using a nationally representative survey of self-identified politically “independent” whites, Craig and Richeson conducted three experiments. In the first, they asked respondents about the racial shift in California—if they had heard the state had become majority-minority. What they found was a significant shift toward Republican identification, which increased for those who lived closest to the West Coast.
In the second experiment, they focused on the overall U.S. shift with census projections of the national population. Again, they found that white Americans became more conservative—and more likely to endorse conservative policies—when they were aware of demographic changes that put them in the minority.
...
Near the top of the list, they found, was a deep consciousness of being “white in a country with growing minorities.” One participant described his town as such:
Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes—there’s one library, one post office. Very homogenous.
For most of their lives, these people could ignore the country’s demographic change. But the election of President Obama was a clear sign that things were different.
The result was fear and anxiety. A fear, for instance, that comprehensive immigration reform would begin a tidal wave of dependency, as Democrats won their votes with the allure of government programs such as Obamacare. “Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don’t,” said one Tea Party participant. “There’s so much of the electorate in those groups that Democrats are going to take every time because they’ve been on the rolls of the government their entire lives. They don’t know better,” said another.
Bouie's reaches his end conclusion that demographic changes, combined with changing white attitudes based on said demographic changes, could wind up giving our country a racially-polarized politics similar to that of the Deep South:
With extreme racial polarization—and not the routine identity politics of the present—this goes out the window. We would fracture like the Seven Kingdoms, with a politics governed by mutual suspicion. And you don’t have to imagine this future. You can see it right now, in the Deep South, where our history weighs heaviest. In Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, elections are polarized by race: Whites vote one way, blacks the other. The result is constant acrimony, huge disinvestment in public goods like education and health, and a political culture where the central question isn’t “how can we help each other” but “how can I stop them from taking what I have.”
But the problem with Bouie's conclusion is fairly simple to figure out, and should be fairly obvious:
most of America is not Mississippi. If that were true, white voters in California would currently be as Republican as white voters in Mississippi. (Hint: they aren't; they aren't even as Republican as white voters in Arizona.) As I've explained, in much of the South to this day, great pains are taken to ensure that in spite of the fact that their states are fairly diverse, white children are largely kept in a bubble and rarely allowed to stray outside of it. And certainly there are pockets of the rest of America in which this is true, and politics similarly becomes an "us-versus-them" struggle, but there are also places where this is not true, and there are relatively few places where the white "bubble" is so pervasive that very few are allowed outside of it.
As well-written as Bouie's piece is, the flaw is the assumption that children who grow up in a diverse society will grow up to hold the same views as their parents and grandparents who grew up in the homogeneous society that one survey respondent described above. If you grew up in a homogeneous society, where everybody you knew was white and middle-class, and suddenly that society is far more diverse (and they have the gall to elect a President who's not like you to boot), then sure, you might have the typical Tea Party reaction to demographic change.
But who's to say that if you grow up in a diverse society you will have the same reaction? And that probably has something to do with the Tea Party's fear of demographic change: not just that the "others" in this newly diverse society will vote differently than them, but that their children will start voting like the "others."
I could, of course, be completely wrong, and Bouie may be correct that demographic change may lead us to a racially-polarized politics similar to what's currently seen in much of the South. But my own experiences tell me that increasing diversity may lead more people to become comfortable with a diverse America.