Did American racism
originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of
institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow
Jim Crow was not a
regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point
of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in
plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of
poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black
equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing,
and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into
social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They
tried to unmake it, too.
Liberalism, rather
than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North
gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original
essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow’s many strange careers in
the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim
Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and
political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and
second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal,
economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies,
practices, and ideas.
The book ultimately
dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American
racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism
actually originated in the North.