^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Mississippi's State Senate District 4 includes parts of Alcorn, Tippah, and Tishomingo counties. It's primarily white; in the pre-Reagan era, it went mainly for conservative white Democrats, or "Dixiecrats," of the Strom Thurmond mold. In more recent years, it has gone mainly to white Republicans.

Last November, it went to a black Democrat named Eric Powell.

Alabama's State House District 12 includes the city of Cullman. It's 96% white and has traditionally followed similar voting patterns as Mississippi's State Senate District 4: Dixiecrats, then Republicans.

In a special election last month, it went to a black Democrat named Larry Fields.

Things are changing in the South--but it isn't exactly a matter of racism vanishing so much as it is a matter of racism becoming more complex, as the New York Times reports. With respect to Fields, for example, some of the local remarks indicate an interesting dynamic that's beginning to develop:

"He’s a dadgum good fellow," said W. F. Davis, a retired boilermaker, at Jack's, a roadside restaurant here, as Mr. Fields basked in congratulations nearby. "He’s always been one of us."

The distinction between "one of us" and something else, of course, is always present in a county where Mr. Fields still sees Confederate flags dotting the landscape.

"There’s two different races, in that race," explained James Rice, a white resident describing black people, as Mr. Fields affably worked voters at Jack's. "You got some that don’t want to be nothing, and you got some that want to help. You don’t find too many like James Fields."

I'm not going to single Mr. Rice out for saying this; he's articulating a sentiment that is common among among both blacks and whites. Several months ago (see "Beyond Black and White"), I wrote:

According to a recent Pew study, 37 percent of African Americans and 44 percent of African Americans aged 18-29 believe that there is no single "black" race--and 61 percent of African Americans believe that the cultural gulf between low-income blacks and the black middle class has widened.

What Mr. Rice is essentially talking about, in other words, is the divide between low-income blacks and the black middle class. He doesn't have much respect for the former, but he doesn't discriminate against the latter. So does his statement really reflect racism, or just classism? And to what degree does racism simply reflect the color-coding of class bias?

Racism as we know it certainly originated as classism. When the transsaharan slave trade began in the 7th century, there was no racial hierarchy to speak of with respect to sub-Saharan Africans. Blacks were imported as available labor under the same terms that they might have been in ancient Rome--as if they were members of a conquered nation. By the time the transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, the association had been made between visible subsaharan African ancestry and servitude. By the 18th century whites had come to believe that sub-Saharan Africans were born to be slaves, and organized their ideas of race accordingly. But it all began with imported labor, and the association of a certain class of laborer with physical characteristics most common among those of sub-Saharan ancestry. It all began, in other words, with classism.

Likewise, classism has always played a role in racist ideology. The characters of Sidney Poitier--Dr. John Prentice in Look Who's Coming to Dinner, Detective Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night--broadened white public understanding of African Americans by creating heroic black men with as much power and authority as white men. He became, in white parlance of the time, "a credit to his race." This wasn't always exactly a blessing; Poitier would later write of the challenges he found himself facing "in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people." But it challenged many whites to look past their negative impressions of African Americans and realize how strange it was to say that white folks could be as strong as Prentice or Tibbs, but black folks could not.

Still, most black folks aren't and weren't like John Prentice or Virgil Tibbs. (Most white folks aren't and weren't, either.) And in the world of the white voters described above, most black folks aren't like Larry Fields. Like the heroes of Sidney Poitier before him, he has strengths that give him a post-racial quality. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Sidney Poitier did a lot of good with his film career, too. But we shouldn't see this as a sign that racism is dying, because racism is decomposing before it dies, as social diseases tend to do. And what we are perhaps witnessing is its breakdown into its more fundamental elements--classism and race:class correlation.

The New York Times story begins:

"Really, I never realize he’s black," said a white woman in a restaurant, smiling.

"He's black?" asked Lou Bradford, a white Cullman police officer, jokingly.

"You know, I don’t even see him as black," said another of Mr. Fields's new white constituents, Perry Ray, the mayor of one of the county's villages, Dodge City.

Larry Fields is changing his white voters' impression of what it means to be a black man. This is commendable, and it will no doubt have a major effect on the culture of his district. But we can tell there's work to do by the fact that his candidacy is seen as one that transcends race, rather than one that simply acknowledges it. Nobody should have to forget he's black.

See also:

• Beyond Black and White
• Racism and Electability