Deep Roots

In Deep Roots, Avidit, Matthew, and Maya detail just how lasting racism can be in a nation’s institutional and societal formation and existence.

They pinpoint the fact that the counties in the Deep South with the highest number of black slaves in the 19th century are the same counties today that exhibit the highest number of racist sentiments toward African Americans.

Meaning, the racism experienced in the state of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and more, today is but the unconfronted and unchallenged racism of yesteryear.

If it is not challenged and defeated it will not go away.

What troubles me more about this book is that these sentiments of prejudice and discrimination that shaped the American Deep South then continue to influence much of the social, political, religious, and cultural norms of the American South today.

American hyper-individualism makes the modern American citizen myopic enough to reduce a series of retrospective studies concerning slavery, racism, and systemic inequities to the incidents of a previous age that have no bearing or weight on the actualities of today. This is very problematic.

As writer Edward Ball once said:

“The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the ‘I,’ prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors.”

We’re past due confronting the systems that made America what it is today.

Racism, unfortunately, is deeply rooted in the genesis and possibly, the denouement of this great nation.