United States | News & Politics

This doesn't take into account the long history in Alabama (and the south more broadly), of which some residents likely have personal experience, of living in an area where a white minority can enact incredible violence on the black majority with support from the state and sometimes federal government. This isn't something where the neighboring counties (or even states) are just going to watch it happen, every bigot that's been listening to right wing talk shows for the past decade is going to be drawn to that like a moth to a flame. A lot of people very understandably do not want to risk bringing that down on their community.

Which isn't to say what's happened to him is good or understandable or justifiable, but that's why people don't just form a mob to deal with it.

a lot of counties in the cotton belt have looked like this since pre-civil war, when all men of the white minority were required, by law, to be armed and trained to assist in suppressing any slave insurrection. after the civil war, there was considerable upheaval in these places that the powerful minority had to suppress. incarceration, political violence, state terror were all financed and deployed to prevent the new majority of enfranchised black americans from accessing state power or making common cause with broke whites.

on the left, we talk a lot about the foucalt's boomerang of imperial tactics of oppression returning from the colonies to the metropole as fascism. but there is literature out there articulating the unique laboratory of settler states engaging in exploitation and resource extraction informing later imperial policy. i.e. The South (of the US) functioned as an experimentation site for the US to sharpen its claws in developing extractive, exploitative political projects to export abroad.

the national forgetting of this place and its critical history (and its rich history of violent insurrection against capitalism) allows its legacy and function as a political project to continue to this day. make no mistake, the suppression of "Critical Race Theory" and larger suppression of history education in the south is just as much about forgetting what came before as it is about keeping the lid on today and into the future. think about how many meat packers and industrial concerns have relocated to The South in the last 100 years, where unionization rates are always in the toilet for some mysterious reason. i'm sure it has nothing to do with the police being given wide latitude for violence and strike breaking. the large, diverse and exploited labor force is still here, under the boot of capital.

the project of US capitalism is to turn every place on the planet into the southern US. we are tomorrow's people.

The key is not to talk about it, but to simply do it. Some racists wind up mysteriously full of holes face down in a ditch? Huh, weird. Anyway...

They are. They’re in on it

Because the federal government doesn't care about this type of reactionary shit, sundown towns still very much exist with longstanding white families in power for decades. Shits fucked when you live in a settler state in denial about itself.