South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

The Pew Research Center published an article in 2021 that identified the US’s rising political divisions as “exceptional”:

The studies we’ve conducted at the Pew Research Center over the past few years illustrate the increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement, and a long list of other issues (Dimock, Michael & Wike, Richard. “America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide.” Pewtrusts.org. 29 March 2021).

These intersecting issues inform Perry’s reflections on America’s contemporary political polarization.

Political polarization in the US is geographical, but referring to this division in geographic terms does not simply mean that the North is separated from the South. This polarization also divides urban from rural areas. Race and class also play critical roles in understanding contemporary political divisions. In 2020, the Brookings Institute published findings that show “movement toward the Democratic Party in rapidly urbanizing suburbs is shifting America’s partisan fault line from a long-standing urban-rural divide to an emerging split between metro areas and the rest of the state” (Damore, David F., Lang, Robert E., & Danielsen, Karen. “In 2020, the largest metro areas made the difference for Democrats.” Brookings Institute. 4 February 2021). These internal divisions, Brookings found, are grounded in multiple stimuli, including the growing recognition of the importance of race and diversity and the pushback against efforts to acknowledge and address these issues due to “perceptions of status loss, particularly among white residents.” This perceived slight is one that is reported throughout Perry’s analysis, particularly in her interactions with white working-class Southerners, including an evangelical Lyft driver in Virginia and a miner-turned-taxi driver in Birmingham, Alabama. This white fear of status loss, however, is not a new trend. Perry shows that such fears are grounded in history and were especially apparent in the Jim Crow South, for example, when white violence destroyed Black economic districts.

Recognizing the intertwined histories of race, geography, and class also helps explain contemporary political affiliations. For example, as a group, Cuban Americans in Florida tend to be politically conservative because their elite, white-identifying families’ negative experiences with the socialist Cuban Revolution inform their politics. Similarly, the racist legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and the Jim Crow South shape many Black Americans’ politics. Indeed, the South gave rise to Black nationalist movements and the freedom movement, for example, most notably in Jackson, Mississippi. Indeed, Perry’s own experiences as the daughter of freedom movement organizers with strong connections to the Deep South inform her political perspective. Perry also works to find common ground with those who might otherwise wish her harm. For instance, she recounts praying with her evangelical white Lyft driver at the conclusion of her ride, although her approach to Christianity differs from this woman’s, and empathizing with the financial hardship faced by her white taxi driver in Alabama. Such understanding, however, must also be extended to Black Americans, who, as Perry argues, created the Southern soul of the country. Perry concludes that saving the polarized nation depends on realizing the collective dreams of enslaved people and their descendants: “If their dreams can become ‘we’ dreams, hope will spring” (383).