The Deep Historical Roots of White Southern Cultures of Justice

Justice cannot be understood simply as an abstract set of ideas, such as "equality," devoid of its context in time and space. Rather, from the vantage point of social theory, justice is a set of social practices interwoven with material and discursive relations of power and culture. From this view, justice can never be freed from conceptions of the social order, from discourses that sustain, legitimize, and naturalize some views of equality and inequality and not others. Justice is, then, as much about cultural attitudes and ideologies that shape the taken-for-granted world of everyday life as it is about legal systems that ostensibly dispense rewards and punishments in nonarbitrary ways. The culture of justice pervades, for example, the interpretations and attitudes of judges and juries, law makers, the police and military, educators, and the media. More broadly, as Giddens (1984) has demonstrated, the taken-for-granted notions that underpin everyday life—including definitions of what is proper or not, normal or not, or important or not—are central to the socialization of individuals and the reproduction of local social relations. In this light, notions of justice pervade the private sphere as well as the public, the family as well as the school.

Why does the culture of justice and human rights in the South differ from other parts of the U.S.? The answer to this question must be found in the seeds of southern culture, especially among its dominant white population. The South's attitudes toward justice—what defines it, how it should be administered—have deep roots that extend deeply into the historical development of the region. There are, of course, many Souths, which exhibit considerable diversity over time and space (Boles 2003); it is, however, the dominant, hegemonic form widely accepted among traditional white southerners that stereotypically characterizes the culture and politics of this region.

To understand this issue, it is useful to invoke David Fischer's magisterial book Albion's Seed (1989), which traces in great detail the ways in which British immigrants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries colonized the east coast of what would eventually become the United States. Colonists who settled in the South—meaning originally the Chesapeake Bay region that would flower to become Virginia as well as the backcountry farther west-had different origins and outlooks than their counterparts in New England, Delaware, or elsewhere. The Puritans in New England, for example, hailed primarily from East Anglia, whereas the Quakers in Delaware originated in the north Midlands; the original southerners, in contrast, came largely from the south and west of England, while those in the backcountry of Appalachia originated largely from the border country between northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Fischer traces a variety of folkways that were carried from the Old World to the New, including speech, food, dress, names, family structures, gender roles, sexuality, marriage patterns, sports, architecture, and other phenomena, but for this brief commentary I will focus on his analysis of southern concepts of order, justice and punishment.

Politically, southerners were more conservative than their counterparts elsewhere from the beginning. Many Virginians, for example, were descendents of loyalists to King John in 1215, were Anglican Royalists in the English Civil War of the 1640s, and opposed the American independence movement a century later. This culture was "profoundly conservative in every sense—elitist, hierarchical, and strenuously hostile to social change. . . . Words such as 'innovation,' 'novelty,' and 'modern' were pejorative terms" (Fischer 1989, 258). Virginia's elite families created a society predicated on the manorial ownership of land, including primogeniture, thus importing two feudal traditions. In the backcountry, the Scotch-Irish settled on dispersed farms (Raitz 1984), giving rise to a tradition of individualist sovereignty in which the private realm dominated the public. Status was defined largely through the liberties one possessed (e.g., freedom to own land or vote), a conception that divorced liberty from equality.

Religion has long played a central role naturalizing inequality in the South. With relatively few immigrants from Catholic countries, the South has long been dominated by Protestantism. In the original British colonies, the...