The South's New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History (review)

Book Reviews The South’s New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History. By Glen Browder. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2009. 125 pp. $14.95. ISBN 978-1-60306-050-9. In this slim volume, Glen Browder presents his thesis about how race continues to affect the practice of southern politics after the Civil Rights movement. While he provides some unique insights into the challenges white and black politicians face in the twenty-first-century South, the reliance on anecdotal evidence and the decision to avoid any “pretense of rigorous objectivity or methodology” undermine the persuasiveness of his argument (p. 15). As both an academic and former Alabama politician, Browder rightfully argues that he possesses a unique perspective on southern politics. As a “participant-observer,” he draws upon his academic background and experience in Montgomery and Washington, DC, to craft an analysis focused on how race maintains a central role in the practice of southern politics (p. 15). Based more on backroom discussions and private conversations between politicians than on public pronouncements, Browder’s thesis contends that southern politics since the 1970s has become “biracial , positive, and functional” in regards to matters of race (p. 98). Using V. O. Key’s classic work Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949) as his starting point, Browder argues that white Southern politicians played a “race game” to gain elected office before the Civil Rights movement by appearing more conservative than their opponents on matters of race. Although Browder avoids discussing the phrase, former Alabama governor George Wallace provided the most infamous summation of the race game when, after losing the 1958 gubernatorial race, he stated he would never be “out-niggered again.” The race game continued after the Civil Rights era (Browder does not clearly state when the Civil Rights movement began and ended, but given his focus on electoral politics, his discussion implies that it ended with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965). One of the book’s key themes is revealed through his discussion of the reintroduction of African Americans into the electoral process. Politics is politics, says Browder, and while Civil Rights leaders held the moral high ground on the streets of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, African American politicians behaved just like their white counterparts once they took office in Montgomery. The race game continued because T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 62 both conservative white and African American politicians still considered it the best means to achieve their goals and gain concessions for their constituents. As a young politician, Browder “learned first-hand that crass racial politicking was a bipartisan and biracial phenomenon in Alabama” (p. 56). Given the self-serving agendas of black and white politicians, how could real racial change come about? Browder asserts that a strategy of “quiet, practical, biracial leadership” utilized by himself and several other moderates helped achieve change during the 1970s and 1980s and was the foundation for the “New Racial System” of southern politics that presently operates (p. 59). This strategy proved to be a balancing act, and in the most engaging section of the book he discusses the “Browder Agenda,” which achieved change by placating the conservative white members of his constituency through the avoidance of racially charged issues in public while also serving his African American supporters through behindthe -scenes negotiations with like-minded black and white politicians and civic leaders. As a result, Browder argues, he and other moderate Democrats achieved real change for African Americans on substantive issues. By the 1990s a spirit of biracial cooperation still existed, but the growing strength of the Republican Party led to voter realignments along racial lines and, as a result, both black and white politicians continue to revert to the race game when elections become too close to call. Browder’s analysis of race-based politics is at its best when it focuses on his own experience as a southern politician, and this book provides an insightful first-person account of a particularly interesting period for Alabama politics. Browder is on shakier ground when he aims at turning...