Samuel Bazzi (Program on Political Economy Seminar)

Date: 

Thursday, October 14, 2021, 4:30pm to 5:45pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel, room K354

Samuel Bazzi (UCSD), "The Other Great Migration and the Geography of Racism in the United States" (with Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson, and Patrick Testa)

Abstract

This paper offers a new perspective on the cultural and institutional foundations of racism across America. We show how millions of white migrants out of the postbellum South shaped the long-run trajectory of racial animus at a critical historical juncture. These migrants brought Confederate ideology to new parts of the country and helped to entrench a culture of white supremacy through violence and exclusionary institutions. Southerners and especially those with a family history of slaveownership sorted into positions of power in their new communities and played an important role in establishing these racial norms through the early 20th century. This early Confederate diaspora then attracted much larger inflows of Southern whites during the Second Great Migration. Together, these early and later migrants exacerbated racial politics during the Civil Rights era and forever changed the geography of racial inequity.

Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Program on Political Economy (PE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.

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See the seminar's full schedule at the Program on Political Economy page.

All interested faculty and students are invited to attend. Samuel Bazzi