South's New Racial Politics, The

The South’s New Racial Politics presents an original thesis about how blacks and whites in today’s South engage in a politics that is qualitatively different from the past. Glen Browder—as practitioner and scholar—argues that politicians of the two races now practice an open, sophisticated, biracial game that, arguably, means progress; but it also can bring out old-fashioned, cynical, and racist Southern ways. The lesson to be learned from this interpretative analysis is that the Southern political system, while still constrained by racial problems, is more functional than ever before. Southerners perhaps can now move forward in dealing with their legacy of hard history.