"The South's New Racial Politics: A New Racial System for the Twenty-First Century".

A half-century after the civil rights movement, blacks and whites in Alabama and the South seemingly have come to terms—terms that will amaze outsiders—about living together in a halfway house of racialized politics. A New Racial System has taken hold as the region develops a politics of biracial accommodation despite its hard racial history.For most Southerners, the Old South is dead; Southern Democracy is a memory; the Republican Revolution has been consolidated; and two-party competition is a reality in various parts of the region. Most importantly, descendants of slaves and slave-owners have reconciled pressures for systemic progress with certain aspects of their cultural pasts; and the civil rights movement of the 1950s-'60s has morphed, rather curiously, into a new order for the new century.This paper will analyze contemporary southern politics as neither the stark past nor an idealized future. Based on his background as a political science professor and public official, the author proposes that the South now is a halfway house of racialized politics in which white politicians and black politicians attempt to secure for themselves and their constituents the blessings of democracy and the goodies of political life. (The presenter of this proposed paper is a longtime political scientist who also served in the U.S. Congress, as Alabama's Secretary of State, and as an Alabama State Legislator. He is the author of a new book, The South's New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History.) ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]