Cretaceous geological upheaval and African American voting patterns

November 5, 2020 11:23 AM

How are ancient geological forces reflected in African American voting patterns? "Look at the electoral maps by county for the last few decades of US presidential elections. You’ll notice that the South goes almost uniformly Republican red every time ... But if you look closer, there's something else there - a Democratic blue swoosh running through the heart of the South.
posted by gp_guy (12 comments total)

I had wondered about this! Always figured the Mississippi basin swath was about migration patterns, but didn't know the geology of the "Black Belt." Very cool.
posted by helpthebear at 12:01 PM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Previously but worth a second look I think.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:09 PM on November 5, 2020

this is really cool
posted by supermedusa at 12:59 PM on November 5, 2020

Looking at the county-level returns I have seen so far, the black belt is still a factor in this election (I live in the section just east of Atlanta); lets hope it grows in importance.
posted by TedW at 1:37 PM on November 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

An interesting response to one of the author's tweets.
posted by klanawa at 2:20 PM on November 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

This comes up at one point in Lewis Dartnell's Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History (Goodreads link), which has a broader argument about geology/geography that implied (or, so I'd thought anyway) that there's a case to be made that what white supremacists argue is an inherent genetic advantage that grew European dominance instead and in fact mostly was a kind of lucky accident of geology/geography. (I wish I could remember how I'd described the case, but it's in a blog post and I've since nuked my entire blog; I'm sure in any case that it wasn't an original thought.)
posted by bixfrankonis at 2:26 PM on November 5, 2020

There’s also the perspective being heard more often that the soil and land were enriched and maintained by Indigenous peoples as well as these kinds of deep-time geological processes.
posted by sixswitch at 2:48 PM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Related by Michael Harriot: Lowndes County, Ala.: The Place God Forgot
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:31 PM on November 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

I wonder if a similar connection could be drawn between the coal seams in northern Britain and the rise of the Labour movement in the UK. I must get hold of the book bixfranconis mentions.
posted by Fuchsoid at 4:30 PM on November 5, 2020

It doesn't have to be geological. Ten years ago a pal of mine did an analysis of surnames in the two major Irish political parties and found statistically significant associations which had predictive value. Most people think that adherence to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael depends of which side your grandpa fought in the Civil War 100 years ago. Byrne and O'Malley dug deeper to ask why grandpa was fighting on that side. And the answer turns out to be because his Grandpa was tonking your gt.gt.grandpa on the head 100 years earlier. And so on to the birth of surnames 1,000 years ago. Surnames are strongly, but imperfectly [whoops mis-paternity], associated with Y chromosome variants. Mythic figures like Niall of the Nine Hostages can be inferred in descendants. ditto Genghis Khan for central Asia.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:05 AM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

There's a bumper sticker saying I've seen that goes "We owe our existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."

This story is less about deep geology for me and more about soil, and how our life comes from the soil; and it's about materialism (in the philosophy sense) and how our ideological, most immaterial constructions are connected with our material existence in chains of causation; and it makes me think about the chain of time, and the historians' bumper sticker quip that "all history is recent history".
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 5:38 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I remember a geologist friend saying that from his viewpoint all of history was really just "current events"
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:36 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]