In The Silent Majority, Matthew Lassiter elucidates diverse minutiae, of a classic tale exploring changes in the American south in the period lasting 1964 to 1970. His tale dunks deep bringing to the forefront sensitive issues surrounding the strip malls and racial divisions experienced in New South. The author gives key attention to politics miring school integration in the numerous municipal regions such as Kruse. Matthew intricately explains how the residents of these colonies altered their outlook on condoning explicit racism based on total isolation to protecting the actual discriminations emanating from residential patterns. Lassiter offers an explanation of how the process of combating inequality based on residential patterns played a crucible role in swirling tax revolts, suburban secession, and creative genuine politics.
Lassiter’s Silent Majority frames the proletariat politics spawned by housing separation and suburban collapse and the relationship intrinsically connecting local and national in the materialization of the center-right course that has subjugated American politics since the 1960s. In order to have a peek at the root of the contemporary electoral realignment in present America, one has got to understand the dimensions of the middle-class political customs and housing advance across the postwar South. The prevalent inclination to characterize the conventional budge in American politics to a top-down “Southern Strategy,” launched by the Republican party to purposely exploit white hostile response against the civil rights movement, misses the convergence of southern and national politics around the suburban philosophy of middle-class privilege (Lassiter 42).
A keen inspection is carried out on parental insurgency in Georgia and other places like Carolina to pave a way for the creation of open schools movements. In Georgia where this issue was pursued passionately, parents revolted against isolating state government that intimidated school administrators by threatening to shut down public education or privatize it instead of creating a leeway to allow token integration. In Charlotte, parents from the white race supported public education even after the white courts prearranged for the school system to bus students between the city and its adjoining environs. According to (Lassiter 54), “these groups revitalized the center on race and class and helped to steer modern Southern cities away from self-destructive racial conflict”.
In order to ascertain that the open school faction did not represent a sudden pinnacle of racial equality parents acted based on hushed calculations based on the period the civil rights upheaval was likely to escalate and who it was going to affect adversely. In areas like Atlanta, well-heeled homeowners knew for certain that even in the case where isolation fell, the schools in the surrounding environs would remain principally white. Consequently, they designed a tactic through which they could contain the two likely worst outcomes including the collapse of public education and court-regulated busing. In the words of Lassiter, this strategy often constituted restructuring of limited practices in the order of class overlooking the race factor. For instance, token integration could be accomplished without necessarily endangering all the better-quality resources available to the majority of white children.
In order to spawn a good understanding of the current American politics in the schooling system, Lassiter compares Charlotte and Atlanta. (Lassiter 67) The author further connects the process of school amalgamation to the broader question of Southern political repositioning. The silent majority gives prominence to the fact that on the limits of unification, the perceived imbalance of federal intrusion, and the need to safeguard law and order in the South were not based on conventional politics of isolation.
References
Lassiter, Matthew. “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics In The Sunbelt South.” Princeton University press. 2007. ISBN: 9780691092553