They put themselves in this bizarre position where they’re absolutely dependent on an exploited black underclass but also entirely vulnerable to that underclass if it was ever able to mobilize.

I mean, its not bizarre if you makes you rich. The economic incentives of a permanent underclass are as obvious as they are enormous. And for a social order that's turned the art of segregation into a science, there's no end in sight. Maps like this have :fuck-around: written all over it, but these fuckers never find out because they are simply too good at what they do.

Hence the century of reaction to Reconstruction, culminating in Civil Rights, and the, what, sixty years of reaction we’ve had since then?

A great deal of what lets the South function is bigotry in the North. Black residents of these states discover that they've got nowhere to run, because white bigotry knows no latitude. A "Free State Project" for minorities that operated like a Maryland for Catholics or a Canada for English Loyalists could be a serious game-changer in terms of race relations. But the closest we've come to that is DC, and for some reason nobody in the US Government wants that territory to become a state.