Spatiotemporal Changes in the Slavery–Inequality Relationship: The Diffusion of the Legacy of Slavery

Abstract

Despite the persistence of relationships between historical racist violence and contemporary Black–White inequality, research indicates, in broad strokes, that the slavery–inequality relationship in the United States has changed over time. Identifying the timing of such change across states can offer insights into the underlying processes that generate Black–White inequality. In this study, we use integrated nested Laplace approximation models to simultaneously account for spatial and temporal features of panel data for Southern counties during the period spanning 1900 to 2018, in combination with data on the concentration of enslaved people from the 1860 census. Results provide the first evidence on the timing of changes in the slavery–economic inequality relationship and how changes differ across states. We find a region-wide decline in the magnitude of the slavery–inequality relationship by 1930, with declines traversing the South in a northeasterly-to-southwesterly pattern over the study period. Different paces in declines in the relationship across states suggest the expansion of institutionalized racism first in places with the longest-standing overt systems of slavery. Results provide guidance for further identifying intervening mechanisms—most centrally, the maturity of racial hierarchies and the associated diffusion of racial oppression across institutions, and how they affect the legacy of slavery in the United States.