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Look at this map.
Now, look at this map.
Now, look at these two maps next to each other.
They’ve got the same little swoopy line on them—crazy, right?
Well, would it sound even crazier if I told you that this map was of a hundred million
year old coastline and that this map was of the 2008 general election results, and that
this also proves that there are ancient geological forces influencing the outcome of US presidential
elections?
Now, I can hear you all saying, “Yes, Sam, that does sound crazy.
You have that same crazy look in your eyes as that time you told us that Sam from Wendover
has the exact same name and voice and DNA as you, and this is probably just another
weird coincidence.”
Well, sure, it could be a coincidence, but that explanation suffers from a pretty bad
case of ‘SUCKING’—‘SUCKING,’ of course, being my acronym for Senselessly Underemphasizing
Carbonate Krill In National General elections.
You see, these prehistoric krill actually play a crucial role in our national politics
even to this day—not because they have voting rights, or because they control a powerful
krill lobby.
It’s… well, just a little more complicated than that.
To understand how, exactly, krill play a part in our modern-day elections, we have to go
back to the Cretaceous period, about 160 million years ago.
During the Cretaceous, you could find those prehistoric krill living here, in Macon, Georgia.
Except it wasn’t exactly Macon, Georgia, because Macon, Georgia was underwater.
Due to increased CO2 levels—which resulted from high levels of volcanism and the dinosaurs’
inability to give up plastic straws most of the deep south and the central plains were,
at the time, actually a warm, shallow ocean.
This ocean was filled with krill that were born, grew up, had little krill families,
died, and finally left behind their carbonate skeletons, which eventually accumulated into
large chalk formations around its coastline.
Now, fast forward a few hundred million years to 11,000 BCE—the ancient ocean has dried
up, the chalk formations have turned into fertile soil, and some jerk in Mesopotamia
has just invented slavery.
Fast forward another 12,000 years, and this guy discovers a new continent called America,
except it was actually this guy like 500 years earlier, except it was actually possibly this
guy 500 years before that, except it was actually several civilizations of people like 20,000
years before that.
But of course, the first guy gets the credit because he was the one who figured out that
you could make a bunch of money by filling the entire continent with slaves.
And if you were the kind of person interested in filling an entire continent with slaves,
the first question you’d need to figure out is: where are these slaves going to make
me the most money?
Well, the colonists pretty quickly discovered that there was a specific stretch of dark
soil in the deep south that was unusually good at growing cotton—so specific that
farming just a few dozen miles north or south of this strip would yield noticeably fewer
crops.
It turns out that cotton plants’ favorite food is hundred-million-year-old krill skeletons,
so this region lined up pretty much perfectly with the chalk deposits made along the coastline
of that prehistoric ocean.
The colonists named this strip of land—stretching roughly from Virginia to Arkansas—the “Black
Belt,” and concentrated a higher number of slave-run plantations there than anywhere
else in the country.
Fast forward another century, and some people decided that building an entire economy around
kidnapping people and forcing them to do labor was maybe a bad idea after all, so we did
a little war, defeated racism, and the slaves were free to hop on a carriage to the big
city and become the CEO of the Cowboy Hat Factory.
Except… well, that’s not really how it went at all.
While there were a few notable migrations of freed slaves and their descendants—such
as the Great Northward Migration in the mid-20th Century—many more freed Black Americans
stayed in the South.
Up until 1910, nearly half a century after the slaves were freed, more than 90% of the
United States’ Black population was still concentrated in the same regions that formerly
practiced slavery, including and especially the Black Belt.
This makes sense if you’re familiar with sharecropping—the predatory farming practice
that trapped freed slaves in cycles of debt and poverty and made it nearly impossible
for them, or their children, to leave the South.
While the modern-day statistics aren’t quite as pronounced, the counties that trace that
ancient coastline are still predominantly black, ranging from around 50 to 85% of their
populations.
When election season rolls around and the Southern states turn redder than my rosy cheeks
when you type “good video, Sam” in the comments section, these counties tend to flip
blue instead.
They don’t always have a huge sway in the outcome of the election, but they’ll occasionally
tip a traditionally Republican state in favor of the Democratic candidate, like North Carolina
in 2008, or Georgia in 2020.
Of course, this blue streak wasn’t always there—prior to the Voting Rights Act in
1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, it was almost impossible to see.
So, the next time an American election rolls around, just remember: voter suppression doesn’t
just erase our civil rights, it also erases a long and illustrious history of a whole
bunch of ancient, dead krill.
So, not everything going on nowadays is, in fact, shaped by an 160 million year-old coastline.
In fact, much of what happens today is based on what happened yesterday.
That’s why I like to get up-to-date with what’s happening in the world before I start
each day, but I also like not getting sucked into an endless cycle of doom-scrolling Twitter
right when I wake up.
That’s why I read Morning Brew—the free, daily newsletter that gets you up to speed
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