The Emerging Majority?

I was reading The New Jim Crow, a book on structural racism in the Prison-Industrial Complex (not unlike the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex), when I came across Kevin Phillips' "The Emerging Republican Majority"that argued that Republicans could replicate Richard Nixon's success of turning poor white's resentment over improvement in African-American conditionsinto election successes.This might be what led the recent backslidingof the US's democracy!
I'd argue that such a tragically successful racist strategy is a consequence from our country's nearly exclusive use of First-Past-the-Post elections.Why?  If you're an economically-disadvantaged minority group, it doesn't give you any exit-threat from the center-left major party.  Since to vote for a third party is to throw away your vote, and historically this group could hardly afford to throw away their votes, you gotta vote center-left, which leads them to take your votes for granted, and which reduces your motivation to vote, which even further reduces your sway... It's a vicious cycle!  
But the consequences are even worse when the overall system tilts too easily to give one party a permanent majority.  This raises the stakes and gives the center-right partystrong incentives to strategically push for racially biased policies,like the Jim Crow laws of the South, that reduce the number of disadvantaged minority voters, especially through increasing their chances of becoming felons who cannot vote.  
Does that make all Republicans "racist".  No.It's the system and its perverse incentives.  If we change our election rules so no party can dominate any state's politicsand third parties are given a constructive role to playin the defense of economic/ethnic/ideological minority rightsthen these perverse incentives will be removed andthe Soul of our Democracy will begin to heal.But until we make electoral reform a key part of progressive-centrist-civil rights movements,the perverse incentives will remain and it'll be hard to talk honestly about the reality of racism and its effects on usdue to how polarized our politically environment will remain orhow heavily the single party in power will dominate the discourse.This is true, regardless of the skin color of who occupies the oval office!  dlw