Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 - Hardcover

Hale, Grace Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679442634 ISBN 13: 9780679442639

Publisher: Pantheon, 1998

Synopsis

A historian traces how, in the wake of the Civil War, white Southerners formed their identity through violence against ex-slaves and separation from them, and how the culture of segregation continues to affect American society. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"A delightfully provocative book -- the most nuanced picture yet of the world view of segregationists." -- Austin Chronicle

From the Back Cover:

In this brilliant and indispensable study of the making of segregationist culture, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "color line" came to define American identity itself: whiteness became the standard, desirable image of aspiring middle-class life while blackness was consigned to the margins, to the back of the bus, and became a marker, for a white majority, of social pathology. Nowhere was the identification of blackness with inferiority more obsessively enforced than in the South, where the law cast a blind eye on lynching as public entertainment and where white children were taught that Negroes "must be kept in their place."

Drawing on a fascinating and often disturbing array of cultural artifacts and events, Making Whiteness shatters the habitual assumption that racism is an unfortunate fact of human nature, and points the way toward a truly egalitarian and integrated society.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679442634
• ISBN 13: 9780679442639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 427